Re: [seul-edu] New member of the seul-edu ML

[Reto Stamm <reto@xilinx.com>]

Hi Thomas,

sorry that it took me so long to reply. I wrote most of the LingoTeach application, it's not all that great so I am currently rewriting the whole thing (that's why there is so little progress in the last 2 Months).

LingoTeach has the goal to allow you to learn the words you don't yet know, and possibly even make Audio tapes for your car etc. It's written in Java, so that it is useful to the widest possible audience.
My goal at the moment is to have a File Format (xml) that is easily readable and supports many languages. So one can develop a Lesson (for example, in the Restaurant) and translate it to all languages we can. It can, but does not need to contain special contents (like pictures and, most important, sound files).
The file is then read by a teacher module, that knows about the knowledge of the Student and about what's in the lesson. There is a simple interface to the Teacher that allows anyone to make their own games (like, for example, a memory card game, or a multiple choice test, or a tape recorder that tapes all the things you don't know well (and maybe makes MP3 files and so on)). So I hope this will allow the Project to grow to all sides, content as well as
Interfaces.

Another part I find is important is the Lesson Editor, that allows to view the contents of a lesson and modify it. This is quiet difficult at times because the characters for Thai and Japanese (and all the other non roman characters) have to be displayed at once, and I have not figured out how to do that yet.

At the moment LingoTeach only supports Translations, no Cultural notes and so on. But that would not be too hard to do. And certainly spice up the lessons.

A very important thing to me would be the ability to exchange lessons. There are not many Linux users in Estonia, and we don't want to stress those people too much and have them translate the same things over and over again, for each Language Project that comes along. This may be done by standardizing on a File Format (but I see that you are using SQL, so that's not easily possible. Maybe just keep an Interchange format in mind, maybe we'd even need some
kind of  content keeping organization that makes sure the hard earned contents are available to everyone, no matter what system they are using).

I wonder if it makes sense to put the Lessons under the GPL, or if that is too non restrictive (hear your voice advertising something on the radio would not necessarily be great).

Hope this makes some sense, let me know what you think.

Best regards

--reto

Thomas Temp? wrote:

> Answer to chris' post.
>
> Wow, what a heavy/quick/interesting response from you all! Thanks a lot.
>
> I must say, I had never heard about QVocab, Lingo Teach, or Zope before.
>
> I had a look on the Seul website. There is a description for QVocab. It's not what I'm looking for now, although it might be a good idea to implement a way of sharing dictionary files at a later time.
> I found nothing about Lingo Teach or Zope. Can anyone point me to those projects?
> Regarding EduML: I had overheared that it was aimed at handling students databases/records, not educational content. So I just stopped investigating. Am I wrong?
> regarding the idea of using an HTTP server or even a web client, so we can focus on the interface/database: if I had my hands free of these absurd and frustrating and deeply useless constrains on the technological choices, I would have investigated the field of developping extensions for Amaya (the W3C's experimental XML browser), using a jigsaw http server (the W3C's experimental XML HTTP server,). The server would have come down to a few CGI scripts...
>
> But I do not have that freedom. They said "You MUST use Delphi(c) under Windows(tm) and a SQL database. And I am very lucky/grateful to be able to avoid Access and build a Linux server...
>
> Moreover, I did _not_ study the faisability of XML/HTTP. Maybe it's not such a great solution, after all? (does anybody have a ready-made answer?)
>
> Regarding programming languages: we _have_ to use Borland Delphy(c) for at least part of the project. That will be the client GUI. The client is kept simple, for easier porting. Uh... I meant re-writing. Delphi w/ Win32 GUI is not portable.
> For the server, I was thinking about C or C++. It's the one most adapted language among those I know (I don't know Java). The other person working with me on the server wanted to do Pascal, so we might end up with C and GNU Pascal.
>
> About the website: now exactly 24 hours later, the translation of the english ontroduction to the project is over (whooh.. it's getting late!). I also fixed the problem with the changelog link.
>
> Well, and I might try to get to sleep soon ;)
>
> Thanks a lot again for your feedback,
>
> Thomas Tempe