status

[brad]

Greetings all.

Having read through the previous posts (which are at least 6 months
old), I'm curious about the status of this project.

There are some great discussions on this list which just seem to have
stopped. I don't think there's much code that resulted from these
discussions, but if I'm wrong, I'd really like to know where it
is! :)

I also saw the wiki (http://code.pinaxlms.com/) but it seems bare as
well.

What's the best way to get this going, again?

Brad

[James Tauber]

On Jan 29, 2010, at 4:14 PM, brad wrote:

> Greetings all.
>
> Having read through the previous posts (which are at least 6 months
> old), I'm curious about the status of this project.

I haven't done anything and I feel bad about it as this is still something I care a lot about and think has great potential.

> There are some great discussions on this list which just seem to have
> stopped. I don't think there's much code that resulted from these
> discussions, but if I'm wrong, I'd really like to know where it
> is! :)

Shawn Rider did some work at DjangoCon that I have sitting in my Inbox and need to put up somewhere soon.

> I also saw the wiki (http://code.pinaxlms.com/) but it seems bare as
> well.

I'll probably move that to a hosted service my company is starting rather than it be a completely separate website running older code. (code.pinaxproject.com will likely be moving)

> What's the best way to get this going, again?

I definitely have a bunch of action items, but I don't want to hold things up. Let's get discussions going here again.

I still think what we need to do is having a running "toy" lms project as soon as possible.

Iterating on running code trumps all else :-)

James

[Skylar Saveland]

I'm still listening but haven't had time to do anything.  I was talking an twitter with http://twitter.com/nautilebleu who was doing some django-scorm work.

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[David Quinn-Jacobs]

I've become a bit disenchanted with both Pinax and Django, after working with them for a couple of months.  I've recommended that we look at Zope and/or Plone, or another solution for our LMS.
Cheers,
-dqj

[Ozan Onay]

On 30 January 2010 08:54, David Quinn-Jacobs <d...@quinn-jacobs.org> wrote:

I've become a bit disenchanted with both Pinax and Django, after working with them for a couple of months.  I've recommended that we look at Zope and/or Plone, or another solution for our LMS.

Ick. Prepare yourself to become disenchanted with zope and/or plone, too. What problems did you have with django? It usually takes much longer than a couple of months to start seeing django warts, and even then most would maintain that it's the best python web solution for any serious project.

Since my last post here, i've been working on a small lms-like django project which you can play around with at http://witnik.com . It's totally not scorm compliant and still in its early stages (bugs ahoy!), but it goes to show how much lms-like functionality one can achieve with just a handful of django pluggables. If anyone is interested in the project/code, please get in touch.

Cheers,

Oz

http://ozanonay.com

 

[James Tauber]

On Jan 29, 2010, at 5:28 PM, Ozan Onay wrote:
>
> Since my last post here, i've been working on a small lms-like django project which you can play around with at http://witnik.com . It's totally not scorm compliant and still in its early stages (bugs ahoy!), but it goes to show how much lms-like functionality one can achieve with just a handful of django pluggables. If anyone is interested in the project/code, please get in touch.

Wow, that's amazing and really nicely done. You say get in touch about the project/code. Does that mean you'd open source at least some of the code? Is this using Pinax at all? Could we make it play nicely with Pinax?

I'm excited.

James

[Ozan Onay]

On 30 January 2010 09:33, James Tauber <jta...@jtauber.com> wrote:

Wow, that's amazing and really nicely done. You say get in touch about the project/code. Does that mean you'd open source at least some of the code?

Potentially. There's a lot of project-specific code in there, so I'd probably have to make a cleaner, more generic fork... which I'd be happy to do if there's enough interest. 

 

Is this using Pinax at all? Could we make it play nicely with Pinax?

I did cherry-pick a few apps from Pinax. It uses notification, avatar, emailconfirmation, pagination, robots, threadedcomments and timezones as is, as well as significantly modified (butchered, really) versions of account, friends, profiles and messages.

Generic versions of a few of the apps I wrote for witnik, combined with the existing Pinax apps, could conceivably be used to create a fairly feature-rich LMS. Whether people would use it is another matter - a better approach might be to design a Pinax LMS from scratch, using pieces of witnik code as points of reference... that way the project wouldn't be burdened by the ill-conceived business decisions I made designing witnik. I'd be more than happy to contribute time/code to such an endeavour, but don't really know how to get the ball rolling.

On another note, do you come back to Australia much? I'd love to buy you a beer if you ever find yourself in Sydney.

    

Oz

 

[brad]

> Shawn Rider did some work at DjangoCon that I have sitting in my Inbox and need to put up somewhere soon.

> I definitely have a bunch of action items, but I don't want to hold things up. Let's get discussions going here again.

I'd very much like to see both of these, and I think this would be a
good place to start.

> I still think what we need to do is having a running "toy" lms project as soon as possible.
> Iterating on running code trumps all else :-)

I agree. Either Shawn's code (or the witnik.com code if its made
available) would be great starting point!

[ptone]

On Jan 30, 8:34 am, brad <bkmontgom...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Shawn Rider did some work at DjangoCon that I have sitting in my Inbox and need to put up somewhere soon.
> > I definitely have a bunch of action items, but I don't want to hold things up. Let's get discussions going here again.

I too would love to see the witnik codebase - if nothing else as
another learning example. I know it's no longer new, but I still like
the web2.0 interactive style.

I think the biggest thing that could get this project going again is
multidb support.

It would allow mapping into a moodle DB for some transition/
compatibility features, and allow another DB for new Pinax/Django/LMS
features.

I'm in a decent position to help see some of this realized. I work at
a private progressive school where we are always looking for
innovative teaching tech. I'm a pretty proficient python guy, with
some novice/intermediate django experience.

My problem is getting in the dev time - as I'm also the school sys-
admin, client management, and involved with school administration.

We use moodle extensively - but I'm in the process of starting to
migrate a couple projects to Django.

First is just our front facing website, this I hope to be the tip of
the iceburg.

behind this I want:
- a pinaxish parent/student/teacher community site
- a django based Student Information System
- a django based LMS including gradebook app that ties into our SIS
for generating transcripts

Our current SIS is a custom Filemaker app - capable and doing its job,
but getting painful to maintain.

For LMS we are using a moodle instance - teachers and students are
happy with it, but I hate having to tweak PHP, as I walked away from
PHP a while ago and just hate to look at it.

So I am "in the trenches" on this one, but have only a percentage of
time I can do active dev work (frustrating)

As a progressive school we have some interesting ideas that could
yield some interesting apps.

One I just mapped out with some staff yesterday I'll share here for
any feedback.

The app is for capturing digital student portfolios.

The models would be (in sketch form)

Project (a piece of student work)

student m2m to user through "student annotation" object
teacher m2m to user through "staff annotation"
artifacts m2m to artifact object
unit fk to unit (collection object)

artifacts are basically scanned work, or linked media - ie a scan of a
rough draft and scan of final draft of a pieced of student writing.
Title, caption, etc

The student(s) and teacher(s) involved then make annotations

student annotations consist of answers to prompts like:
"how did you come up with the idea for this project?"
"What did you find the most challenging part?"
"Where would you take this project next, and what would you need to
know or learn to do that?"
"Reflect on the project?"

A teacher annotation might look like:
"Strategies the student used"
"Observational notes on the students work"
etc

looking over this now - not sure of the pro/con of doing m2m
"through", or just having a chained relationship of project <-fk-
annotation -fk-> user. But that's just my "I don't get to touch
django every day" side showing ;-)

Anyway - I don't want to over commit/make false promise, but I'm very
interested in helping where I can.

-Preston