edu.plone.org

All this discussion is good, but I think we need to
start to capture it and organise it.
There are many areas involved, and different
directions we wont to go in. and many unanswered
questions... eg why is eduzope so inactive?

It appears there are many differing standards around,
and we haven't seen the market leader yet... But since
plone is XML compatible, it appears that a rich
metadata would allow for easy translation into any
standard. Also, as the natural language processing
products come of age, some of this work will be
automatically done....

There appears to be various educational zope products
(see for example http://fle3.uiah.fi/), cmf ones ( see
for example http://www.zope.org/Members/gillou/XQuizz
and by the way what is happening with this product?)
and some plone educational sites already running.)

Future enhancements to plone will of course improve
any eduplone setup.

There seems to be two dimensions, intranet/internet
education site vs online education, and school vs
university. This would suggest different flavuors of
eduplone are needed, though I think the overall
framework should be flexible enough to suit both. On
the other side of the coin we would want similar
products, eg online testing.

My suggestion.
* edu.plone.org be set up with a plone site it its own right
with wiki (don't ask me
which one) (or backtalkbook?) to tease out these ideas
and start to put some order to them to create a
skeleton on which to have some common action. Also, the site to use
CMFCollection
so members can add links, docs etc and have them turn up in the right spots,
eg standards
discussion, zope educational implementations, CMF educational
implementations, etc.

* A sourceforge site be set up where educational
products can be developed much like the Collective
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/collective/) called
eduplone (or part of the CMFplone setup at sourceforge?)
* This site should include a single install configured
for school plone and for uniplone which would have the
necessary structure and products needed for an out of
box generic solution.
* We should also then join
http://opensourceschools.org/

While the standards issue is not resolved, I don't
think we need to put as much work into that area yet,
but be trying to develop a rich set of metadata for
the educational objects we will be creating so it can
easily be ported into any of these frameworks. Thus,
when we designate an educational object, eg student,
we should also indicate what metadata it should have.

I think we should concentrate on building a generic
eduplone for schools and for unis and incorporate the
products that are around to give it the functionality
we want. Then it will be a matter of keeping up to
date with plone/cmf/zope, and then a matter of
creating import/export type products for IMS and other
standards...

I would also suggest the edu.plone.org site be primarily about getting
a clear picture of what is happening and what products are around and then
deciding do we want to create a plone 1.2 instance or wait for plone 2. The
reason
to wait would be due to migration problems. So may be we need to spend time
researching
and coming up with a clear design before we build. At the same time we could
be experimenting
and edu.plone.org could capture best practice around.

I hope I have these concepts correct. But it is
impossible for a single person to be abreast of all of
it, but together we can do it! What do you think?

Robert Zaar
St John's Regional College
DANDENONG 3175
AUSTRALIA
Ph: +61 3 9791 3366




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