Re: Open Book

[Robert Hopcroft <hopcroft@uswest.net>]

Doug Loss wrote:

>    However, the basic idea behind it is still a good one.  In doing a
> bit of searching of the web I found this:
>
> <http://xent.ics.uci.edu/~khare/Paper.htmld/index.html>
>
> It's dated, but I can get in touch with Rohit Khare and see where things
> currently stand.  It looks as though this may be a more robust system
> for generating WWW-based textbooks anyway.  Please look at this link and
> tell us what you think.  If at least a few of you show an interest, I'll
> contact Rohit and see about getting his authoring tools ported to
> GNUstep (which would probably be the quickest way to make them available
> on Linux; it doesn't look as though a Windows version is likely,
> although a Mac OS X one might be).

Doug, I took a look and it doesn't appear to deal with XML. I'm wondering
what our position on using XML is?

>    While I'd like to have the open-content textbook project be
> associated with seul-edu rather than be ours entirely, I think it's
> important enough that if no one else will do it we should.  Hey, it may
> be a way to get Linux workstations into schools, if teachers can use
> this authoring tool to generate multimedia textbooks and the tool can
> only run on Linux or NeXTStep.

Actually, we are very close to laying out a framework for doing the whole
thing. If we can utilize Promath/GFlash as a display engine, we have a big
piece done. On the textbook side all we have to do select a set of topics,
create an outline for each and get people to fill in the pieces. However we
need to decide whether or not, we are going to base it on XML I know way
back we were talking XML. I took a Quick look in the archives but I didn't
spot what I'm referring to.

Bob