[Zope] update on zope-edu

[Timothy Wilson]

Hello everyone,

Though I would provide a quick update on the progress of the brand-new
Zope in education SIG. A lot has happened since it was announce here
yesterday. Yesterday morning there were 5 or 6 subscribers to zope-edu. At
last count there were 49 this morning. There is obviously some interest in
this area.

Much of the discussion so far has naturally centered on design issues and
information about existing Zope projects. Several people have mentioned
that they plan emulate the features of the commercial products that are
currently available (there are more than I thought). So far,
http://www.blackboard.com/ seems to be the consensus favorite. All of the
commercial systems are quite expensive and difficult to customize because
they are proprietary. A Zope product would obviously address those
problems quite nicely.

Others have been discussing the need for a system that teachers and
students could use without extensive training. If it isn't easy, it won't
get used.

Finally, a number of posters have discussed the need for some sort of
framework that would guide development of products that they would be
guaranteed to work well together. Some sort of "Web site in a box" with
customizability would be just the ticket. Schools could add features as
they needed them and would be able to store the student data in the ZODB
or an external DB.

Alan P. registered the domain zschool.org and offered to host a site for
the group. I'm sure there will be much more discussion about that in the
days ahead.

That's a very cursory update on our progress over the last day or so. You
can join the action by subscribing to the zope-edu list. Send a 'subscribe
zope-edu' message to majordomo@sicfa.org and you'll be all set.

-Tim

--
Timothy Wilson       | "The faster you  |  Check out:
Henry Sibley H.S.    |  go, the shorter | http://slashdot.org/
W. St. Paul, MN, USA |  you are."       | http://linux.com/
wilson@visi.com      |       -Einstein  | http://www.mn-linux.org/