Re: [seul-edu] directory of educational apps on Linux

[Manuel Gutierrez Algaba <irmina@ctv.es>]

On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, Ray Olszewski wrote:
> For the past week or so, Doug, Roman Malonowa, and I have been discussing
> the possibility of SEUL/edu "reclaiming" the Directory of Educational Apps

Well, I've had a definetely good idea to ease and allow participation
of people in maintaining Web sites like Seul. 
Moreover this would an application suitable to be playable with
children to interest them in Web publishing.

Moreover it's an idea easy to do and with unknown possibilities.

The idea :
"
Email ---> Bot (---> Human reviewer ) ---> Webpage

Ok, first forget all your ideas about "static" files comprising
HTML code. 


Let's imagine this kind of email:

To: webbot@seul.org
From : Johsr Alean <way@any.be>
Subject: @educative_apps@
Body:

<Key>: KittyWitty
<App>: http://www.good.fr/stuff/indeed.html
<Comment>: New algebra learning programm.

<-------------------------------------------------->

This gets stored at /var/spool/mail/incoming/webbot  at
the machine cool_seul_machine when it's "fetchmailed" somehow.

Then a process webbot running in cool_seul_machine detects 
a change in that file of mail. And it processes,
reads the key , it validates it. 
And now we can either:
generate the webpage of seul new edu apps at 

/home/httpd/seul-edu/new.html

or webbot can save it to supervision.

Well, how can webbot generate a HTML page ? Well, imagine
a python Object that contains the skeleton of the HTML page,
plus methods to generate rows of tables or items of list
where to put the incoming information. That is, the info 
of a web page  is : the changing one + the non-changing one.

As you may imagine , the commands we can supply to the webbot
is endless , we can control ___all__ the process of updating
the webpages without touching a single line of HTML , just 
sending/asking for orders to the webbot.

But, as we are in seul-edu , that forces me to find useful 
uses for webbot.

Ok, it can be used as _the definitive tool_ for getting 
participation of classes guided by computer. 

A humble example, let's imagine a contest of creating a story.
10 kids are placed in groups of two persons in 5 computers.
Every computer has two things: 
A browser.
A email program. 

The teacher is in another program. 

The teacher sends to a webbot an email thus:

<key>: Teacher_key
<Command>: Start game 
<Param1>: Roselind woke up early that morning to see his new
horse Almarind. 

Webbot takes this and it supplies it to the page 

localaddres/current_story.html

All children see that line in their browers.

Now, every children tries to complete this line, sending emails:
<key>: TeamA
<Command>: Completion
<Param1>: It was a good horse, and she loved it for its sweetness

....
Then teacher :
<key>: Tea...
<Command>: Suggestion_of_children

and he gets an email....with all suggestion, he decides what to choose
and the game goes on.

Well, as you see , the requirements are the least,
the possibilities the most, and imagination above all. 

Of course, we can have Java, Gnome, emacs applets/frontends to 
deal with a webbot, but  this is left for the future as an
exercise.

Well, that's my 0'3 Euros for today. 

I promise to programm it in the medium term future.
It's awesomely easy and it may render fame and freshmeat hits!

Regards/Saludos
Manolo
www.ctv.es/USERS/irmina    /TeEncontreX.html   /texpython.htm
/pyttex.htm /cruo/cruolinux.htm ICQ:77697936 (sirve el ICQ para algo?)

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