RE: [Fhsst-authors] New site test

[Andy Higginbotham]

I don't have enough time to look at it all today but two registration points
came up:

1- Maybe it is worth adding in a repeat email box as some idiots (not me of
course...) may type in the wrong email address.  I know this can be
irritating but at least it helps stop useless accounts, such as the 'andy'
account now on the site, being generated.

2- I couldn't read the captcha image on my second attempt as the word arced
off the top of the image.

Ill let you know what else I think in the next few days.

I am also planning to contribute some more to physics and/or maths later
this month once my commitments have become a bit more reasonable.

Andy

-----Original Message-----
From:
address@hidden
rg
[mailto:fhsst-authors-bounces+andrew.higginbotham=hertford.oxford.ac.uk@
nongnu.org]On Behalf Of Mark Horner
Sent: 07 February 2006 08:39
To: address@hidden
Subject: [Fhsst-authors] New site test


Hi Everyone

This is the new years update email that I've been
delaying :) Happy new year and hope everyone is well.

We want to change almost everything about how FHSST
has been working and the new interactive site is
the key to that and so I'm going to focus on it except
for the fact that we will also
have a larger admin team this year and we _guarantee_
that from March 1st there will be someone
attending to things every day (work day ;) for each
book and 2 coordinators for each book
- no more delays :)

Finally the new site is ready for comments. I have put
up a test version of it which will
be available for 1 week. Then I'll implement any
comments/suggestions and we'll put the final
site up. The final one will be at www.fhsst.org but
thats only when we are really ready! The
aim is middle-Feb.

Why a new interactive site?

- make it easier to volunteer, contribute and
administer
- make it faster to get an assignment you like (you
choose now)
- to reduce administrative load so admin team can
focus on books
- speed up feedback for users
- provide searchable forums to be more user friendly
than mailing lists
- provide grade level information about contributions
automatically
- provide syllabus information on a per section basis
as well as suggestions and ideas
- allow everyone to be able to comment on sections and
make suggestions etc.
- create a clear framework for getting volunteers more
involved in project beyond just writing contributions
- provide structure to allow hackathons to require no
additional administration other than venue and
volunteers organisation
- support multiple input formats including LaTeX which
can be run on server
- a WYSIWIG rich-text editor (HTML output) is
available if you don't know LaTeX
- for LaTeX users server-side LaTeX means we worry
about the packages etc. you don't even need to install
it yourself
- (To Do: add spell checker :) and this is 99% likely
to be ready before we go live )
- (To Do: enable search - this is just one click but I
keep messing with the site indexing manually so it
won't work
   properly for the test right now )

For now the TEMPORARY TEST site is at:
http://stary2-02.lbl.gov/FHSST2
It'll be a little slow but the final one will be
hosted on a proper server and will be much faster. We
have uploaded a few Physics and Chemistry sections so
you can see what it will be like.

Firstly, please take a look and tell send your
suggestions to the list. I'd really like to hear
from everyone what they think, what they would like
added etc. I'll describe the features in some
detail below, but it'll be a long email. Please at
least take a look and send some feedback. I'll be
acting as an evaluator as described below over the
week so that you can appreciate the full workflow.

Here's quick very rough run through of how all of the
bullets fit together:

You sign up on the site directly, choosing a book to
start working on when you sign up. Once
you login you can see a list of available assignments
for the book. Choosing an assigment
makes you the owner of it and it is moved to your
"workspace". Only you can edit it now.
Once you've edited it by selecting it from your
workspace and clicking on edit you can click
on submit and its saved in the database. You will then
be taken to a view of the page. Notice
at the top that there are reading grade values
determined for the section so far. Click on the
names for more details about these grades.

You can come back and continue editing another time.
When editing
you can choose rich-text WYSIWIG or LaTeX. You keep
editing until you want feedback. When you want
feedback you select the Evaluating state from the
drop-down menu, click on submit and someone with
feedback (evaluation) rights will be get back to you.
You will not be able to edit it anymore until
feedback has been received. You'll see a bar above the
menu when you login with the most recent feedback
for a section you have written when you login. You can
also click on 'my evaluations" to see all the feedback
you have received. You will also see a bar on the left
called FHSST Statistics where your average is
updated for all your evaluations. You can see how well
you are doing (3.0) is a perfect score. This is the
number we use to determine who understands guidelines
well enough to be an evaluator.

Now you can start other assignments or even subscribe
to toher books. Just go to the assignments page and
select one or the book cover page and click on the
subscribe link at the bottom. When someone has
made at least 4 contributions that are in line with
the guidelines (score > 2.5) of the book they will be
given
evaluator (feedback) privileges. The contributions and
guidelines show they have time for the project and
understand the objectives.

There is also a way to give feedback on evaluators,
called mediation. When an evaluation is completed
anyone
who has asked for feedback on at least 1 section can
see a list of mediations for that evaluation - this is
where you can
say if you think an evaluator was fair or not. This is
just to stop anybody getting out of control and
to encourage evaluators to give good clear feedback.
To keep it fair you cannot evaluate your own section
or mediate your own evaluations.

There are also forums for each of the books and for
general discussion where you can post questions or
participate in discussion. In the final site this will
be searchable.

To make sure things run smoothly we guarantee that 2
admin members will look at each forum daily and
process evaluations to make sure that your questions
are answered and you receive feedback in a timely
manner.

You can always relinquish an assignment if you would
prefer to choose another one or give up on it.
The same goes for evaluations or mediations.

We hope that everything will be pretty obvious once
you get the general idea or workflow for the site:
edit -> evaluate -> edit -> evaluate -> publish
evaluations go to authors and are mediated
mediations go to evaluators
ask questions in the forums

Thats very rough but if you read that and play with
the test site it should all fall into place very
quickly.
Read the instructions on the site and you'll see what
we mean.

Hopefully the final site will really help us work
together more efficiently.

Cheers,

Mark


--
--
Mark Horner

Jabber/AIM/Yahoo/Skype/Google:   marknewlyn


Co-author:
http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/fhsst

"Life is but a seg-fault away ...

Life received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x42074d40 in calloc () from /lib/i686/liblife.so.6"



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