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Welcome to the DEMO site which accompanies A Place Called Home.
Here you can sample the very easy to use CMS / Weblog server
software developed by Userland Software.
DIRECTIONS
1) Click the Join Now tab
in the upper right of the page and become a member.
2) You will then be
able to login to the site as a contributing author using the Login tab in the upper right of the page.
3) Once you join and login, you can contribute a news item to the site by clicking on the Authoring link in the upper right of the page. If you are logged in, a link called 'Create a News Item' should appear.
[For more hints, see the Quick-Start Guide link below this sidebar.]
Check out a group of high school students authoring
their own sites using this same type of technology on a server at the
Hunterdon Central
Regional High School in Flemington, NJ. Their server also hosts a
collaborative link between Flemington, NJ and a similar server run by
Georgia State University College of Education for students in the Rockdale County Public
Schools, GA.
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| Friday, June 27, 2003 |
Greetings to Visitors...
-- Ames Brown |
posted 6/27/03; 7:54:24 PM |
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Welcome to the Demo Site for "A Place Called Home." Simply click on
the link in the upper right tab to return to the main site.
Here you can get a taste of authoring on a CMS/Weblog server. Using the
tab in the upper right, you can sign up, login, and then begin
authoring articles which you can post to this site [see the directions in the blue sidebar on the left].
All the features of the server software are not enabled for this demo
site (so you won't be able to upload pictures or files), but enough is
enabled to allow you to experience the potential of this type of server
technology for use in the development of digital portfolio servers in
school districts and colleges of education. This server is running on a
regular MacOS X G4 computer configured with Userland Frontier, as well
as other software. First setup in May (a month ago), it is the new
portfolio server for the School of Education at FDU.
[below--an excerpt from an article I wrote for MARTEC]
A LITTLE HISTORY
In 1990 as Tim Berners-Lee
was 'inventing' the web, he realized the inseparable link between both
browsing/authoring web content and incorporated the ability to do both
in his
original browser/server model. However, NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) in their official release of the Mosaic
web browser at the end of 1993, which began the web revolution in the
US, left out the editing/authoring capability. The Mosaic code
eventually became Netscape, and with the release of Netscape Gold in 1996, authoring capability was incorporated back into the browser. During the same period, Adobe Systems released Page/SiteMill, one of the first WYSIWYG web authoring tools, and published "Kids do the Web" (Bix, 1996) documenting school web authoring projects across the nation.
As society's adoption of the web began to grow exponentially in 1994,
companies such as Opera and Microsoft
released free web browsing software which still used the approach of
leaving out the editing/authoring capability propagated by the original
Mosaic model. The W3C (World Wide Web
Consortium) international standards group, under the leadership of
Berners-Lee, continuously maintained and updated (currently version
7.x) the public Amaya code base
("W3C's Editor/Browser") in an effort to influence developers to
incorporate the hybrid approach in web browser software. If you
download Amaya (Win | Mac)
and install it on your computer, you will immediately notice that
editing and browsing are seamlessly intertwined. Now it seems that CMS
technology is bringing the standard browser back to its original hybrid
intent, albeit in a fashion which is driven by the server rather than
the browser itself.
VISIT ONE SCHOOL's CMS SERVER SITE
The city of Delano in Kern County, California hosts a beautiful CMS-based site for the Delano High School.
Their server runs on Userland Frontier server software. As is characteristic of CMS web
sites for any type of organization, it has up-to-date content. Whereas
a traditional school web site might be maintained by just one
technology staff member who is hard pressed to find out what new
information should be developed and posted in a timely fashion, a CMS
school web site has direct authoring responsibilities for different
content sections or types of information by teachers, administrators,
and other staff.
Even
if only a small fraction of the school faculty/staff take on authoring
responsibilities, this widening of participation makes an enormous
difference in the vibrancy of a school web site's content. The Delano HS teaching staff
web page has a web site icon link next to many of the listed faculty. Curriculum
sites range from a simple yet elegant social studies site
to a very elaborate English teaching site
devoted to mythology. At the bottom of each teacher's web site is the
"login" link typical of CMS sites which allows the teacher to directly
update/create content.
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