Contents
1. Introduction
1.1 The rock-bottom assumptions
1.2 The Website@School teams
1.2.1 Core team
1.2.Translators
1.2.3 Code contributors
1.3 Main design viewpoints
2. Features
3. Available modules
4. Supported languages
5. Wish List
6. Useful sites and links
7. References
8. History
9. To conclude
Website@School is a website content management system (CMS) specially designed to build, manage and maintain the websites of schools.
Website@School has a firm foundation, both on the visible surface as well as 'under the hood'. Its basics were forged with the help of Jürgen Habermas and Donald Knuth.
- Jürgen Habermas (1929- ), and his 'Theory of Communicative Action'.
intro_jurgen_habermas.jpg
"Habermas is a philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, which he has based in his theory of communicative action. His work has focused on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics -- particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas
- Donald Knuth (1938- ), American computer scientist and his 'The Art of Computer Programming'.
intro_donald_knuth.jpg
"Donald Knuth is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University. Author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming ("TAOCP"), Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms, contributing to the development of, and systematizing formal mathematical techniques for, the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms, and in the process popularizing asymptotic notation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth
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Celestin Freinet (1896-1966), pedagogue and educational reformer and Paolo Freire (1921-1997), Brazilian educator and influential theorist on education are our indispensable guides when thinking about a CMS for education. Almost a hundred years ago Freinet already saw the possibilities of modern technologies in the hands of pupils for real life learning and communication, while Freires thoughts on reciprocity fit in the Open Source philosopy.
celestin_freinet.jpg
paolo_freire.jpg
Concepts of Freinet's pedagogy:
- Pedagogy of work (pédagogie du travail): pupils were encouraged to learn by making products or providing services.
- Enquiry-based learning (tâtonnement expérimental): group-based trial and error work.
- Cooperative learning (travail coopératif): pupils co-operate in the production process.
- Centers of interest (complexes d'intérêt): the children's interests and natural curiosity are starting points for a learning process.
- The natural method (méthode naturelle): authentic learning by using real experiences of children.
- Democracy: children learn to take responsibility for their own work and for the whole community by using democratic self government.
(excerpts from Wikipedia)
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[...] challenging is Freire's strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it should be completely abolished. This is hard to imagine in absolute terms, since there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship, but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. Freire wants us to think in terms of teacher-student and student-teacher; that is, a teacher who learns and a learner who teaches, as the basic roles of classroom participation. [...].
(exerpts fromWikipedia)
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On the shoulders of the above giants, a couple of dwarfs (the core team) have tried to create a real world educational website content management system: Website@School.
The core team of Website@School consists of: Karin Abma (ICT coordinator of the Public Primary School Rosa Boekdrukker in Amsterdam, the Neterhlands), Peter Fokker (PSD Engineering, main developer, programmer) and Dirk Schouten (former teacher, volunteer, user manuals writer). Carla Alma and Margret Kwantes are trying to raise money. Please donate!
Many people, from all over the world have helped making Website@School available for pupils, teachers and schools. Please help education in your coutry by translating Website@School in your language. It's quite simple with our Translate Tool.
In alphabetical order:
- Dutch: Core team.
- English: Core team.
- Spanish: Anouk Coumans, Margot Molier, Trudy Stap, Hannah Tulleken.
- Your language here?: Your name here?
Website@School also uses code created by other software developers. We thank them for their projects and their desire to share their code. The following contributions can be found in Website@School:
- Frederico Caldeira Knabben and his FCKeditor. Frederico's site can be found at http://ckeditor.com/. The FCK editor is distributed under the GPL, LGPL and MPL open source licenses. This triple copyleft licensing model avoids incompatibility with other open source licenses.
- More to follow.
Over the years the guiding design viewpoints have developed into the following:
- The website of a school needs special qualities. It differs from the home site of the Jones family, or a youth club. Also it's certainly not the site of an enterprise or a business; a school is not a company. This notion requires features that differ from most other (fine) CMSs.
- A school website is the place on the Internet where pupils, teachers, faculty, parents, the board, several committees and other parties can find a place to express themselves and communicate with all kinds of visitors. A school CMS should enable all these stakeholders to use the CMS for their purposes. A school CMS must take care of all their cultural differences and similarities in the way they express themselves and communicate with their differing audiences.
