old.kete.net.nz :Documentation

My first shot, based on a couple months experience evaluating Kete and (currently) designing/building a demo site:

Excellent environment in which to a group can self-start, develop/maintain discussion, and facilitate/foster consensus--via, e.g., its basket- or topic-based 'holding pens' for arguments, supporting evidence, links to major opinions, etc.--over questions having no precise value as answer.  Perhaps even for those which do.  Though I've less experience putting Kete's moderating capability through its paces, it seems that through it an extensive, flexible 'refereeing' capacity is also available to this process.

Here's a scenario:

Each course (or course instance) has a basket where the students are regular members (they may add and edit material in the basket). Instructors for the course are the basket's administrators (can add/edit material to the basket, set basket preferences, and manage membership).

Privacy controls are enabled for the basket and homework is set to private (though all students could see each others' homework in this scenario) while the syllabus, course description, etc are public.

If you don't want students to be able to see each others' homework before an instructor has graded it, you could turn on "Moderation Policy: moderator views before item approved" and then only the instructors could see the version of the item until it is approved.

There are many other potential scenarios... each student could have their own basket for their homework, for example.

Cheers,

Walter

Tags: privacy controls, moderation, baskets

Hi all,

We have done some thinking around this issue and have come up with the following uses that can be made of Kete by schools:

• a publishing vehicle for formal writing, research etc.
• peer review / critique through discussion surrounding an item.
• a researching resource
• promotion of the school / class activities
• contributing to community ie recording community events
• recording the school's history
• developing IT skills in terms of becoming familiar with a raft of web 2.0 technologies.
• for older kids, actually downloading, installing and configuring Kete teaches a raft of linux skills.  
• interviewing skills
• and editing / compostion skills in creating oral histores / digital stories from the interviews.
• letting the local community about school events and news
• a website for the school / class
• practice in composing web pages using the wiki editor (ie tables, inserting imagesa, hotlinks etc)
• survey community ie on school uniform changes, policy changes etc
• promote / preserve arts and cultural performance on video / audio
• create online art portfolios, poetry portfolios, musical compositions (audio)  
• record school trips eg a topic for an outing then different people upload their photos of the trip and comment and discuss the photos, trip etc.
• share material with relations the world over

I'm sure there are dozens of other ideas too. We first presented Kete to a meeting of school librarians, and then got invited to individual schools to show the teachers as well... seemed to be received really well!

cheers Jo.