Now mention of revolution on eduforge

[Marielle Lange]

Dear all,

Busy week. Among other things, I have been setting up this:  <https:// 
eduforge.org/projects/exercist>
"Eduforge is an open access collaborative learning and exploratory  
environment designed for the sharing of ideas, research outcomes,  
open source educational software, and tools within a community of  
educators, researchers and developers. "
In other words, it's like source forge, for educational material  
(mostly softwares).

What encouraged me to create a related (but not identical) project  
were some discussions with the admin of a related project <https:// 
eduforge.org/projects/exe/>. The eXe project is about an automatic  
quizz generator.

We discussed a few issues and we ended up having very nice  chats...  
In fact, their admin is listed as one of my project member and I  
collaborate on some brainstorming on an ontology project. <http:// 
revolution.lexicall.org/projects/ontology/> and <http://tinyurl.com/ 
7muds>

However, I really believe we need to encourage a bit of in-depth  
discussion on a few issues, on this eduforge environment. Avoidance  
of proprietary software can lead to awkward results:

After more than 6 months of development, with a team strong of 22  
members, the exe editor has very limited functionalites: "The wysisyg  
editor in eXe with firefox as the browser doesn't permit me to insert  
audio or other multimedia files."

Though Python is in theory completely cross-platform, it doesn't  
guarantee out-of-the box use on any platform. I tried to install  
their program on my mac, from the sources (only option available  
now). I spent three hours on this, first having to figure out how I  
needed to call the "setup" file, being told I needed to install an  
additional module, then being told I needed to upgrade my version of  
python, which I did after a search on google, then being told I still  
needed to install another module, then another one, and finally, I  
had to install a module which produced an error on macs (due to a  
spurious windows character). Three hours and I couldn't even have it  
running on my computer!!!!

On top, they claim to use an "open source" software, but all the code  
that defines the format of the output is embedded in the python  
source (as they intend to distribute as a compile package, the users  
will have no access to this). It's a better approach to use  
revolution to fill in templates, as discussed a few weeks ago on this  
list... and that's just plain easy with revolution. One of my MSc  
student, new to revolution, succeeded to produce a draft of automatic  
interface generator based on XUL specifications for interface  
components <www.xulplanet.com/ > in no more than a week.

Okay, revolution is a proprietary software, but my view on this is  
that it would be far easiest to create applications (eventually free  
to use) that would let other teachers edit their course content, in  
an easy to use GUI, and have it exported to agreed specifications.  
The tree viewer, for instance, now exports to OPML, as illustrated  
at: <http://revolution.lexicall.org/projects/ontology/>). I wrote  
that program in less than *3* days; that's how easy revolution is  
compared to python (I was starting to learn python, attracted by the  
pythoncard project just before I learned about revolution... no  
turning back from revolution).

We had some interesting discussion on this list. I thought it would  
be useful to have an environment where these ideas are exposed to  
others than converts. Various forums (fora) have been created for my  
"exercist" project. One of them proposes to discuss the issue of  
standalone vs. web-based delivery for e-learning material. Feel free  
to take part (you will need to register to eduforge for this, but  
that's only a 1 min. process). The direct link is:
<https://eduforge.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=363>. Anybody  
interested in this project is of course invited to become a member.

Hopefully meeting you at the on-line scripting conference this Saturday,
Marielle

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Marielle Lange (PhD),  Psycholinguistics, Lecturer in Psychology and  
Informatics
University of Edinburgh, UK

Homepage:  http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlange/
Lexicall project: http://lexicall.org
Revolution-education project: http://revolution.lexicall.org