Cees de Groot wrote:
Hi all,
I was off this list for the last half year or so, so I'm in for some catching up :-). In the meantime, a couple of quick questions:
I'm starting up a new project, Open Source Educational Software (www.oses.org for more details). Basically, I want to get people from various disciplines (teachers, pedagogues, graphics artists, programmers) together to work on classroom-software. The site must be highly collaborative, and friendly to non-technical users. Software will be mostly written in Java, so it can run on any box with a browser.
Heh. I've been working for six months on something very similar (but not Java). It's called Moodle (http://moodle.com). There's not much public on the site yet, but I've been testing a prototype course with 100 students behind the scenes. When that's done and I have some results, the site will be opened up (few weeks).
Q1: is Zope the best environment to do this on? On the collaboration part, Zope's user features are great, and Confera is ok as well, but other things are lacking (chat, public file repositories, interfaces to CVS maybe, talkback areas at the bottom of most pages, etcetera).
I built these quite easily within Zope (except Chat, which is Java and C).
Q3: if the answer on Q1 is "yes", are there any Zope gurus out there who want to help me on structuring the site, maybe writing some of the utilities that are missing? One of the reasons for picking Zope is that I'm considering making the add-ons for collaboration available as part of the project, so that schools can run Zope (Zope fits the OSES requirements for platform independence, that's a very big benefit).
Well, you can join my project soon if you want. :-) ;-) Cheers, Martin -- ### Martin Dougiamas -- Internet Agent ### Centre for Educational Advancement ### http://cea.curtin.edu/staff/martin