[school-discuss] multilingual web platform

[Paolo Pumilia <paolo_pumilia@tin.it>]

Dear all, 


Our working group is planning to build a multilingual collaborative 
workplace to allow teachers and ICT professionals meet and make remarks
on didactical and technical aspects of open source educational 
applications.

We are still at a very experimental stage. It will be a long way and 
it will take the help of many people for such peoject entirely unfold. 
So we are just at the beginning.
Anyway, the first requirement is to properly set up a working platform.
To that aim, a commercial firm (not yet chosen) will be charged to 
build a zope/plone 'product', within september. 
Here enclosed the specifications i have put down to make clear which 
functionalities are to be expectd from that product.

Your comments about such project will be welcome. 
Since that product will be 'openly' available, i will be glad to add
modifications to those specifications to make interoperation with other 
web applications easy. 


Thank you
--
Paolo Pumilia

AICA OpenSource WorkGroup Coordinator
email: paolo.pumilia@acm.org
cell: +39 347 2315 496
Website: http//linfe.it/

AICA - Associazione Italiana per l'Informatica ed il Calcolo Automatico
piazzale Rodolfo Morandi, 2 I-20121 Milano
fax. +39 02 76015717
e-mail: segreteria@aicanet.it
Website: http://www.aicanet.it

-- enc. -----

Access of collaborators: 
  A workflow should be set up to manage documents provided in several
  languages and pertaining to two main clasess: didactical an technical
  ones. 

  Documents should be easly created, linked to other documents and updated 
  by several authors. 
  Documents are short (1-2 pages) descriptions, added with comments or email 
  messages.
  Visitors should be able to browse descriptions and comments and to print out 
  the whole document sets that authors have linked together as pdf file. 

  I guess that XML format is the best way to store information, but it is
  likely that authors will prefer to prepare and update documents using
  their usual editor. 

  I hope zope/plone and some of your conversion utilities will be of help here. 

  

Access of the anonymous visitor: 
  A web page should be set up at linfe.it to list educational applications
  together with links to documents and to the the download location on the 
  server file system. 
  

  Here is the main scheme for each record: 

   ----------------------------------------------------------------
   | 1 Name | 2 General   | 3 date |  4 Descr. | 5 Techn. | 6. Down
   ----------------------------------------------------------------
    
  Where: 
  1. Name is the application name. 
 
  2. date.  date of the last release
  

  3. General. provides a very short and link to the general description card:
     3.1 -  Authors and History
     3.2 -  Working environment
     3.3 -  Web sites (home page, contributors, users)
     3.4 -  Last tested version 
     3.5 -  primary classification (maths, history, etc)

  4. Descr. provides link to didactical information pages: 

     4.1 - Introduction
     4.2 - How to run
     4.3 - Suggested classes, age of pupils
     4.4 - lessons examples / didactical paths 
     4.5 - case studies
     4.6 - Flaws, Weak aspects, missing features
     4.7 - Requested features and suggested improvements
     4.8 - schools and teachers available as didactical support

  5. Techn. provides link to technical information pages: 
     5.1 - How to install
     5.2 - how to configure
     5.3 - possibly how to compile
     5.4 - Flaws, Weak aspects, missing features
     5.5 - Requested features and suggested improvements
     5.6 - commercial firms and IT professional available as technical support

  6. Down. link to the download page (.rpm, .deb, .tgz)


  Listing should be sorted according to several pre-defined keywords. Some of
  those cannot be envisaged now, so it should be possible to add keywords after 
  the system has been set up, following the indications of the board of directors
  of our project.
 
  Listing should be displayed either in the same language, if available, that 
  has been set up by the web browser, or according to user's option.
  
  A further requirement is the possibilty to concatenate and print out informational
  objects according to users' preferences. 
  
  E.g.: 

  listing 1:
     1. Name 
     4.7 - Requested features and suggested improvements
     5.5 - Requested features and suggested improvements

  listing 2:
     1. Name 
     4.6 - Flaws, Weak aspects, missing features
     5.4 - Flaws, Weak aspects, missing features

  listing 3:
     1. Name 
     5.1 - How to install
     5.2 - how to configure
     4.2 - How to run

  listing 4:
     3.5 - primary classification (maths, history, etc)
     4.8 - commercial firms and IT professional available as technical support
     5.6 - schools and teachers available as didactical support

  listing 5:
     3.2 - Working environment
     4.8 - commercial firms and IT professional available as technical support

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