[seul-edu] Link Management System

[Les Richardson <richl@mail.tfsd.sk.ca>]

As teachers "collect" sites that can be used to enhance their classes,
there is a need for a simple approach to entering links and building web
pages, particularly for the "technologically challenged" segment of the
teacher population.

One approach is a simple web based submission form that allows teachers to
enter a "link" which would include a name, a description, an URI, and
perhaps a couple of categories on which to classify. One might be a
teacher's name.

Once submitted this link could be stored in a file or database for later
retrieval. 

A web site could be setup that would then dynamically generate a webpage
or pages from these stored links in a variety of formats for students (and
other teachers) consumption.

This approach eliminates the "lockup" of links that occurs when teachers
make their own pages, because other teachers will then have to manually
edit these links into their own pages. As well, once stored in this
structured format, they can be easily exported or reported upon in a
format unanticipated at the start.

Where should this be located?

This normally would be on the inside of the school LAN and attached to the
local in-school webserver. All schools should have these in order to allow
teachers to create websites to direct students to educationally
appropriate sites. All school workstations would normally load this as the
home page, rather than any external site (which would be much slower than
LAN speed).

And where could such software be found, you ask?

(Hmmmm....) Well, I've written something similar for educators who are
promoting the use of Open Source software in Education, including Unix
software. It is written in a language available on all computers, called
Perl, and of course I will share it freely.

It's here:

http://seuldat.seul.org


I've also written an indexing system to track computer applications for
educational use. It is located here: (and is also affiliated with the
Seul/Edu group)

http://richtech.ca/seul


Please contact me if any of this would be useful.

Les Richardson
H. Hardcastle School
Edam, Sk. Canada