Vision for OneVille documentation

Overall hopes for our documentation:

Documentation should be coherent -- glued to our core research questions, throughout.

Most of all, we need analytic categories coherent across the project. Otherwise the project will not make a clear contribution to thinking or work.

-cites to any research or other projects go in footnotes. -simple language. -examples of “how to” take precedence.

Documentation should be visually inviting. Think of enticing a teacher or young person or parent to tackle similar efforts where they live.

The site should be hypertextual and particularly, should link to other projects within the OneVille Project. In a footnote manner (meaning, secondary to most readers), put in links to relevant research, prior information.

The documentation should include the voices of our participants. (see below)

(More details:)

Documentation should in the end be downloadable, and distributable by people; something they can email around their school.

The documentation should perhaps also include our contact info, so that people can ask questions of us and our participants. Should we urge people to “please contact us"?

We might offer an index that also talks about other things to read.

Of particular concern: including participant voices

We hope that the more direct quotes and videos we have from youth, parents, and youth, the better we will convey what we've been doing.

We might get quotes from participants through targeted interviews now, or, take them from data collected throughout the project.

We might include short video interviews that enrich the content but aren’t required by site visitors to watch if they want to understand what we've been doing.

Still photos of speakers are also a great way to bring text-based “voices” more alive.

Some prompts for getting those voices:

What interested you in doing this in the first place? What did you think might be gained?

What are particularly thought-provoking stories from your project, that say something about improving communication in public education?

What are continuing barriers to needed communications?

What's your current take on how youth, parents, and teachers can participate in improving communications in public education, and creating new uses for basic technologies? Should others do what you have been doing? What would you tell them to make that possible?

Technical instructions aiding OneVille colleagues in the documentation

How to upload an image to the wiki:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Managing_files

from ^ but modified for our theme slightly:

Upload a file

  1. Prepare the file for upload. Make sure the file is exactly as you want it.
  2. In the sidebar, under “toolbox”, click “Special Pages.”
  3. On the Special Pages page, click "Upload File"
  4. Click “Browse” next to the “Source filename:” to locate the file on your computer (the name of the “browse” button depends on your web browser).
  5. Change the “Destination filename:” to something descriptive, if necessary.
  6. Fill in the “Summary,” if necessary.
  7. Click the “Upload file” button.

To use an image in another page, you treat it much the same as a wiki link:

File:Cane Portrait Chevreuse.JPG

Female Mallard

^ File name |size to display | caption ]]