Hi all, I'm going to send this out as an email prior to writing a spec on LaunchPad, because I'm not sure if this is outside of the scope of what can reasonably be considered as part of the core Edubuntu process, but it is important, and if nothing else some consciousness raising is necessary.
We're getting to the point where there are some serious chunks of free infrastructure for schools, such as Moodle, LAMS, Elgg, Edubuntu itself, and SchoolTool in edgy will have a ton of new functionality. As I talk to people implementing these in their schools, or for that matter, writing this software, the possibility of getting these pieces to work as one integrated system is increasingly the central topic. Things are starting to happen piecemeal. The new versions of Moodle and Elgg can pass student generated content between them, Moodle supports importing class rosters using the IMS Enterprise spec, SchoolTool has always had its own web services API (that connects to nothing at this point), and of course there is a huge raft of elearning specs that allow course content to be imported and exported from various authoring tools and LMS's. There is an existing spec, the Schools Interoperability Framework http://sifinfo.org , which is used in the US to tie together a school or district's enterprise apps and could be used to focus interoperability of free software as well. SIF is basically an XML web services architecture and data model covering many facets of school data & administration. It is sort of like D-Bus for a school. One real hinderance to adoption of SIF by open source developers is that the architecture is dependent on a central server called a Zone Integration Server (ZIS), and the only free implementation is both out of date and incomplete (after being developed and dropped by Sun. More on that here: http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/2006/06/001423.php). A Linux distribution that included a working ZIS and SIF "agents" for applications like Moodle, SchoolTool, and also OS services like LDAP would be much easier to set up, administer and use than the free or proprietary systems we have now. It would be a big step forward. Matt Jezorek has resurrected the old Java ZIS and he and I have done a little work on agent libraries for PHP and Python at http://sifsoft.com With contemporary XML processing libraries like lxml in Python, writing the agent code has been pretty painless so far. I'll stop there... I'm not sure if this literally fits into the Edgy planning process, but it is an important strategic consideration. Tom Hoffman SchoolTool Project Manager -- edubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel
