On 1/17/06, Miles Berry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>Spreadsheet export would be essential. > > > > > > Essential for what? I was thinking that export would only be useful > > if you were also importing. > > > Well, essential might have been overstating the case, but we do a fair > bit of statistical analysis of data, generally in Excel, and I think it > would be easier to do this via export than odbc or sql stuff, although, > come to think of it, the live linkage is appealing, but perhaps harder > for most teachers to set up. The NFER here did a study of data use in > schools, and found that those schools that used data well for learning > and teaching purposes tended to go via home grown spreadsheets rather > than the analysis tools built into their MISs.
OK, that makes sense, although I hope that in the long run SchoolTool will provide a means for the home-grown innovations to flow back to the rest of the community. > Moodle 1.6 is promised for late Feb or early March, I believe, but I > wouldn't hold out too much hope for the web services API, which is only > billed as 'basic' (qv http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=36084) - > I would be surprised if it went down as far as the gradebook, but who > knows? There will be more to come in v 1.7, potentially over the > (northern) summer. I've no problem with ST reading or writing straight > to a moodle DB, as I see the open nature of the DB as one way of > ensuring that open source VLEs are guaranteed to be compatible with any > MIS, at this level at least, however I could understand you wanting ST > code to be linked too closely to the changes and chances of Moodle > development. I should note that I haven't actually budgeted any money for Moodle integration, so there are no guarantees that we'll have anything production ready in the fall either way. If 1.6 (or at least a beta thereof) is due in a month or so, I guess my inclination is to see what they come up with for web services, since we've already invested a lot of effort in that approach. --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
