Talk:Learning activities/Journalism

It's great to see these tutorials become part of olpc. For visitors who aren't familiar with this material, it was started by veteran newspaper editor Jack Driscoll of the Boston Globe when MIT launched a community news web site for community residents in Melrose, Mass., long before the phrase "citizen journalism" came into use. While Jack was writing for older "novice journalists," he's a master of telling a story clearly and concisely, so this page should be very useful for teachers and older children...

For olpc xo users, some additions would be appropriate, especially as new tools are made available, possibly using the Speex and GStreamer audio for note taking as implied in the wishful-thinking paragraph below.

For example, section 1.1 Research: Basic Tools --

You can take notes with the xo's keyboard, camera and sound recorder, especially if paper and pens are harder to find than a little green laptop. You can speak your notes into the built-in microphone, then play them to refresh your memory when you type your story.

The xo can switch activities between listening and typing. You can also use the camera or draw pictures to take "notes" -- not just pictures you intend to publish, but pictures to remind you how to describe someone or something when you write the story.

A paragraph like that could be wikified on key terms, as could some parts of Jack's original. (I haven't taken time to find the correct link terms yet; this is just a demo.)

Any discussions on how else to "grow" this tutorial into a more olpc-world resource?
Robby 15:41, 8 January 2008 (EST)

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I got even more verbose about some of this on the OLPC Library mailing list today. I've put a link to the top of the thread here -- and today's addition here.
Robby 20:29, 9 January 2008 (EST)

Writing tools

Just a thought... I've made some notes about bugs and workarounds on the Write activity page. As basic writing tools for the XO are debugged and evolve in (apparently) a more wiki-like collaborative way, they will contribute to the way "journalism" can be done in OLPC communities. Robby

Uruguay School Seeks Collaborative Editing and Publishing Tools

The following note was sent to a list of Report activity contributors and watchers... I've suggested that it might be a great project for developers investigating Drupal and Drupal-OLPC possibilities:

Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:45:13 -0400 Subject: Report activity requirements for Uruguay

Requirements for I - Report activity.

The educational goal is to give the children experience working together and creating a finished project for posting their work. The existing blogs show a lot of creativity and have received a lot of posts. Kids have commented on their life, enviroment, riddles, school work, science and other things. Most posts have pictures.

This would be an extension of the existing Google Blogger tool with added features. For example, must run offline. I supports different ways to publish the material with review and work on Mesh within the school. It provides a collaborative way to confirm the work before it is published.

The existing blogs are built with Google Blogger: http://www.blogger.com/

The next step is to provide a place where the kids and teachers can coordinate their work, proof read it modify it and prepare it before posting it publicly. The goal is to allow a class or the whole school to come up with a finished web site and blog area which they can share.

Use case: The teacher and students come up with an idea for a report they want to produce. For example, they could do a report on La Gran Fiesta de La Cuenca Lechera. The teacher or some students choose an overall format for the report (or possibly creates a new format). When its time to work on the report the class divides up in to groups with each group working on gathering information on a piece of the report. e.g. one group collects pictures, one group intervew people who went to the festival and writes that down, one group looks up the history of the festival, etc. Each group add their material to central collection (e.g. a library). Then the groups or the whole class starts putting the report pieces in to the sample site. As piece of the whole site comes together comments and edits are made and the whole thing is reviewed internally to the school or class.

When its agreed that the site is ready, its posted to an external page and possibly a blog. The whole project can take many days or even weeks and all the work should be saved.

The core idea comes from the work done so far on the Report activity: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Report

However, these requirements are not written specificaly for that activity. We are open to Moodle or any other tool which can provide the functionality described.

The main requirements are: 1 - Create a protected space to create and try out content which is only accessible to the school or class. Then when the class agrees its ready post it to a public web site. - Allow authenticated access and editing rights. - Acceptable to require users to enter a user name and password. Preferred to auto logon based on XO Hardware key. - Acceptable to only allow access from school network. Preferred to allow access from anywhere with authentication. (* this second one is only needed if students or teachers will sometimes login to the internet from outside the school *)

2 - All text, instructions and content must be in Spanish.

3 - Allow a sample page to be viewed, commented on and edited before its posted. The sample page environment should have the same look and feel as the final posted environment. - Post to a full web site only viewable internally. - Post to a public web site - Post to Google Blogger tool - Supports creation of multiple web sites and blogs - Allows editing or addition to an existing web site or blog - Comments and edits can be made on the internal versoin of the site and then all comments can be easily removed before the site is posted publicly.

4 - Allows the uploading of images, text, videos and other content (Flash?). The same set of content as supported by Google blogger.

5 - Keep a record of all edits and changes and allow rollback to previous versions.

6 - Allows creation of templates for the formating of the web site. - Includes at least one template to start with - Allows easy creation of additional templates, preferably with a GUI but HTML coding is also acceptable at the start.

7 - Content creation tools - Easy export of images from XO camera? drag and drop or pick from a visual list or enter full path? - Easy export of video from XO camera? - Copy and paste or export needed from AbiWord or other activity? - Animation export?

8 - Storage on school server - Full image of web site can be stored localy on XO space permitting

9 - Simultanoues editing - Allows users to see edits as they are made by other users - Allows teacher or student to approve edits before they are posted to internal site and visible to others or before posted to external site and visible to everyone.

10 - Library of source material. Supports creation of a library of images, text, audio and video. - Students can upload their content to the library and then other users can pick from the available content to include in the web site. - Library can contain a list of internet URLs or other content not created by the students. - Library can be organized in to categories and subjects. Prefer support of many tags. - Selecting and including content from library should be as easy as copy and paste.

11 - The whole project and the content on XOs must be backed up regularly so that no single HW or SW failure will lose all the work. If possible it should be backed up so that no two HW or SW failures will lose the work and a backup should be made outside the school.

-- just pasted here by Robby 16:10, 10 March 2008 (EDT)