Thomas Dalton wrote:
2010/1/9 Chris McKenna
<cmckenna(a)sucs.org>rg>:
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