[Zope] Zope in education

[Timothy Wilson]

Hi everyone,

When I first became interested in Zope, I posted a question to the Zope
list inquiring about potential uses in education. (See archive at
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-July/007378.html) There wasn't
much response then, but now I'm convinced that we've reached some sort of
critical mass of interest in using Zope in K-12 and higher education.

In the past week alone, I've seen several posts from individuals or groups
who are independently developing to planning to develop Zope apps. It
seems to me that those who are interested in this area should be combining
their efforts to accomplish their goals. I'm planning to pursue a grant to
support something like this (more later) from the state of Minnesota and
would love to hear from others.

In a nutshell, I'm going to propose in my grant request that a connection
be developed between our administrative database and our school's Web
site. Most schools, even ones that aren't particularly technologically
advanced, use some sort of administrative software for doing scheduling,
attendance, recording grades for transcripts, etc. In our case we work
with a consortium called TIES (http://www.ties.k12.mn.us/) that provides
those services for us and many other school districts in Minnesota.

I'd like to develop a system whereby students, teachers, or parents can
log in to our Web site and immediately have access to information about
the students. In other words, let's say that the teachers have some way to
put assignments for their classes on the Web site. When the student
logs in, they would be authenticated through LDAP to our server and then
Zope would query the student database to find out what classes they're in.
Then it would pull together all of the upcoming assignments for those
classes and display them on the homepage. This is just one simple example.
Image what other things could be done!

I'm also interested in using XML to provide a layer (analogous to ODBC, I
think) between the administrative software and Zope. I'm also part of the
SEUL-EDU group (Simple End-User Linux), and one of the members of that
group has done an amazing job creating an XML DTD for educational
applications. It's called EDUML and you can read a description at
http://roberts.vsb.bc.ca/zope/eduml). It also turns out that the author is
using Zope on his Web site! (The site was unavailable for some reason this
morning. It worked last night though, so check back if it doesn't work
right away.)

I realize that I've just scratched the surface here for the sake of
brevity. I hope that some of you can get a feel for what I'm thinking
about here.

So what's next?

* Is there sufficient interest to create a special interest group for Zope
in education? The ZCommerce folks did this.

* Would DC be interested in creating a special section of the Zope site
for those interested in this area?

I hope we can continue discussing this. There's too much potential here to
ignore it.

-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/