Re: Establishing conventions for publishing reports

Hello,

personally I have the feeling that the real problem, rather then the 
quantity, is the classification of reports (or other material) and how they 
are indexed.
The system now does not support any automatic classification, and relative 
index, based on the activities brought forward. We only have a subdivision 
into groups, but if we browse groups web pages, it is hard to understand 
what is going on. In most cases the only way to access to reports is via 
the automatic index in the relative report page; such automatic link does 
not give any help to the user who wants to browse the reports and 
understand what is going on. As a consequence, for the moment, the only way 
to inform a visitor on what is going on, is to describe experimentation, 
and classify reports manually, thus including them in the groups pages, 
which are (I suppose) the first pages a visitor would visit.
Among the various groups present in our plone, only a few of them attempt 
to guide visitors in browsing their pages, below I put a list of links to 
the pages that present such attempts, we could draw from some of this 
examples in order to suggest policies for all the groups.


Topic Groups:

out of 8 group pages, only 3 of them attempt to present information on what 
they are doing, 2 of them attempt to classify their reports and present 
structured indexes.
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/infinity/group_index_html (link to 
references)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/sequences/group_index_html (link 
to a report describing an activity with links to pupils' reports)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/randomness/group_index_html (index 
of relevant material concerning the ongoing experimentation, it includes: 
the randomness weblabspaedia, a diary of the experimentation, table of 
documents which are available also in english, index of pupils the reports 
produced by the teacher and by pupils classified according to the proposed 
activities)


Participating Schools

:
out of 12 school groups, 6 of them present their work, some of them attempt 
to classify their reports and present structured indexes.
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_camden/school_index_html 
(Presentation of activities, but not structured links to published material)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_corroios/school_index_html 
(Presentation of activities, but not structured links to published material)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_peter/school_index_html 
(Presentation of activities, but not structured links to published material)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_peter/school_index_html 
(Presentation of activities, but not structured links to published material)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_sarpi/school_index_html 
(Index of work in progress with links link to a structured index of 
teacher's and pupils' reports and class' reports, plus a link to other 
documents used in the experimentation)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_sofia/school_index_html 
(Index table of reports, classified as group reports, individual reports, 
and related)


The issue of language:
Yishay wrote:
"Another issue is language. Should we enforce a common language for all
>published reports? I'm not sure. I think having multiple languages on
>the system is a virtue. Yet, we should strive to have all published
>GROUP reports translated to English, and I think we can request that all
>published personal reports have at least a summary / abstract in English."

Personally I do not agree with the idea of requiring a summary in english 
for every published report. There are reports who are written to be read by 
everyone, also people from other countries, and there are reports that are 
written for smaller communities. I believe that a report should be written 
in a language which is understood by its target community; so for instance, 
if an italian pupil writes a report targeting his/her class, he/she should 
be free to write it in talian, without then being required to translate it. 
I think compulsory abstract in english could be a heavy and inhibiting 
work, a pupil could always wonder "why do I have to write a summary in 
english when my report si to be red by my class mates, or by other people 
from my country?". Plus I don't think that only reports written in english 
should be considered worth publishing; if we are a multilangual community, 
then we have to show that we are such, and we have to show that we use 
english as a common language only when it is needed, in oerder to exploit 
the richness of mother tongues.
In our experimentation, for the moment, we followed the policy that every 
individual document produced by the the class as its internal activity, was 
published in Italian;
we sistematically translated pupils' group reports, and other reports 
describing tasks and other issues of the experimentation. Further on, the 
Encyclopaedia documents (which we call Randomness Weblabspaedia 
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/randomness/Folder.2003-12-02.1157/index_html/en/), 
are produced by pupils in italian, but thet know that the target is the 
plone community and that such documents will be translated for them by us. 
So we can classify report, in terms of their targets, in the following way:
1. reports targetting a local community
2. reports targetting an international community

The second kind of reports, requires to be translated in english, the first 
does not, nevertheless it has the dignity to be published (our pupils were 
very happy to know that their reports were published and visible by 
relatives and friends). Beside this, in the limit of our possibilities, us 
researcher can translate (or write english summaries), or organize the 
material on the plone in a way that makes possible for a visitor to 
understand what is going on; then, if interested visitors require 
translations of specific documents, those can be done on demand.
Personally I think that to limit the production of reports would be a loss 
and would not solve the problem: this is a project which inhevitably will 
produce loads of reports in the next 2 years, even if we limit production.

A suggestion:
I would suggest that we add to the system a feature allowing a teacher to 
add activity entries (with at least a title and a brief descriptio), so 
that, when one wants to write a report, he/she is presented with a menu in 
order to chose the activity (which could also be none, of course) to which 
the report is associated.
If we do so, then the system could automatically index reports according to 
the activities of each group (or school); so a visitor could easily grasp 
the sequence of the activities, see their descriptions, and eventually read 
pupils reports.


I hope I did not add confusion in this isse,

best wish, Michele