[OSGeo-Edu] Our proposed educational content and management standard!

[Helena Mitasova]

Charlie, Sasha,

thanks for working on the framework - I have a few questions:

- I will be working on two graduate level courses and that will require
to include equations (some may be complex) - I can see that DocBook  
supports
equations, but given the fact that I have most of my texts written in  
latex
and that the structure of DocBook actually resembles latex
is there a latex <-> DocBook translator available?

- I looked at the pdf example and the html files - do you also have  
the actual template
that I could use to write a sample text to get some feeling for how  
it will work
for the kind of material I need to write?

- just a comment - using OSGeo svn is a good idea and it would be  
good to set it up
ASAP so that we can try out the entire procedure (the svn repository  
could be used
to handle also material written in latex that could follow the same  
structure
and would be served as pdf).

Tyler - can you arrange for the svn to be set up, or who should we  
contact ?

Thanks a lot for all the hard work - it is great to see the progress  
and I hope
that others will join the effort!

Helena

Helena Mitasova
Associate Professor
Department of Marine, Earth
and Atmospheric Sciences
1125 Jordan Hall, Campus Box 8208
North Carolina State University
Raleigh NC 27695-8208
http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/



On Jan 18, 2008, at 12:43 PM, cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu wrote:

> Greetings OSGeo Education list members:
>
> Happy New Year! 2008's going to be a great year for our group.  
> (Note: To keep
> this manageable, I'm going to send two emails out. This one is  
> about standardize
> content and its management, the other will be on broader edu  
> committee tasks.)
>
> Our proposal to standardize OSGeo educational content and version  
> control
> management is at
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/images/3/3a/ 
> A_Proposal_for_OSGEO_Edu_Authoring_Summary.pdf
>
> The main benefits are (1) a structured writing approach and (2) the  
> ability to
> easily create multiple formats from a single source file. This  
> second benefit
> would allow relatively easy creation of, for example, a book from  
> various
> selected OSGeo edu modules, following a similar structure and format.
>
> This has taken significant research/work on our end. What we want  
> from you is:
>
> 1) Comments or a general vote of OK so that we can implement; and
> 2) A commitment from some who have edu material or are writing edu  
> material to
> follow this standard so we build a searchable database of standardized
> educational content over the next 6 months.
>
> Wouldn't it be **WONDERFUL**, if by October in South Africa we have  
> a searchable
> database of standardized content to present? This goal IS  
> achievable and would
> be a huge leap forward for our group.
>
> SO,
>
> - PLEASE REVIEW THE PROPOSAL. COMMENTS APPRECIATED.
> - IF IT LOOKS OK I'D LIKE TO SUGGEST A COMMITTEE VOTE TO MOVE  
> FORWARD TO
> IMPLEMENTATION.
>
> We want to move forward. Can we decide by Jan 23rd before I leave  
> email for 2
> weeks? If we need to set up an IRC to discuss, let me know.
>
> Thanks all!
>
> Charlie Schweik (UMass Amherst, education committee chair for any  
> new list
> members)
>
> for
>
> Ned Horning (American Museum of Natural History, edu committee co- 
> chair; Ned
> provided a lot of the initial thinking here)
> Alexander (Sasha) Stepanov (UMass Amherst. Sasha did much of the  
> research/hard
> work here)
> Maili Page (UMass Amherst; helping develop/test the tutorials)
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Edu_discuss at lists.osgeo.org
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