Re: [school-discuss] SIF versus other initiatives

[Stephen Bannasch <stephen@concord.org>]

>Hi,
>
>I would recommend that we simply "ignore" this, until there is a need for
>Open Source school applications to inter-communicate. As far as I know,
>that point has not been reached.
>

When you are thinking about solving problems in education by developing and applying technical systems include the following as technical functionality that may be useful:

A XML message router using a publish and subscribe model to distribute data between networked applications combined with a suite of xml schemas for describing administrative and educational data structures.

That is SIF.

If you assume that capability can be deployed and used it will change the way you think of application design and your approach to solving problems.  It will be much easier to add a small application targeted to a specific need.

I think one important area for development in education is the combining of formative assessment in with students use of computer-based visualization environments.  To do this properly the interactives need access to authentication systems and a repository for storing the formative assessments.  Separately I need a web application to display the results of mining this assessment repository.  This experimentation and development is much easier if I can build from a SIF/ZIS framework.

If the work we are doing turns out to be valuable it will be much easier to deploy into existing school if they are using SIF technology.

At this point I think the main advantage to an open source ZIS (the xml message router) is that it will make it much easier for open source developers to experiment with SIF and make more likely the design of new applications with this technology in mind.


-- 

-- Stephen Bannasch
   Director of Technology, Concord Consortium
   10 Concord Crossing, Suite 300, Concord, MA 01742
   direct: 978 371 3477, fax: 978 371 0696, main: 978 369 4367
   http://www.concord.org  mailto:stephen@concord.org