Education Portal

["Bruno J. Vernier" <vernier@vc.bc.ca>]

As I was cleaning my email, I came across www.schooltone.com which is
Sun Microsystems and others offering a commercial package setting up an
education portal for school communities.

and it struck me that "PORTAL" is the word to describe my dream (and the reason
why I am working on EduML):

so that all the educational software that "saves state" (stores information
about levels reached, marks, attendance, time logged in to server, etc...)
can be presented on one personalized homepage.  Teachers would see their
whole class at once, administrators would see the whole school at once.

Scott McNeally (CEO Sun Microsystems) tells us in his usual style, that any
company not dealing with portals will be history in 5 years.

Reading their website, it is clear that all they are doing is offering a
modular packaging system (not unlike a linux distribution) where schools
decide what they want to see on their portals (and pay a per/user fee based
mostly on the licencing cost for the relevant software which must be
compliant with the data format they use (and other than calling it
alliance-compliant, I found no description ... does it use XML? is it
proprietary? )

An open source variant of that is for us to write "eduml drivers (local data
conversion into eduml" for each of the applications found in our schools.
The more XML-like the data, the easier of course.

With an open format like EDUML and "drivers" for many/most educational
applications, a thousand portals could flourish essentially presenting the
same data in various decor (e.g. on a simple single page in a table, or
spread out over several pages with frames and javascript hoopla).

For data that needs to be updated continously, the application will have to
spit out data continously in XML format (stock market data, weather,
multi-player edutainment, etc...).  For stuff that requires
programs to be launched, XML-RPC can be used to make function calls in XML
to those programs and get the results back in XML.

Portals (which are NOT about internet searches (that is just an optional
module) gather up just the data each one wants from various sources and so
can be used upstream and downstream from each other:

if seul-edu goes with squishdot (which is a portal if you use the
personalisation features), then eduml portals can make use of squishdot's 
stuff directly (saving themselves the effort of collating and putting together
those pieces of info) ... those of us who want to set up specialized portals 
on the net, will likely see them used indirectly by other portals more than 
directly as the main interface of the student or teacher.

Bruno