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SEUL.org: Linux in education report #31 for October 23

[ Thanks to Doug Loss
for this link. ]

“Michael Williams of the Haywood Valley School District in North
Carolina tells us of this article about the use of Linux in his
district. Also, LinuxUser magazine from the UK has an article about
Opening up Education in the UK. (This article requires Adobe
Acrobat Reader or equivalent software like xpdf.)”

“There’s an interesting article in the October 2000 issue of
Linux Journal about using Linux and MBone to do distance education.
Unfortunately, the article isn’t on-line, but one of the major
components of the article has its own website here. The Distance
Education Teaching Assistant (DETA) is a wizard style interface to
the MBone tools designed to facilate their use in distance
education courses. Its main purpose is to integrate the the many
software tools needed for distance education over the MBone in a
single easy to use package.”

“A current discussion on the SEUL/edu mailing list is about
standards (actually, about the lack of them) for exchanging
information between various administrative programs such as
gradebooks and attendance records.
There are a couple of
US-centric efforts at such: IMS and SIF. Unfortunately, both of
these are dominated by commercial interests and appear to suffer
design-by-committee syndrome. Bruno Vernier of British Columbia
started work on a similar, but open, standard for information
exchange, EduML, a couple of years ago, only to have it languish
for lack of programmer experience and tools to handle XML easily
within application programs. However, this discussion has caused at
least a couple of project leaders to take another look at EduML as
a way of exchanging information. We’ll keep you informed of any
developments in this area.”

Complete
Story

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