On 9 Jan 2010, at 21:14, geni wrote:
2010/1/9 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2010/1/9 Chris McKenna cmckenna@sucs.org:
On Sat, 9 Jan 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
The point (for the guide that Brian and I are apparently writing) is that "empowerment" is a good buzzword, but there is a small, treacherous area to explore from a teachers' point of view: accounts for minors should not give personal details, so a "role account" for say, Tynecastle High School, looks more appropriate. But there are administrative reefs also, namely the deprecation of role accounts and shared passwords in general. Something can be done in practical terms by stating that the project has a fixed term, will be retired, and will have its password changed by a school staff member.
Would not it be perhaps better for the individual students to have accounts, but under teh control of the school. Perhaps based on their school pupil number (e.g. Tynecastle-091 Tynecastle-122) which means that attribution for good and bad edits could be given to the individual rather than the school.
Yes, that's the usual recommendation. I'm not sure what you mean by the school having control of them, though.
In the scenario of the school in Edinburgh, a group is told to execute a certain project on WP. The attraction of a single account is clear from the point of view of monitoring: a single edit history tells you everything. If you have a group editing one page - and I have met just this on WP, American college students assigned a task of upgrading a nominated page - a bunch of people all trying to edit from different accounts can lead to edit conflicts, if no worse.
Any account where the email address supplied went to a computer in the school's administration would be "controlled" by the school, from the point of view of resetting the password.
This discussion seems like fine tuning to me, actually; but, yes, I can see it might be worth going into the issues a little in a guide. (I do want to be concise, though ... all experience suggests verbose is easier to write and less likely to be read.)
Charles
Well so far everything you have described would risk getting you blocked from wikipedia.
Probably the most important thing to do is to contact http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects first. -- geni
On the narrow point of whether schools or pupils should have accounts, I have come across a similar issue at work. We provide a web service with some similarities to WP, and we started off with company accounts. For security (and accountability) reasons, we moved to giving each individual a user name which can be given access to any number of accounts. The incentive for a business is that they can add or "ban" users from their own accounts without having to go through us (ie they can administer their own users); and also they can monitor usage by each user of their own account, which is a big incentive to do it our way and not to share user names in business.
Providing some incentive for people to do it the WP way - which basically could be a similar combination of information and control - is a good way to get schools to do it your way.
As it happens, our web service is available to all UK schools at no charge to them (paid for by a charity), so I suppose it has a parallel existence.