Educational Plone Sprint and the future of Plone Educational

Hi,

Grab your best chair, get a some of your favorite (or closest available) 
beverage, and read this mail if you are interested in the future of Plone 
in Educational settings. We are going to cover a lot of ground, and I will 
also summarise some of the topics discussed so far and offer my 
recommendations for how I believe we should proceed.

Some of you might know me, some of you may not. Since I haven't posted 
anything to the educational list yet, I'll do a short introduction: My name 
is Alexander Limi, I live in Norway, and I'm one of the original founders 
of the Plone project. My responsibilities in the Plone project include (but 
are not limited to, sigh ;) User Interface design, usability testing, i18n 
integration, accessibility, standards compliance, quality assurance and the 
normal Plone dictatorial duties. My background is in Computer Science and 
Psychology.

I would like to apologize in advance for this long mail, I usually don't 
write huge monolithic emails. I just thought that we needed to gather some 
of the discussions so far, and tie it in with Maik's Educational Sprint 
announcement.

Also, I promise to be more active directly in the mailing list in the time 
to come - so we can avoid these catch-all mails. :)

This mail was triggered by Maik Jablonski wanting to announce a Plone 
Sprint with focus on the Education and Learning Management side of Plone.

( if you don't know what a sprint is:
  http://plone.org/events/sprints/whatis )


Maik Jablonski <[email protected]> wrote:

> I want to announce the planned "Educational-Plone"-Sprint in 24.9.-28.9 
> in Paderborn.

Good, you seem to be thinking along the same lines as I am. I've been 
meaning to write you a mail and propose that we did something along these 
lines. Things have been incredibly busy lately. There's some *really* 
exciting stuff happening with Plone (we're talking big stuff here :), but I 
can't tell you about it before more details are confirmed and some papers 
have been signed. :)

> The sprint can focus on several issues regarding plone in educational 
> (maybe other) environments:
>
> - Wysiwyg-Integration (my Epoz-project 
> http://www.zope.org/Members/mjablonski/Epoz develops rapidly , but maybe 
> we can do a better integration into Plone, developing toolboxes etc.)

It's nice, but again I want to take advantage of the fact that a stable and 
tested editor with *very* clean code and nice customization options exist.

I have talked to a number of people in the Plone community, and I've 
reached the conclusion that the editor is such a big part of the Plone 
experience and usability that we should have a firm grip on it.

The product I want to use is htmlArea (URL at end of mail). During our User 
Interface Cleanup week, we did a roundup of all the editors we could find, 
and this one won out by far. It's very well made (clean code!), has an open 
source BSD license (so we can even fork it if we should need to), and has a 
large and active user base, which ensures that there are very few bugs. It 
also supports both IE and Mozilla, like Epoz.

It's also highly customizable, which brings me to the next point: I would 
like to get sponsorships for integrating this editor into Plone. I'm not 
talking about just plugging it in instead of a textarea in edit forms, but 
changing it so it behaves as a natural part of Plone instead of an edit 
box.

This means:

- Inline editing - people edit the document directly as-is (including any 
Description/Title etc)

- Totally transparent fall-back-mode for older browsers

- Full integration - this means that the editor is on *all* elements in the 
Plone UI, and works equally well no matter where you are

- Restrictive editing - people should not be allowed to do things that are 
not semantic (pink colors and yellow backgrounds are out, specialized class 
types ("note" etc) are in)

- Image browser and search interface

- Link browser and search interface

This is one of the items that *has* to be done in a tight team of people 
who know Plone, UI, Javascript, and the DOM - and is badly suited for a 
Sprint as such. It requires a good plan, attention to detail, and tweaking, 
tweaking, tweaking :)

So my idea is to try to work out a cost estimate for this, connect a few of 
the Universities with your project group and get funding for it, and do it 
properly. It's too important to just do half-made. I know that your project 
has offered to sponsor some of the development, so has University College 
London, and if we can get other universities to help out, that would be 
even better.

> - Keyword-Management for Plone

This brings me to the second project I would like to propose, which is a 
bigger task, but with a lot of potential. The project is integrating Topic 
Maps for Plone.

As you have probably figured out by now, keywords are nice in small-to- 
medium-sized web sites, but breaks down when you try to use it for large 
amounts of resources.

