This is not a bug report. This is not a request for help or information. It is related to dnn but that may not be apparent in the beginning of this posting. In summary, I have 2 years to prove that our portal is an asset to keep and continue development on.
In February, there will be a ground-breaking ceremony for a new university campus some 16 km out of town. It is the result of a US$ 200m co-operation deal with a Chinese investment company and the construction plans include a high-rise academic hospital and a separate ICT building. There is no doubt that once the construction is finished, a complete overhaul of management structure will be necessary and of course, my job is on the line too. Yet, I'm not too worried about that.
But most of the other staff should realize that their jobs are on the line too, simply because they lack any other capacity than producing some Excel work sheets and Word documents.Even there, they have problems to catch up. Cambodia is just waking up to the existence of Khmer in Unicode and in Microsoft's Uniscribe. In the library, I often see students work in Unicode - I sometimes check that out. But our staff is trained in the old Khmer fonts on the US character set and have developed a system of work-arounds.to create exactly the wanted outlook.
Khmer has no spaces between the words. Spaces are used in Khmer, more or less like commas in western languages.That means that word wrap did not work with legacy fonts and minor changes in the text could require reformatting all the text that followed, adding and removing spaces to create the wanted line breaks and manipulating character spacing to achieve right alignment.
Khmer Unicode has something called zero-spaces to delimit words but it takes at least some motivation to insert them between words. Ideally, the computer should be able to insert most of those zero-spaces by itself (I think it does that in Thai) but the Uniscribe is not that developed for Khmer yet. As long as the text is only used to be printed, it doesn't matter that much. But when documents are intended to be published on the web, having those zero-spaces most certainly does matter.
First of all, the author has no idea of font sizes, line widths or character spacing on the browsers of the readers. Zero-spacing the text is important to always achieve a correct word wrap. This reason is the easiest one to explain. The second reason is more difficult. Khmer have never learned to search their texts, to search through search engines, to use search in short. Only Google indexes Khmer web pages and allows searches in Khmer. Even if indexing in Khmer seems problematic in SQL 2008, future releases might resolve this and we do not want to have to rewrite every web page or article or announcement or calendar event to make them searchable.
This requires some self discipline. Now, that is difficult to come by. I try hard to overcome ethnocentric prejudices. I try to participate in their culture and to understand it from within. So, my criticism on some aspects of their culture is no arrogance. My first criticism is the acceptance of "Almost Is Good Enough - Never Strive For Perfection"
Remarkable is also that no-one in the staff reads cup email. Those that can use email (a few) use yahoo.
Khmer culture is a Brahman based culture. It does not know inherited casts like Indian society but society nevertheless is based upon some kind of layering Before the Vietnam War, the stratification was based on privileges received from the king, now it is based on privileges received from government. This creates the top of a patronage system. Your position is safe as long as the position of your patron is safe.
Have a look at the web site of CUP. It's all about the achievements of the president.who is also a senator for the majority party and has many royal honor titles.
I believe a website must have a measurable effect on the bottom line. A web site can (and must for sustainability) always generate profit. It can do so by attracting students (enable registration online or at least prepare your registration online). Build the image of the university, not around the personality of one person, but around the university as a team. The portal part of the website should facilitate communication and delivery of education. Much of the design of that part is still to be done, I am evaluating a tool that shows potential, but I prefer waiting for html 5 to structure a solution.
Intermediary strategies are far more important: getting the portal static strings translated in a sensible way and then get the staff trained to update their part of the information. The translation process is quite problematic and I have nobody with the capacity at the moment.
I have a very good translator, He has been interpreting a guest lecture by a German professor. I've also witnessed a former guest lecture completely failing because the interpretor did not understand the contents. We use a lot of metaphors in academic language that do not exist in Khmer. To translate correctly, you must translate their actual meaning, bring the metaphor back to the idea it represents. For academic translation, this is good. This ensures that meaning does not go lost. But meaning has precedence over imagery.
For the web portal, I need the capacity to do the opposite, to create a metaphor for an idea, a metaphor that will be understood by most Cambodians. Now that capacity is missing with my current translator. This is about the ability to be creative with your own language, to give new meanings to old words in new contexts. This is not the work for a translator, this is part of the design work.I can teach the instruments, but I have no capacity in design.
A Cambodian offered our rector a free web hosting with a design template the rector liked very much on contents copied from our actual web site. In no time I copied his design into a set of dnn skins and containers. There is a small shift in the tint of the color red. their deseign can temporarily still be seen at cup(dot)camtechgroups(dot)com. I asked them about the picture used in the logo pane. It was copied somewhere from the internet, he said. "This is Cambodia, you know". I am sure I will get the rector one day to replace it with a professional photo shoot in gown in CUP colors. At the mean time, I sport a link on the home page of his site on my site. Also, did you notice my page counter is working, his is not? :-)
The guy from Camtech Group called to complain. But as I come to think of it, I did exactly what the rector had instructed me and I kind of like the design. Some simple improvements like the DNN Cycle Carousel (free downloadable on codeplex) did wonders to impress the rector and to convince him of the superiority of my solution. Thank you, Jan.
A whole world of opportunity remains hidden behind those two words: Register and Login. But it's a good thing that it remains hidden: a lot of information for the contents is still missing in the public part. Let them first fill up those empty pages.Clients realize too little that they are responsible for the contents. Adding a link to a content page in the navigation structure does not magically fill that page with information.
If you've come this far reading my posting, thank you. Thank you for proving that I'm not insane. It feels good to have it written down somewhere, to have shared it
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The one-eyed in the land of the blind.
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