Re: Gradebook / Introduction

[Douglas Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

>>>ES == Eric Sandeen <sandeen@io.com> wrote at Wed, 9 Dec 1998 17:55:52
-0400 :

>My wife's a teacher, and I've seen what she goes through.  :-)  I
>decided to look for a Linux gradebook app because the shareware program
>she's using now is buggy and no longer supported.  That search brought
>me here.
>
>I'd like to contribute to this gradebook project.  As I said, I'm not
>the world's greatest coder, although I can probably help with debugging,
>useability (via my wife and coworkers) and with documentation.  I've
>actually used a few gradebook tools in the course of helping my wife
>with her work, so I may have some experience in terms of what's out
>there, what works, and what doesn't (for me, anyway).  I'm putting
>together a list of features that I think would be good, interface ideas,
>etc.

Such a list of features sounds like a good idea.

>Incidentally, I found *another* person who's working on a Gnome/Linux
>gradebook, at http://my.voyager.net/bradley/  Not much going on there
>yet, looks like he's just getting started.
>
Well, that's three gradebooks that we now know of under development: Justin
Maurer's GNOME-compliant gbook, Matt Wimer's gradebook, and Bradley's
gnugradebook.  I don't know if it will ease any apprehensions some of you may
 have, but we earlier talked about (and I think Justin said he planned to
make such modifications to gbook) using XML as the data exchange language for
 administrative software generally.  That would allow any frontend program to
 access the stored data, whether that program was X-based, curses based, or
whatever.  By the same token, whatever programs generated the data wouldn't
have to use the same interfaces as the reporting programs (gradebooks, lesson
 planners, etc.) or as any other data generator.  These programs could be bar
 code scanners, converters for mainframe files, scoring routines in
courseware, or many other things.

Bruno Vernier is working on defining the XML DTDs we'll need, so as to define
 the data structures.  I'm pretty sure he's basing them on the work of the
IMS Project <http://www.imsproject.org>.  Once that's done we should be able
to develop various components that work against those structures without
having to have that development tightly coordinated.  So long as there's a
common data structure, end users should be able to pick and choose the
components they'd like to use and be reasonably sure they'll work together.

I've looked at Bradley's webpage, and it's clear that he's just starting.
Justin and Matt, could you give us some idea of where you stand in the
development of your respective gradebooks, and what kind of help we can give
you to get them up and running?

--
Doug Loss            An idealist is one who, on noticing that
dloss@csrlink.net    roses smell better than cabbage, concludes
(717) 326-3987       that they will also make better soup.
                        H. L. Mencken