Topic Maps is an ISO standard for building meaningful relations between 
entities. (ISO/IEC 13250, if you are interested, there are more links at 
the end of the mail.)

It is a powerful way of storing relations between objects, and creating 
indexes. It's similar to another standard called RDF (Resource Description 
Framework), but sufficiently different to warrant its status as an ISO 
standard. In my opinion, Topic Maps map very well on to Content Management 
in general, and Plone in particular.

Topic Maps is a complex thing to implement, but works very well when in 
use. However, this is where we have an ace up our sleeve, as a Norwegian 
company in Oslo (the same city as three of the Plone developers live in) 
have developed a Zope implementation of Topic Maps, called ZTM.

Their implementation is based on XML Topic Maps 1.0 (aka XTM), and has been 
in production for about two years in big Norwegian web sites and intranets. 
The core technology hasn't changed much for over a year, and is considered 
stable.

The Plone Developers contacted the company (Creuna AS), who has developed 
one of the biggest web sites based on topic maps in the world using this 
product. They are releasing it as open source software, and agreed to help 
integrate it into Plone.

We can't do it for free though, and as we have a unique opportunity to 
couple some of the best people in the world in the area of XML Topic Maps 
with the user interface talents of the Plone Team, this is another area 
where I would like to see some sponsorship. Our Plone developers in Norway 
have the time and opportunity to work with the people in Creuna, and we 
could make it happen pretty quickly if there's interest and some money to 
back it up.

> - Flexible metadata-systems

This is another big area. We need flexible metadata to support metadata for 
learning objects, like LOM. Kapil Thangavelu has already done an 
implementation, but needs some sponsorship and some help to make the full 
integration happen. This might also be a worthwhile goal to pursue at a 
Sprint. I'll let him comment on that.

> - Annotation-Services

Rice University has developed a standards-compliant annotation server for 
Zope that I would like to integrate into Plone. This task is highly suited 
for a sprint, and is one of the things I would like to propose for the 
sprint too.

The product provides an annotation server for Zope, implementing the W3C's 
Annotea (URL at end of mail) protocol which allows clients to add 
annotations to web pages without modifying the pages' source.

Essentially what we need to do is to write a Zope/Plone client to interact 
with this annotation server, so we don't have to rely on the users having 
dedicated Annotation clients installed.

> I'll hope, you will still lead the sprint as we've discussed it weeks 
> ago.

I look forward to doing that. :)

OK, now for a short summary of questions and issues raised in previous 
mails to the list. I've read them all, I just haven't had time to sit down 
and summarize things before now. These are in no particular order, and only 
represents my views and recommendations on the subjects.

Eduzope and this initiative:
 - EduZope is a related, but quite different initiative. EduZope has been 
more focused on lobbying, research, politics, standards research and 
increasing Plone and Zope's visibility in the EU school systems. Georg 
Pleger and Robert Boulanger have done an excellent job, and we are now in a 
very advantageous position because of their efforts.

   This initiative is more about getting "down and dirty" and doing actual 
programming and producing a product. EduZope needs "EduPlone", and the 
other way around. Cooperation is the key. And as the two efforts consist of 
many of the same people, it's not a problem.

   Although there has been relative silence in the EduZope web pages 
recently, it doesn't mean that there is no activity, Georg Pleger is 
working with very interesting companies, and there's a lot of stuff 
happening behind the scenes that is very important for our future success.

The domain edu.plone.org:
 - Until it is sustainable as a standalone project, it's better to just 
organize it on plone.org. I will of course help out with the administrative 
efforts of setting up a project area.

Separate Sourceforge project:
 - I would recommend starting out in the Collective. If the project gets 
big enough to warrant several mailing lists and a separate administration 
crew, just move it later. Collective is all about minimizing the threshold 
for development, and making it easy to fix bugs in related projects.

Groups vs Roles:
- groups are coming in Plone 1.1, based on GroupUserFolder (GRUF). (Just 
checked in the first cut at the User Interface this morning, actually - 
it's 70% functional at the moment, and we expect to have it working by the 
end of the week.)

