Re: [school-discuss] LessonForge

[Les Richardson <richl@mail.tfsd.sk.ca>]

Hi All,

At 01:06 PM 4/8/02 -0400, Matt Jezorek wrote:
>This is the basics of LessonForge's plans
>
>
>Create a online database of lesson plans that includes: 
>        a) A import feature that will allow someone to digitally send 
>           a copy of a lesson plan from a Word Processor or PDF or some 
>           other digital format. 

How is this going to work? Any kind of proprietary format is not going to
be able to be converted to any format other than perhaps Ascii/UTF8.  What
about line breaks? What about any kind of structuring markup? (ie.
paragraph breaks, headings)


These proprietary formats will contain _nothing_ in terms of structured
markup. So therefore, how does one create an export format in XML when your
data is basically a useless (in terms of structure) "blob" of text?

As well, what kind of internal storage format would be used?

This kind of thing raises all kinds of issues....What about ease of
authoring? Sorry....



>        b) A export feature to export lesson plans to pdf for printing 

Again, what technology?
  
>        c) Use a XML Format (EduML, EML) for all lesson plans to allow 
>	   easy transformation of the data to any other format. 

Ditto. How? (Sorry to be negative...)


Les Richardson


        d) Create a DB index of all the xml files with other information 
>           that would be searchable. For example "I need a lesson plan for 
>           X Book Y Chapter/Y Page's" 
>        e) A chat back feature for each lesson plan. 
>        f) a Desktop Client (linux, windows, possibly mac) that would 
>           interface to the Database and pull back lesson plans from 
>           searches 
>        g) A directory index to allow drill down topics/subjects to see 
>           other lesson plans 
>        h) a way to collaborate/merge lesson plans into one lesson plan 
>
>Any comments ?
>-- 
>Matt Jezorek 
>Executive Director / Founder 
>Blue Linux Group, Inc 
>http://www.bluelinux.org 
>matt@bluelinux.org 
>
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