- Most times the website of a school must be managed and maintained by many persons. All of them have little or no experience as webmaster, HTML expert or systems administator. A school is mainly managed by hard working female teachers who like to teach, and not to manage some CMS. These circumstances call for a very secure, robust and stable but KISS CMS for all those users. Yes, also for eager to learn whizzkid pupils.
- Documentation. Website@School has excellent documentation. First a comprehensive user manual. Further, extensive developer documentation and last but not least, well documented code. All of them written for their own audiences.
- And, last but not least, a school CMS must be a place where pupils can learn. Learn to create and publish texts, learn management and administrative skills, experience markup languages, style sheets and maybe even learn coding. For every level, from writing the first text to writing code, a school CMS should be a learning tool in itself.
These viewpoints were shaped in features. Please read the next paragraph.
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Detailed information on the features can be found in the chapters that describe the main functions and the modules. Below a general description of the Website@School features in no specific order.
- Focus on security, robustness and stability.
- Easy installaton with a well dcoumentend GUI (Graphical User Interface) and additional Users' Guide documentation.
- Excellent, richly illustrated comprehensive documentation targeted at the school users. The User's Guide is a context sensitive help function.
- Excellent developer documentation created with phpDocumentor.
- Fine grainded Role Based Access Control (RBAC). Each area, section or page can have its own admin(s) with permisions from 'none' to 'everything'.
- Unlimited number of Areas ('websites' in Website@School). If needed everyone can have their own website.
- Unlimited number of Intranets.
- Unlimited depth in sections, subsections, subsubsections, etcetera.
- Sections and pages can have their own image, thus permitting site navigation and use for analphabetics or young children.
- Management with braille terminal for blind or visually impaired users.
- No frames and almost no javascript facilitates reading with braille terminals.
- BSS (Bazar Style Style) permitting unlimited differences in site styles by user editable style sheets in areas, sections and pages.
- Pages have metadata and can be visible, hidden, read-only, under embargo and expiry dates and can directly link to URL's.
- Content of areas, sectons and pages can be moved around to other areas and sections, enabling changes to any site structure.
- Alerts on 'everything' for 'everyone'.
- Mouseovers with short information texts or to keyboard shortcuts
- Collaboration: Groups of users with different group permissions (Unix style).
- Virus scanning for all incoming materials (provided the server has a virusscanner). Clamscan is automatically detected.
- A Translate Tool: Easy translation of the program text strings by technically unexperienced translators. Translations are sent by e-mail.
- Easy database backup.
- Easy upgrading and maintenance.
- Extensive logging and status reproting with cut & paste for error reporting.
- Full UTF-8, i.e. ã Ê ï ó ù, etçetera as well as non-western languages.
- Breadcrumb trails with some intelligence (reduces mouseclicks).
- Proxy Friendly URLs (configurable) to save bandwidth.
- And much, much more, please see the chapters in the Table of Contents. Each chapter has it's own features.
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Website@School has the following modules:
- WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get ) editor.
- Plain HTML editor.
Please help us by developing more modules and write to: info@websiteatschool.eu
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Website@School is available in the following languages:
Check our http://websiteatschool.eu site to see if new languages are available that are not yet incorporated in Website@School.
You can help schools in your country by translating Website@School. The system provides an easy Tanslate Tool for 'on the fly' translations, sent by e-mail.
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- Please help other schools by translating Website@School in your language. We have a special Translate Tool that enables online translations. Creating a new language version is a piece of cake.
- Help us with feature requests.
- Help schools with developing and coding for Website@School.
- Please donate to the project. Your school can help to keep your school site sustainable. We welcome financial support of the project. See Donate to Website@School
- E-mail us the URL of your site. You can use the E-mail link at the bottom of the Home Welcome page in Website@School Management.
- Do you have wishes? Please mail us.
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Further reading, if you like. A lot can be partially found on the Internet.
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Webstie@School is the successor of Site@School, born in 2002. The history can best be summarised with [1]:
intro_good_code.png
Since we had years of experience with Site@School - which still has thousands of schools worldwide using it-, there was little need to change requirements. In that way Site@School was an excellent prototype. We only had to add long awaited features that were impossible to incorporate in good old Site@School.
[1]: Courtesy Mr. Randall Munroe of xkcd.com who permits using his comics for this use. Source: http://m.xkcd.com/844/.
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Nuff said, back to work.
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Author: Dirk Schouten <schoutdi (at) knoware (dot) nl>
Last updated: 2011-02-11