Hi Juergen,
Juergen Schmidt a écrit :
Hi Eric, all,
first of all i would like to propose to move any further discussion on only one mailing list. Maybe dev@openoffice.org because the
d...@education is not part of this thread.
You're right, let's concentrate now :)
+ I fixed the title too ;)
eric.bachard wrote:
I agree I "derived" StarOffice4Kids name, to create the OOo4Kids one. Indeed the idea is similar. I don't know ho wthings where done with
StarOffice4Kids, but we have decided to strictely follow what the teachers ask (in fact, they must demonstrate every need). Did you the
same ? Can you tell me more about that ?
I can't answer your question i wasn't really involved in the project and it was
done by an external vendor.
Ok
The colleague who mentored this
project doesn't work for Sun anymore.
That's not a good news :-/
Nevertheless, there is at least one big difference : because of the slow / poor / old machines most of the schools have, we decided to not
use Java ( StarOffice4Kids is mostly Java if I'm not wrong), but maybe was it only a prototype ?
yes, probably the better way is to modify the existing user interface...
To avoid misunderstanding: we just need to simplify it, not make UI
changes (teachers don't care about ribbons and co). The first changes we
did were for legal reasons : as OpenOffice.org owner, Sun trademarked a
lot of things, and as a fork, we respected that (e.g. creating our own
Start Center).
The new is the behavior, e.g. we'd like to add a password to the prefs
.. and so on, and include pedaogical objectives for students doing that.
e.g. we' like to use the existing start center + the Impress wizard as
-sort of- design patterns, to write two new wizards, opening predefined
models in both writer and draw, but in two clicks, and insist on the use
of styles.
.. and so on
StarOffice4Kids used the officebean and put an own simplified Java UI around.
Ok
In my vision of the Education Project working on performance issues, there are - I'd say - gurus, who do constitute the Performance
projects core. On Education Project side, mentors and students who respectively teach and learn the good practices, and, for the best of
the students, work on performance improvements. When the idea, and the resulting code will be enough, we'll join the performance meeting, and
propose our work to be evaluted.
To be frank with you, I have some doubs yet another project/sub-project will
help there (ihmo there is no need to complicate more), but I can be wrong.
well i don't talk about a real sub project. See it more as virtual project.
No idea the name, in fact: we just do it, and we'll see later what is
the result.
One further effort to improve the overall performance under the
umbrella of the performance project. And what is the performance project. It is one further aspect of the normal and always ongoing
development umbrella.
As i have mentioned earlier i personally don't like our structure with all the different projects, many of them are useless and are not really
projects. Other are very active and span a much bigger scope.
So i personally work on the OpenOffice.org project in different areas ;-)
Same for me, but the only way to be consistent and have some
credibility. For the external world, it is to have an active Education
Project, and people specialized in the domain, answering the need.
Not only : the teachers are involved too. Most of the scheduled changes have been proposed by them, and without them, nothing would
have been possible (they know better than us what is possible).
that sounds very good and interesting
But needs a lot of energy, people and time
eric.bachard wrote:
Other extremely important thing: OOo4Kids is the way to enter in
schools with free software.
yes of course and as i mentioned before, the kids are our users of tomorrow and they are the business leaders and decision makers of
tomorrow ...
I just limited my vision to stop seing a lot of governments pay zillions
of euros/dollars for an office suite, while the need is already covered
several times by free software.
I think this is not sufficient. We need to implement more than what we have today, and integrate more Education specific contents and so on.
Believe me or not, but the only thing people want (not only teachers), is : simplify the UI. On MAc OS X side, this is the rule 20% visible /
80% hidden law.
i haven't said that we have everything in place and i am sure that we have to do much more. But i see an overlap with the UX team here and
doesn't it make sense to work closer together.
When we did the Mac OS X native port (IMHO the first real effort from
the not-Sun community), we did a lot of UX changes, but nobody joined us.
Teachers and kids are one further user group with a different focus as normal
office users.
My main point here is if we can find a way to customize our UI in the way that
it becomes quit easy and efficient.
That's what we started.
We can define different UI themes for different user groups. One for kids, one
for traditional office users, etc.
IMHO, there is no need to redefine a new look. The teachers don't care
about the look. they want something adapted.
I don't know if this is possible but it's worse to think about it.
Maybe you thought "worth" ? (sorry, my poor english striked again :)
We should try to work together in all the different areas and not side by side.
What will certainly work. Now, it's important work together, but not to
be controled by.
Now, to answer you, all propositions are welcome. From our side, I can't
remember the number of times I invited people, including developers, to
present us what they do, under the form of IRC ClassRooms.
Of course, the invitation is still valid : what about see people from
performance, UX, whatever project, join and present what they do to the
students on the channel ? The success of these ClassRooms is really
important (I myself particulary appreciated the one from Philipp Lohmann
(gsl), and Mathias Bauer (framework) ). At a point the system will be
copied by other entities (teach OpenSource is in the mood).
As example, we could have people in charge to organize, one the UX part,
one the performance part, one something else ..
Another possibility (add both works too), could be to see, at fixed
hours/day in the week, be present on the IRC channel, and answer the
questions the students could have. Have a dedicated wiki page, to
prepare the questions .. and so on.
IMHO, the best way is to see more devs joining : things will
automaticaly improve afterwards, without the need to add administrative
things in the middle. Waiting, I'd like to say a big thank you to
Thorsten Behrens, Bjoern Michaelsen, Cedric Bosdonnat and Pierre
Pasteau, who are present ~ every day on the channel, for the quality of
their contributions. Other devs are welcome :)
.. all of that is just suggestions, of course :)
Regards,
Eric Bachard
--
Education Project:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Education_Project
Projet OOo4Kids : http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/Main_Page
L'association EducOOo : http://www.educoo.org
Blog : http://eric.bachard.free.fr/news
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