I apologize to Tony, George and any others confused by this thread. I
am still learning how to balance my various roles and responsibility
to the project and ecosystem.
In the back ground, Tony and I have been having a separate thread
searching for areas of mutual value between XSCE and the deployments
he supports. I hope that he and I can continue that discussion and
achieve consensus among the various stake holders.
In the mean time, we are have this public XSCE thread searching for
way to get started. In this case a good implementation strategy seems
to be picking high value services and/or content and making it
available on XSCE. In this way, Tony and other deployments can pick
and chose between the various available content and services to build
a stack which meets their needs.
The things George was asking about about are three strategic pieces
which fill holes in the current XSCE project:
1. epath library system: George is talking about the server side
service which distributes the content to students. XSCE is currently
working with Pathagar and Internet In a Box. We would like to see what
synergy we can achieve by working together.
2. english language content: Our ability to grow XSCE as a project
depends on our ability to 'show value' to students, teachers, and
deployments. Off line learning content is the single biggest way to
show that value.
3. schools: Once we get beyond content, the single most requested
feature is the ability to keep track of the relationships between
students, teachers, classrooms, and schools. The learning curve for
tools like moodle and schooltool are a barrier to their adoption for
many teacher, schools, and deployments. The simple django web app you
use looks like a nice step toward meeting classroom management
requests without become overwhelming.
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 1:24 AM, Tony Anderson t...@olenepal.org wrote:
Hi,
I think this should be done in the overall context of XSCE as proposed by
David Farning. I think of what I am doing as a system and not as isolated
pieces. The ds-backup is independent because it only addresses backup and
restore of the Journal. However, this is going to become more a system
element as deployments turn to the shared model. It may become moot, if the
community abandons dependence on Sugar.
Tony
On 07/12/2013 03:39 AM, George Hunt wrote:
Hi Tony,
When you sent me your ds-backup script to migrate student datastore to the
server based upon the favorite star in the journal, I downloaded the olpc
repo, and added your version as a branch, and uploaded it to
https://github.com/georgejhunt/ds-backup/blob/ds_on_xs/client/ds-backup.py.
This is a branch which I called ds_on_xs, but which could just as easily
be called tony's ds-backup.
If you are interested, I'd like to create a repo at github for any of the
following: (can't do everything at once):
epath library system,
english language content,
schools, a django application to keep track of students and teachers
And then we can all have access to it and make changes to separate branches,
and contribute to one another's code. If you'd like, you can have your own
github account (they're free), or I can give you shared
access to the repo that we create together at the github.com/georgejhunt
account.
George
On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 8:32 AM, Tony Anderson t...@olenepal.org wrote:
Hi,
On 07/10/2013 02:07 PM, David Farning wrote:
Pathagar is based on Django. The digital library on the school servers
in
Rwanda and Lesotho is based on the same technology but supports any
item
with a recognized mime-type. The issue is how to organize the contents
so
that it can be easily accessed.
Are these open source projects? Can you send links to project code so
we can learn from the approach or include it directly
in XS? The plugin structure enables us to run multiple libraries.
Django is open source. I have sent you copies of the scripts with install
Django. Django is organized by applications - it provides a framework to
build an application.
The basic application is called schoolsite (this is sort of a master
application that handles the interface to Apache and to the other
applications). The library is handled by the 'library' application.
Essentially the library content is organized into collections. A
collection is a set of media files (library items), a folder of thumbnails
(e.g. the first page of a pdf), and a json file (books.json). The json file
provides title, author, path to the item, and mime-type, and path to the
thumbnail. A script in the library application loads the collection (i.e.
puts the books.json information in the database). The library is accessed by
urls (e.g. http://schoolserver/library/ for the home page). Clicking on a
category in the home pages goes to a topic page. A button on the topic page
goes to a list of items (show 9 per screen). A click on the item, downloads
it to the XO and installs it
