Handout2

Plain English Handout about Zope and Education Applications (Technical University of BC)

• ZEO: a program that allows us to share the computing power of many computers and still have all the courses and administration data on one centralized computer (for all to share)
• Zope Roles: control what groups or individual visitors, students, instructors, managers are allowed to see, comment about, create, modify or delete.
• SQL service: a program that allows us to keep huge amount of data like historical student records, attendance and long discussions in a safe, central area yet very quickly retrievable when needed.
• Workflow: a cool way to semi-automatically process assignments, essays, reports so that students can write them up privately, submit them for marking or approval, and then either get published or asked to redo and re-submit.
• Resources: The internet is the biggest resource but teachers would prefer to sift the good from the bad, and to see only "learning units" that are directly relevant to the curriculum to be taught, with perhaps some indication of what other teachers thought of that resource. To do that, we need to attach metadata (standardized notes about the resource, just like all libraries do)
• Webdav: for those who like to work (edit, read, move around) outside a browser, Webdav makes working with webpages feel like working in plain windows, using office word processors, spreadsheets etc...
• FOIP Freedom of Information and Privacy Act should make us be very careful that the information we put on a website can only be seen by those who are authorized to see it, and that when such information is shared between institutions, that the data is encrypted during transit so that no one can eavesdrop on those transfers.
• Library Management I wrote ZEL to handle circulation, book 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.
• GPL and ZPL v2 One of the most exciting aspect of the zope program is that it belongs to you and me as well as the authors who wrote it. This means that it is legal and ethical to make modifications to the program as any of us see fit without asking for permission. It also means that it can be downloaded free from the internet... but we still need to spend time mastering its use or hiring people to answer our questions or make the modifications we want (if we don't want to or can't spend time mastering it ourselves, or asking the questions via the internet)
• Who is Here: We can find out what is new on the school server, who is working there at any given time, and we can even communicate directly with email, instant messaging or electronic whiteboards
• Eduml: the XML schema is the name for a kind of "esperanto" (universal language) that some of us designed to allow otherwise incompatible computers and programs to share information between them (if they are authorized to do so). Since then, a major consortia of educational software companies have come up with its own "esperanto" called IMS.
• Eduml: the educational extension to structured-text/wiki shortcuts: We recycled the name Eduml to also stand for a set of shortcuts that we can use when writing webpages that allow us for example to display fancy math equations, graphs, geometric shapes, chemical equations, random quizzes, report cards, and a whole bunch other educational tools that are handy to have and don't require any technical know-how to insert into our webpages.
• Eduml: the Interoperability effort: Even though teachers prefer not to be aware of it, we really need all of our educational programs and tools to be able to talk (i.e. transfer, retrieve, communicate) securely with each other such that it is never a hassle.
  • example 1; your class list is on a big computer at the school board office and you want it transferred to your local attendance program so that you do not have to retype all those names
  • example 2; you want to only search in one place to find only the most relevant and highly rated lesson plans and learning units in the limited amount of time you have to prepare your lesson plan.
  • example 3; you would like to offer tutorials or courses on a very rare topic like latin or a first nations language. You want to click in one place to see a very current list of potentially interested students in the province, one more click to make your offer known to them, and as they automatically register for your course offering, all the tedious paperwork is done automatically and officially so that you get paid appropriately at the end of the month. At the end of the course, one click and their official transcripts are automatically updated.

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