RE: Education Portal - sparking an idea

["Marshal Anderson" <marshal@marshal.co.uk>]

> so that all the educational software that "saves state"
> (stores information
> about levels reached, marks, attendance, time logged in to
> server, etc...)
> can be presented on one personalized homepage.  Teachers
> would see their
> whole class at once, administrators would see the whole
> school at once.


This gives me an idea that might well be within the remit of this group and
also supports the openess of Linux.

There was an attempt in the UK, mostly by the Acorn community, to counter
the move towards huge monolithic Integrated Learning Systems by developing a
standard possiton/results save format for educational software. The idea was
that it should be possible to take packages from different publishers to
pick n mix your own ILS which could be managed with software that was
capable of communicating with these disparate packages, gethering results
from them and then sening them intructions. This never really happened,
though I seem to rememeber we got as far as declaring a reserved file-type
for it. Being, as we are, on the ground-floor of a new set of developments,
the establishment of such a standard could well be a hook for the use of
Linux.

Comments?

Marshal