[school-discuss] Some changes--part 4, the Educational Application Index

[Doug Loss <drloss@suscom.net>]

The SEUL/edu AppIndex has been one of our best efforts, I think.  I
don't know of any other such indices of software useful in a particular
realm, much less in education.  (This may be just a reflection of my
ignorance, of course...:-) )  However, since I've stepped back from
daily searching for new educational applications it hasn't been
regularly updated.  In addition, when we created it we hoped to enlist
the help of the maintainers of each application to keep our listing up
to date.  This hasn't happened in more than a few cases, making our
listings less useful than they ought to be.

We've occasionally thought of just pointing our website at the Freshmeat
educational section.  However, their definition of educational is more
restrictive than ours.  Freshmeat educational means of a primarily
educational nature, while ours means of use in education whatever the
original intent.

We've talked with Jeff Covey from Freshmeat a few times about using
their data for our AppIndex.  Freshmeat would like to have other people
create specialized indices against their database for specialized
purposes, which is exactly what we would do.  We would be a test case.

There would have to be some accomodation in both directions, probably. 
We have entries in our AppIndex that Freshmeat doesn't have.  Not all of
our fields will map cleanly to their database.  But these are small
glitches, easily fixed.  The biggest problem will be doing the daily
search through new Freshmeat listings for things to add to our
AppIndex.  This is something that I've been remiss in doing for a while,
but that anyone can do, really.

Les Richardson has done a bang-up job at creating and maintaining our
current AppIndex.  He's agreed to make the changes needed to move to the
Freshmeat data set, but I haven't made any concerted effort at it myself
and it's not at the top of Les's personal priority list.  This is
probably where I'll put most of my effort in the future.

As with the case studies, this AppIndex really shouldn't belong to
SEUL/edu, but to Schoolforge generally.  I'd like to transfer
"ownership" of it to Schoolforge.

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Doug Loss              All you need in this life is
drloss@suscom.net      ignorance and confidence, 
                       and then success is sure.
                         Mark Twain