Starting with plain Zope as opposed to Plone:
 - I would not recommend this. A lot of the things you need are already in 
Plone, and it makes sense to learn how to interact with the workflows and 
actions system straight away. For a quick start, I would recommend 
Archetypes. I have started several development teams off directly in Plone, 
and it works just as well as starting with core Zope.

Local events /news /etc: - this is also going to happen in Plone, it will 
most probably be implemented as different publication states.


General guidelines and recommendations for the project:

- focus on core supporting technology for now, and collect requirements and 
wishes along the way

- start small, grow steadily, refactor and rearrange

- implement the project as a pluggable CustomizationPolicy - not a 
customization or fork of Plone.

- coordinate with the Plone project

Finally, I think this mail had a strong point, and should serve as a 
starting point for how to organize the goals of the project:

On Thu, 29 May 2003 10:52:32 -0400, Brian Sullivan 
<briansullivan-9t7PuWcLvar0gXAagfoFvgC/[email protected]> wrote:

> I think there are probably three main school related themes:
>
> 1) Delivery of distance learning/elearning as you indicated ( this is my
> main area of interest - I do industrial/commercial distance learning 
> content
> and delivery). There are lots of existing standards defined in this area - 
>
>
>
>
>
>
> - http://www.adlnet.org, http://www.aicc.org , http://www.imsglobal.org/ 
> that could be  implemented in a Plone/Zope context)
> 2) Tools to support teaching and learning in schools as you indicated
> 3) Tools to support administration of schools (http://www.sifinfo.org/ is 
> an
> organization promoting standards in this area for example).
>
> In some cases there is overlap in need between the themes.
>
> I think Plone has potential for all three.

-----------

So, to summarize:

1. I would like to try out editor integration as a proof-of-concept for 
cooperation between the different entities - and try to sponsor it by 
splitting the costs between the Universities and other learning 
institutions that are interested. Please speak up if you have resources to 
devote to this, we should try to make this happen as soon as possible.

2. On a longer term, we *need* Topic Maps for Plone. Keywords will not 
scale past a couple of hundred users. I would like to try the same 
sponsorship approach as the editor integration in a larger scale with Topic 
Map integration, and with more participation from the community, as this is 
a task suitable for many eyes and hands :)

3. We need flexible metadata to support metadata for learning objects, like 
LOM. Kapil Thangavelu has already done an implementation, but needs some 
sponsorship and some help to make the full integration happen. I'll let him 
comment on what's needed.


And, most importantly:

4. We should try to gather as many people from the educational community 
and Plone community in Paderborn, Germany between the 24th of September and 
the 28th of September 2003. Maik Jablonski has arranged for a good 
conference area which will support about 30 people for a Sprint. I assume 
most of the background information and functional requirements can be 
gathered by then, so we can pick some tasks to start at the sprint, with 
the key people involved.

-----------

There's a lot of ground covered in this mail, if you are picking up a 
particular topic from this mail and answering it, please change the subject 
line in the mail accordingly to keep track of the different discussions. 
Please also quote only the section you're commenting on, and delete the 
other parts of the mail.

 And the people on the CC list need not be included in future mails, they 
can read the follow-ups on the plone-educational mailing list if they so 
desire.

Thank you.

-- 
Alexander Limi   ¤   Co-Founder·Plone
http://limi.net   ¤   http://plone.org
Interface Design   ¤   Usability Analysis

高联合 · アレクサンダー リミ · 이미짱

References:

  The Tao of Topic Maps (Recommended!):
  http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html

  XML Topic Maps (XTM):
  http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/
  (especially "A gentle intro to topic maps":
   http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/index.html#desc-intro )

  ZTM - Zope Topic Maps (Warning, not suitable for install! Hard to set up 
at the moment, not for normal use yet):
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/ztm/

  Creuna, the company responsible for the development of ZTM:
  http://www.creuna.com

  htmlArea browser editor:
  http://www.interactivetools.com/staff/ben/htmlarea3_demo/example.html

  ZAnnot, Zope Annotation Server
  http://www.zope.org/Members/Crouton/ZAnnot/

  W3C's Annotea protocol:
  http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea

  What is a Sprint?
  http://plone.org/events/sprints/whatis

  More information about some of the people mentioned in this mail:
  http://plone.org/about/team





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