Plone in Connet

Hello,

This is my first post here, and this time I don't have any specific
request, I'm just thinking aloud. I'm planning a major overhaul for our
own learning environment and Plone plays an essential role in it.

Situation: In Finland we have this Finnish Virtual University, which has
our every university participating. I'm in Connet, project for teaching
cognitive science and technology, over the country, through the net.  We
have 8 universities providing courses, with one teacher/teaching
assistant/designer-hybrid in every university, and active 3-30 students in
same eight.  Mostly they're not very technically minded: I'm the one who
keeps up our environment and understands Zope enough to dare to go beyond
the link that says manage. In year we have about 12 courses. Some of them
suck.

For now, we have this thing called 'Connet Sandbox'. It started, when we
collectively got bored with WebCT and people I know had just put out FLE3,
learning environment for Zope. This was my first touch with zope, last
summer. After having FLE3 running, I put zwiki in it and together it was
_very_ powerful & liberating experience. (After WebCT, nice to actually go
and change how things work.) I've put some more pieces into it; course
folder with registeration procedures, grading tool that uses MySQL,
irc-server with java-clients opening when user logs in. (Can be switched
off, if sounds painful, but otherwise our very-non-computing people won't
dare to experiment with it.) And front-page with blog-like news and list
of all new FLE-messages and zwiki-pages. Our courses have mostly  their
content in wiki-pages, people are encouraged to use it and fill it with
their personal stuff and so.. Problem is, that with all my little
modifications it is very hard to document this place, and while adding
features is easy and fun, making them foolproof is another and kind of
boring challenge.

Now it's time for Plone to take those tasks. I've made a rough
i8n-translation (our site is, and will be, in Finnish, which somewhat
prevents giving things back to community, unless I have a lots of free
time to clean up our modifications and translate them back into english.
Finnish plone translation will come through, I'll post about it soon into
that other list..)

-Since we already have so much stuff in wiki, it should move along and
stay in one piece. Our users have finally learned to use WikiNames, so let
all wiki-pages stay in one place, so they don't have to confuse themselves
with inter-wiki-linking into their folders.
-This weeks CMFWeblog.. hmm.. out the box there is a nice thing about it;
every entry is made in  the same  page, portal_weblog, and then
distributed into user's home folder or somewhere else. Now, if I add one
property, 'course', with options according to courses user has registered
to and 'personal/none'...
-And same property to every zwiki-page..
-And every other type as well
-Then we create these courses, folder-subclasses, with metadata like
opening date, description, credits, etc.. compatible with course-info-form
in Virtual University.
-Every course-folder-object has whatever content it needs, but things get
swell with Topics. I think we can have a blog-like version of Topic, that
collects everything that everyone has recently done (course-property
matching) in one long page. Having comments on for Weblog entries, we have
nice course blogs, with all users contributions(except comments) tidely in
their own folder. This has been a problem with our previous Sandbox,
people's contributions tend to get lost.
-Now we have our basic actions in two pages. portal_weblog (available also
through blogger-API :) ) is where you do most of your writing, and
course's Topic-collection is where you check latest action and comment
others. One big button to portal_weblog and hint to bookmark (in plone
bookmarks, so we have it in left-side-box) topic-blogs.
-And let's add user portraits when available into weblog-entries to make
them warmer.
-Of course, there are still documents, wiki-pages and all plone-powers for
those who need, but basic course activity seems now very simple:
Read & write here.
-RSS feeds, I don't know lot about them yet, but I have a hunch that with
those Topic-course-blogs they can do local magic.

So, this is what we're doing here. It's about education and plone. I'll do
this, let's  see how it works,  and then we can talk about it's relation
into bigger scheme of things. I know I'm passing by all kinds of
interesting stuff about educational objects, etc, but I just got  to have
this working by fall.

Other thing, after that is to add FLE3:ish properties to discussion tool;
knowledge types and stuff. I'm thinking we may have to let FLE3 to go,
it's webtop and Plone's user folders would make a confusing combination.
For this I propably have to write a script to transform existing objects
in FLE3's webtop to plone-objects. I know there are others with Plone and
FLE3, they might be pondering same things?

Jukka Purma
purma-/[email protected]
Project planner, Connet






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