Re: [school-discuss] Re: XML in Education

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

Hi All,


At 04:48 PM 4/8/02 -0700, you wrote:
>On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 11:23:59AM -0600, Les Richardson wrote:
>
>> >        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...)
>
>
>On the contrary, Les, you are being constructive :-)
>
>After 3.5 years of working/thinking about XML in education, I currently
>think that:
>
>- Storing Data that is potentially going to be interchanged is best done in
>some sort of XML (technically speaking)

I would agree. I've been working with helping update a provincial computer
curricula. The person hired by SaskEd created the curricula in a subset of
HTML using the structured elements (H1, H2, H3, P, and Lists) and virtually
no presentational markup other than <b>.
Running this through HTML2Latex gives a very good quality LaTeX file that
requires only minimal editing to be very useful. This can then be run
through LaTeX2html to give a very useful html pages with navbars, graphics
conversion, etc. Running through PDFLatex gives an excellent "rich" PDF
with bookmarks, internal and external hyperlinks, etc.

All of this points to the virtue of using a simple markup language both for
conversion purposes as well as simplified authoring. I have used LaTeX
rather than other XML dialects since the tools are well established and the
use of TeX as a formatting engine is pretty hard to beat, particularly for
math markup. XSL:F0 seems to be less well established, IMHO. It also seems
to me to be a simpler and more accessible approach. However, this will
change with time.

However, the conversion issues mainly are how well the different language
syntaxes "map" onto one another. So one should look closely at what is
required for output, what might be good for a storage syntax, and what, as
a result, will be required for input markup. (and also how easy it is to
learn from an authoring perspective.) I would think "baby HTML" or TML
(Trivial Markup Language) is a good choice, and can also then be validated
using the W3C validation tools (as well as following the XML markup rules).
Valid Markup is absolutely crucial for successful later conversion steps.


>- that planning for interoperability of education-related data is always a
>"good thing" (TM) but that there is a huge downside:
>
>- writing education-related software that allows XML interchange of data is
>hard because most people either don't have the skills or are just starting
>to acquire them ... and people who are more than beginners (like me) are
>still bogged down by another problem:

However I would think that as long as one has a structured document in some
XML syntax (including TML), one can convert that into a syntax of choice
using conversion tools. (ie XSLT or good ol' perl with an XML parser...).
The key is to have a document with structure rather than a "blob o' text".


>- that we don't have a universal concensus on a specific XML for education.
>This is not for lack of candidates  (EduML, EML, IMS, SIF, and their
>siblings) but that the concensus-building is happening among commercial and
>institutional entities in a closed manner (it costs 1000 dollars to be in on
>this game with IMS for example) ... so we try to make sense of the "open"
>documents released from time to time without the context of the closed
>deliberations. 

But, if we can have a look at the XML output, won't the format be obvious?
Isn't that one of the obvious advantages of XML in general? <grin>

Writing something to chew up a student demographics output format file from
a closed application to import into an open source application shouldn't be
particularly difficult. (at least comparted to parsing output from a
Columbia System printer file and trying to import that...<ugh>)




>- Finally, my gut summary is that we, in the open source community, are
>
>1. largely unaware or naive about this particular process (the process of
>establishing a universal XML for education), 
>
>2. unsure of the political/cultural/technical aspects of adapting
ourselves to the
>emerging standards coming from the aforementioned closed committees
>
>3. wondering how long this process will take, and what to do while we wait
>for a standard to be universally accepted
>
>
>Now to answer the specifics of where we are with EDUML:
>
>- 6 of us have participated in various ways in building up a website
>http://www.edu-xml.org which contains the some thoughts and exercises on the
>creation of , and possible uses for a standard XML in education.  It is
>incomplete and work has ceased for the past month ... and I have described
>some possible reasons for that in the previous paragraphs
>
>The next step was to be to select an XML schema from the list of candidates
>we have compiled. I hope you now see why I am just not sure that we are ready
>for that today... 

Let's write applications _now_, but take consideration of the possible XML
issues surrounding. As well, let's make sure it's not a solution chasing a
problem.

My 1 cent worth.

Les Richardson