Re: [school-discuss] LessonForge

[Matt Jezorek <matt@bluelinux.org>]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Les Richardson wrote:
Honest questions deserve honest answers

> 
> 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)
> 
Have not figured this out yet. BUT BUT BUT i know it can be done, look at 
various email scanners (Head Hunters use them all the time) which dumps a 
resume into a database. It can be done it will be hard but hey those that 
need or want to take the easy road should stay at home. =) no offense to 
anyone really

> 
> 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?
>
Same as above.
 
> As well, what kind of internal storage format would be used?
>
Mostly this is going to be an XML Repository, possibly transform to a 
document server before the end of it. So lets say you have a lesson plan.

You submit the lesson plan.
    -> We assign it an ID from a key in a MySQL database called lesson_id
    -> We create $lesson_id.xml
    -> drop path to $lesson_id.xml into db 
    -> Drop contributer id $user_id into db as well for that record.

so a MySQL record would look like

lesson_id        xml_ref                       contributors
------------------------------------------------------------
12345            /opt/lessonforge/12345.xml    1

After we drop this into the database we can index the xml file for 
Subject, Keywords, Text Book any other keywords we can grab from it and 
drop it into index_ref so a record would look like

lesson_id	subject           ref_words
------------------------------------------------------------- 
12345	        Algebra II        blah, blah, blah, blah

This is just a idea right now still needs to be ironed out.

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

Ease of authoring is an issue but If used they use an online form it will 
nto be hard at all. We are thinking a Lesson Plan Wizard online. Ease of 
authoring offline in digital format, now thats going to be a beast. But 
mostly because of the import/export deals. 


> > 
> 
> >        b) A export feature to export lesson plans to pdf for printing 
> 
> Again, what technology?
>   

This is easy, you can use PDF lib to create PDF files on the Fly from 
Database Information.

For Example
<snip>
<?php
$pdf = PDF_open();
pdf_set_info_author($pdf, "Luca Perugini");
PDF_set_info_title($pdf, "Brochure for FlyStore");
pdf_set_info_creator($pdf, "See Author");
pdf_set_info_subject($pdf, "FlyStore");
PDF_begin_page($pdf, 595, 842);
PDF_add_outline($pdf, "Item ".$data[1]);
pdf_set_font($pdf, "Helvetica-Bold" , 20, winansi);
pdf_set_text_rendering($pdf, 0);
pdf_show_xy($pdf, "FlyStore Catalogue 2000",50,780);

PDF_show_xy($pdf, "Item : " .$data[1], 100, 700);

PDF_show_xy($pdf, "Description : " .$data[2], 100, 620);

$im = PDF_open_jpeg($pdf, "pass4_sml.jpg");
pdf_place_image($pdf, $im, 100, 300, 3);
pdf_close_image ($im);

pdf_stroke($pdf);
PDF_end_page($pdf);
PDF_close($pdf);
?>

There are also great PDF tools for use with ruby. 

> >        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...)
>
One of the objectives is also to advocate open source with lessonforge as 
well as open content. If you look at any KWord, AbiWord , and I think even 
star office. All they are is xml files for the most part. So we can export 
to those without a problem. We can tranform XML with XSL if we need to as 
well for use on a Windows machine a (provided an xml parser) but XML can 
be transformed to HTML easy and other things.


Reminder this is all the begining alot to be ironed out and be done. But 
It can be done. Always remember this. Can't aint ever done nothing. 
(country saying =))

-- 
Matt Jezorek 
Executive Director / Founder 
Blue Linux Group, Inc 
http://www.bluelinux.org 
matt@bluelinux.org 

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