User talk:Aburton
lavarre Sorry about the blip with the Main Page.
Here are a few suggestions that would minimize wasted space at the top.
- get rid of the OLPC macro. It really goes without saying on that page but if it must be said, say it at the bottom.
- get rid of redirects. Hunt down any refs to The OLPC Wiki and point them at the main page. It saves the space taken up by the redirect message.
- Get rid of the heading OLPC News. That isn't true because there is a separate news page. Since this is the opening page, just get right into the content.
- Please keep the Negroponte quote at the top because that is the major misunderstanding out there about the project.
GW Carver
Sorry, but I must disagree about George Washington Carver. When he was teaching children he tried to teach them real science by having them build real scientific apparatus and do real experiments applying the scientific method. Much of what passes for science in today's educational system is memorization of facts discovered by others or history of science. The OLPC could potentially be used as a tool to involve students in the scientific method which is the core of science. For that to happen we need people to produce content (both texts and applications) that is adpated to this approach. And in particular, since the targetted kids will have no scientific equipment of any kind available, the content needs to begin by instructing students how to scrounge up stuff much like G.W. Carver did. If you know of better examples to illustrate this principle, please add them. --Memracom 16:33, 23 June 2006 (EDT)
< includeonly > considered harmless
To keep categories and other metadata in templates from being associated with the template itself, use <includeonly> and </includeonly>. All text between those tags will be discarded except on transclusion. (Note that I had to stick them inside <nowiki> tags to get that text to show up here). (When you consider that all wiki pages -- not only Template: namespace pages -- can be transcluded into other pages, this opens the door to some elaborate obfuscated wikitext...) Cheers, Sj 12:19, 26 June 2006 (EDT)
- I updated the sidebar; what do you think? It's still a bit long; are the learning parablesbeing updated? Perhaps we can merge TOC and OLPC Overview; and the two 'questions' links... Sj 17:44, 26 June 2006 (EDT)