Handout

Nerd-Grade Handout about Zope and Education Applications (Technical University of BC)

ZEO: allows several servers to serve the same educational content with either the same or different set of users ... example: a school district could be served by a single ZODB database served by dozens of ZEO clients ... everything would always be in sync. Combined with replication and load balancing makes zope in education an extremely professional and reliable solution.
Zope Roles: define the rights (permissions) of visitors, students, instructors, managers etc... (This alone makes zope a big time saver)
SQL service: zope works seamlessly with SQL database (I use postgresql). The Openchat application stores postings in a central SQL server, and zope serves the openchat methods and eduml markup.
Workflow: (in CMF) allows for dynamic permissions, for example: student writes an essay (document in CMF) in private mode, then submits it for marking or review , which can then be published and later possibly retracted (all without manually changing permission setttings)
Resources: CMF aware objects all have Dublin Core metadata by default and can be extented to use Cancore or IMS metadata. Searching is fast and immediate after any modification/addition/deletion
Webdav: for those who want to work with the desktop (not browsers), webdav works intelligently converting various document types into the appropriate corresponding CMF type (and for the unix-heads, davfs mounts zope websites like a filesystem)
FOIP Freedom of Information and Privacy Act zope works with apache ssl or M2Crypto module to provide e-commerce-grade security/privacy. Zope could be programmed to be a ZIS (SIF) authorization/authentication hub server thanks to its highly XML centric API. It can be made to work with Microsoft passport or other ZIS
Library Management I wrote ZEL to handle circulation, returns, inventory, statistics needs for a 12000 book school library http://ess.vancouver.bc.ca/zel
Report Cards I wrote ZAR to allow a dozen elementary teachers to do their anecdotal report cards with minimum data entry each term. Since the data is FOIP protected, please see me for a guest visitor password (Certified teachers/administrators only, please). If there is demand, I could create a fictitious database. Data is stored in SQL format, batch printout uses Latex, processing all done with zope (through the web) program snippets.
GPL and ZPL v2 The latest ZPL licence is GNU certified which makes it officially both open source and Freedom-Software certified. All my work is GPL. The data and content is licenced separately according to authors' or school wishes.
Who is Here ; I found it easy to program links to show what is new on the website, who was recently doing what sort of work (viewable by Member-users about each other) ... I am looking forwad to Zope-Messages, a module that will allow integration of zope with email and instant messaging
Eduml: the XML schema developed in 1998-99 before we knew about SIF and IMS. Currently the subject of a budding international exercise for teacher-programmers on http://knowplace.ca/schoolforge
Eduml: the educational extension to structure/wiki shortcuts: version 1 is a huge enhancement to Zwiki, and version 2 is an extension to vanilla CMF document types
Eduml: the Interoperability effort:
- example 1; student data extracted from a mainframe in SQL or csv and imported into zope user folders complete with different roles according to enrollment in different courses.
- example 2; learning objects in cancore format extracted and offered as options (select element in HTML ) in a course creation unit in zope. example 3; suppose all schools have software that uses the same XML standard to offer data to various secure/authaurized servers, it becomes possible and efficient to match available instructors with willing students, or learning objects to provincial curriculums for rating by participating teachers, or educational research (data mining) real time , seeing what effect such and such learning object is having on learners via poll results returned real time in XML format to several university servers