[OSGeo-Edu] Discussion of recommended standards for OSGeo educational material

[Helena Mitasova]

Charlie,

I am answering both to you and the list:

On Jul 16, 2008, at 12:54 AM, Charlie Schweik wrote:

> If you are developing (or plan to) educational content, please respond
> JUST TO ME and I'll tally:
>
> 1) What format do you plan on using (pick one): Latex, Docbook, Open
> Office Writer, Wiki, Other (specify)?

I found I need to use several (and in fact most colleagues use several
different formats as well), depending on what kind of educational  
content
it is. For example, lectures are often prepared as slides (ppt or odp),
lecture notes with lots of equations as latex documents converted to  
pdf,
tutorials may be in html, wiki is used for collaborative class projects.
>
> 2) Do you think we should work toward a recommended format? If so,  
> which
> format above?

it may be useful just to define a general color scheme (for OSGeo
that is already defined by OSGeo color scheme - we may add something
to distinguish the edu material from the rest) and maybe
bare bone simple templates for different types of material
such as html (css file) for on-line tutorial,
slide template for lectures,
or what you already have for Docbook for short courses or workshops,
then see what gets  picked up by community.
I don't think that a single recommended format is feasible for  
everything,
maybe software tutorials would be the easiest to standardize, the rest
is just too diverse, even for a single course.

>
> 3) Do you think we should try connecting to the wikieducator.org  
> project
> (this would require a wiki format)?

I think it would make sense for some type of material - tutorials
short courses,

Helena
>
> Thanks
> Charlie
>
>
> On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 19:10 -0400, Charlie Schweik wrote:
>> IN SHORT, TWO REQUESTS:
>>
>> 1) PLEASE VISIT
>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Possible_edu_content_format_standards AND
>> ADD
>> YOUR NAME TO YOUR PREFERRED FORMAT (Latex, DocBook, Open Office
>> Writer,
>> Wiki, OTHER? ADD ANY PROS/CONS YOU SEE FOR ANY FORMATS AS WELL.
>>
>> 2) ALSO, I'M CURIOUS WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK ABOUT A POSSIBLE LINK TO
>> THE WIKIEDUCATOR PROJECT. The challenge is that this will probably
>> require us to adopt the wiki format. The last section on the above
>> wiki
>> page regarding that for people's feeback.
> -- 
> Associate Professor
> - Department of Natural Resources Conservation (www.umass.edu/nrc)
> - Center for Public Policy and Administration (www.masspolicy.org),
> - Associate Director, National Center for Digital Government  
> (www.ncdg.org)
> University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003
> Phone: (413) 545-1824
> Website: http://people.umass.edu/cschweik
>
> _______________________________________________
> Edu_discuss mailing list
> Edu_discuss at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/edu_discuss