Re: [school-discuss] Thoughts on XML data interchange

[Gunnar Stefansson <gunnar@hafro.is>]

Hello, all

My name is Gunnar Stefansson and I am very interested in trying to
enhance my teaching through the use of computers.

Being a newbie to xml (and this entire discussion) I wanted to take a
look at just what you're doing, but

https://robertscap.bc.ca/rec/REC/Eduml/school_identification

does not seem to work and I got a bit stuck with where to go with
http://k12admin.cmsd.bc.ca/cgi-bin/data. 

The idea of linking all such on-line schools together sounds great.  I
would very much like to be a part of that with my alpha-stage
tutor-web.net, which provides a framework for lectures, tutorials,
courses and associated tests.  So far I've only been using simple html
(and a little javascript) generated by perl programs.

Reasonably soon I will need to include a formal registration
procedure, but security is not really much of an issue as far as I am
concerned at this stage (at the moment I simply register a user by
querying for an e-mail address when the first question is requested
during a session).  Since I've only used a single course as a live
testbed grading (though automated) is done through the csv database in
perl (I can still see what I am doing:-).

Do you have a formal classification scheme of course content in place
(i.e. is it covered by one of the acronyms you folks have been
using:-)?  It'd be nice if I could for example say in the introdution
to one of my tutorials that the content is x and to take this I would
recommend taking some course with content y and a mouse click would go
through superschool to Bruno's course with content y.

My courses would certainly gain a lot if they can be hooked up to
other (free?) on-line courses.  The converse is probably not true
today (partly to to language) but I would like to think it will become
true as I enhance the tutor-web (i.e. more courses in English).

So: Is there a way to get into what you are doing through a reasonably
smooth learning curve?  If you have pointers to a couple of examples
of what you need to generate and how you do it, that'd be great.

Sorry for being so basic...

Gunnar