Thursday, June 20, 2002

And it turns out that these guys [entity-X] have built a commerical learning management system on Zope.  Doesn't look like they are educators though.  The web site is generally uninformative (always a good sign...)  One more thing to track down eventually. 11:56:45 PM    comment [] I have, by the way, deployed our final evaluation system, and it is in use by the teachers.  Thanks to the wonders of object orientation, I just added a comment attribute to the "standard" class, so anal teachers can comment on each score if they see fit, in addition to attaching comments to projects and units.  This was suggested by Frank.  I've been weighing requests to also allow teachers to just comment on a student's performance in a class as a whole, but Jennifer is so strenuously against it that I'm holding off.  I just undertook my first exercise in error handling, as well.  Two teachers were getting errors when they were inadvertantly trying to make duplicate evaluations instead of editing the existing one.  So I added a little <dtml-try><dtml-except> code to automatically compensate for that and redirect to the proper form instead of throwing up a Zope error. I have one outstanding bug.  Sometimes when teachers try to delete a standard from their template it produces a cryptic list instead of the name of the standard on the confirm page and then an error if you try to execute.  I haven't tried to figure that one out yet.  It works most of the time and is not very critical. 11:52:55 PM    comment [] I had an idea in the shower this morning for integrating Radio into my Zope system at school.  You can add a RSS feed from another Radio site to your Radio aggregator by clicking on the little coffee cup icon, which is actually a link like this (if you're setting up your feed from jepstone.net): http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/subscriptions?url=http://www.jepstone.net/radio/rss.xml This sends you to your local subscription page with the http address already entered in the field for the url variable.  Simple enough.  I want to allow teachers to automatically generate categories for classes or projects.  This would allow the Radio input interface to be used to enter assignments and other news relevant to a specific course or unit (one sub-question is whether or not assignments should be strongly typed, compared to other news about a course--I think not, because you don't necessarily want to do extra work just to de-contextualize assignment information).  For example, once teachers have filled out the form to create a class object, the view method on the object could include a link to a url that looked like this: http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/editCategory?displayName=CreativeWriting Except that it doesn't work.  It doesn't put CreativeWriting into the displayName field (that seems to be the name of the relevant field, from looking at the page source).  The advantage of this is that it starts to make Radio the single interface where teachers can add lots of different kinds of content, just by choosing the relevant categories.  Ultimately, you should also be able to use XML-RPC to send these posts directly into the ZODB, to keep them associated with the course objects. 9:42:22 PM    comment []

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