I have just got back from Singapore after travelling for 24 hours so this might suffer a little from jet lag :-)
1. If anyone wants to make any improvements to any of the documentation on the INGOTs website they are most welcome to do so. If anyone E-mails me for a copy of any of the materials in different formats I'll do the best I can to accommodate them. 2. There will be continuous improvements to both the website and the support documentation as resources (both time and financial) become available. The website is now on its third incarnation and the feedback has been very encouraging. 3. I believe that the methods employed in developing INGOTs are very much in the spirit of Open Source. All materials are freely available for community members to modify, translate, use and contribute back etc. 4. I am well aware of the need to improve some things but rather than wait for everything to be perfect we got started and we have worked to improve things based on feedback and perceived priorities from dialogue with the assessors - very similar in principle to the coding effort for OOo. 5. I believe that the substance of the INGOTs in terms of the levels of expectation and the educational philosophy are sound but the approach is quite different from conventional testing. This is deliberate and while it might not suit everyone's tastes it has been popular with people in 10 countries that I have visited so far as well as here in the UK. 6. Yes there are some presentational issues - I know that the criteria tables didn't print correctly in the latest version of the handbook which was a bit rushed to get some copies to take to Canberra. I'll check and fix this and any other typos and similar errors this week. The handbook has been revised many times during the initial trials and until its stable I haven't given much thought to its final layout. I will probably get a specialist to do this as its not my forte and recent additions such as My First INGOT would have required changes anyway. 7. We have 50 schools in the UK that have said they are interested in becoming INGOT Academies. Over the next couple of months I will be working with Chris to ensure as many of these schools as possible come on board. This will provide the revenue for us to employ a full-time person to work on the web site and associated documentation. Daniel Carrera has agreed in principle to be that person and he will fly over here to the UK in June to work with us and we will provide him with time to do his other voluntary OOo work too. 8. As revenue increases we will employ people to develop more educational resources based on OOo - there are some downloads available from the INGOTs website for teaching mathematics using OpenOffice.org Impress, for example. If anyone wants to add to or improve these they are very welcome to contribute. 9. Alexandro Colarado has already done a Spanish translation of the web site and I believe Wojciech Domalewski has done Polish. Now I'm back I'll be able to get these in place. Wojciech has also set up a Polish forum and trained around 40 Polish assessors. 10. The website needs a news section for stuff like above :-) It all just takes time and resources and an income stream will allow us to do it quicker and better. I will continue to develop and promote INGOTs within the current resource constraints and actively seek the resources to ensure growth and further support of the OpenOffice.org project as a whole. Regards, -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMSL --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
