[seul-edu] New Educational Applications

[Seul/Edu Appdex <seul@richtech.ca>]

Name: rahoo

Description: RAHoo is an open-source attempt to allow schools and libraries to organize the Internet for their own use. It is based and owes almost all of its codebase from PHPLinks by Greg Donald. In fact, the code, at the moment, is only a smidgen modified from Greg''s. My intention is to take Greg''s work and spread it to schools and libraries along with some additions. To overview the whole project, you could check out the <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/rahoo/";>Sourceforge project page</a>. 

Why is it needed?
The Internet is an unorganized collection of miscellaneous facts, baby photos, sales brochures and pornographic images. There are some really wonderful things on the Internet, but a ridiculous amount of time is spent by both students, teachers and school staff in schools and libraries searching for just the right pieces of information to solve the information problem. Search engines help, but as anyone knows that works with searching, most searches are lengthy complex things. They work sometimes.  Sometimes the links are dead.  Often the information goes over the heads of students.  

Why for Schools?
In a school, the Internet has to work in the context of limited time and resources for both staff and students. For a student, there is only so much time to find the resources, and most students have limited experience searching the Internet within the subject areas that they are assigned, hence a lot of time is wasted. 

Staff people at schools and libraries have resorted to lots of ways to organize the Internet. Most of the solutions range between static pages and proprietary solutions. Static pages point toward web pages that move, hence librarians and school staffers are continually updating these pages and checking them for accuracy. Proprietary solutions are too expensive and do not allow people to make adjustments or improvements. 

RAHoo is an open source tool built from open source tools(MySQL, Apache and PHP) to create a customizable, self-documenting, self-reporting web directory system. Download a copy of the system, install it, customize it and use it for free for your school. Eventually, that is. For now, you could download a complete PHPLinks here. 



Author: Gregg Martinson

Homepage: http://rahoo.sourceforge.net/

License: GNU Public License

Category: Library