[CityCamp Exchange] teaching civic data-gathering in schools
Great topic. The Institute for Local Government created Local Government Basics for Students, which may provide a backdrop in a civic/civic-tech curriculum.
In terms of decentralized calendar management, Google Apps is making big ins in education by providing free Google Apps. At a local public charter school, the ability to share and manage calendars online made decentralized management possible. Plus, the calendars have feeds available: xml, ical.
And in the spirit of accessible data, I just started working on a calendaring system at a local school. I know a few eager students who'd like their calendar notifications via their iPhone/Droid, rather than in an email (in the campus email system, on a spreadsheet, each week). Kevin - the DataSF project sounds interesting. Any update? Jon - do you think it might work as an After School Program? I ask from a program standpoint. Supplemental education is funded at a steady rate. Also, there was a large "Character Education" grant that wa
On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 2:06 PM, kevin curry kmcurry@gmail.com wrote: Ok, tracking you now. And educational endeavor. This is interesting. I just got off a call w/ someone in SF who is kicking around an idea to organize class/school-age projects using data from DataSF.org.
On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Jon Udell jonu@microsoft.com wrote:
The school's own calendar would be a can of worms for the reasons you note. So instead I'd like to engage a teacher and a group of students in an exploration of the web presence of the community at large, w/respect to its various sources of public event info. The students would learn:
The difference between HTML/PDF pages and calendar feeds
How to create calendar feeds
How to merge calendar feeds
The process would teach key underlying principles of 21st-century literacy, including structured data, indirection, syndication. The outcome would be a prototype of a decentralized, network-based community calendar that works according to those principles.
Admittedly you'd need an enlightened teacher to pull this off. If anybody knows one who'd be willing to try I'd love to connect.
Jon
PPS: re: http://manorisd.intand.com/ Yep, that vendor is one of the few that exports iCal. Our own school doesn't use them but a neighboring school does.
-----Original Message----- From: kevin curry [mailto:kmcurry@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, November 05, 2010 11:36 AM To: citycamp@forums.e-democracy.org Subject: Re: [CityCamp Exchange] teaching civic data-gathering in schools
Jon,
Are you trying to establish a new grassroots practice at the teacher level? In my experience the teachers are not the source of this data either. Schools here in Virginia Beach have an administrative person compile and maintain the school's calendar. How teachers' events end up on that calendar is by hook or by crook. A teacher often emails the admin or stops by his/her office with the info. The school admin is the PoC between a school and the school system. The school principal is a key role player because they control the master calendar for the school. That calendar includes things like PTA events, which are usually reported to the principal during PTA meetings. Not sure if you are trying to find teachers who do or will create, maintain and publish their personal calendars. Otherwise, you might want to reach out to principals.
By the way, here's City of Manor's school calendar: http://manorisd.intand.com/
The RSS feed follows the anti-pattern, but there are some interesting subscription options here:
Manor Independent School District Superintendent Andrew Kim is forward leaning in the use of information technology for his school system.
Best, Kevin
On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 11:08 AM, Jon Udell jonu@microsoft.com wrote:
I'm looking for a few teachers to work with me on leading some students through this exercise:
====
Dear Mr. Jones,
We're students at the Jefferson Middle School, and we're working on a class project to improve the amount and quality of online event information for our community. We noticed that the following information is available on your website: [EXAMPLES].
However, these events aren't published in a form that enables them to show up automatically elsewhere -- for example, on the Herald's site, or the Chamber of Commerce site, or on people's personal calendars. To show how that can work, we have reformulated your information as a data feed. You can see it merged together with other data feeds here: [EXAMPLE].
This is just a demonstration. We're not the appropriate source for your data, you are. As part of our class project, we're reaching out to organizations like yours to show them how they can publish their own event information in two ways: as text for people to read, and also as data for computers to process and for networks to syndicate.
We know that sounds complicated, but it's really just a way of applying the ordinary calendar software that you probably already have and use. May we contact the person in your organization who's responsible for the events page on your website, and make a presentation about how you could be publishing event information in a more useful way?
Sincerely,
Kayla Smith, Tim Miller, Samantha Williams Jefferson Middle School Civic Data Project
====
If you know a teacher who'd be willing and able to try this, please invite them to contact me.
Thanks,
Jon
(http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/10/a-lesson-in-civics-public-data.html)
Jon Udell
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