Re: [seul-edu] Student Information Standard

[Odile Bénassy <ob@seul.org>]

Jason Mellen wrote:

> >Bruno, could you weigh in with some info on the
> > current and projected state of EduML?
> 
> I am interested to see what is happening with this. In any case, would
> software developers support it if we advocated it more?

To me it seems that SEUL/edu is the right place for this discussion, and
to develop a standard
Bruno Vernier has done a very nice beginning already at the end of 1998,
with a few others including Dan Moore and Roman Suzi.
Nobody took it up, EduML was probably ahead of its time...
Now Bruno is busy with hos work and his family. It could be the right
time to do something again. 
About what edu software developers would or would not do I can't tell. 
I, with Promath and other stuff, have been constantly using XML in a
wide variety of ways. Promath is based on edu content coded with XML,
and students' results *should be* stored in EduML, only that's not
implemented yet. Promath(*) is only a prototype at the moment because
it's a lot of work.
Hilaire Fernandes has made an attempt towards EduML for Grader, I think.
Maybe Eric Sandeen could tell us what's going on and which support they
use for their content and student information.

One or two things you must know :
- it's easy to dump a database into XML coding 
- it's easy to convert data from one XML format to another 
For both of these tasks, there are already a lot of software, including
free stuff. I won't give you URLs because I can't take time for that
now, but I know there is a lot of them.

How many people are interested in this topic on the list ?


(*) http://cran.seul.org/~ob/
-- 
Odile Bénassy
http://libresoftware.educ.free.fr/