Re: [Fle3-dev] some plans for Flebas, FLE 3 with basic awareness

[Tarmo Toikkanen]

Hi Jukka,

Interesting ideas you have here. I'll comment on the technical aspects. 
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> 1.
> a) Create a variant of add_memo, for course grades. Like a memo for
> user's
> webtop, but can be modified only by tutors or FLEadmin and read by
> this
> student only.

Apparently you want to have free form grades, so that you can also add 
comments and other feedback into the "grade memos"? Here are some 
problems I see coming up:

PROBLEM: The user can't move his grade object around, because cut&paste 
will destroy the object if no paste is ever done. With several courses, 
the grade memos will clutter up the webtop's root folder. And what 
happens with old courses' grade memos?
SOLUTION: A partial solution is to have a separate "Grades" folder, 
where all the grade objects are stored.

PROBLEM: "Tutor" is a course specific role. A user can be a tutor in a 
course, but when we're in a webtop, there's no course that's active at 
the moment. Therefore you can just limit the creation and editing of 
grade memos to Staff or FLEAdmin roles.
SOLUTION: If you can work with Staff and FLEAdmin, then there's no 
problem. If you need to get this feature to individual tutors (who 
might not be Staff, but just normal Users), then the grade memos need 
to be stored inside each individual course object. Of course you can 
make them visually appear in the webtop, but the object needs to 
physically be inside the course object. Then you could have something 
like a "gradebook" in each course.

> b) In Connet we have students in eight universities and for each
> university there is someone who tutors and assists students there and
> runs
> daily local stuff. He/she should be noted when someone adds a grade
> for
> his/hers student so he/she can add the grade to local register. For
> this
> we need a new variable in user info, your_tutor. When adding grades,
> your_tutor gets a copy of memo in hers webtop.

The additional field of your_tutor is not a problem, although making a 
proper UI that will select the tutor from the list of thousands of 
users will take some time (although that needs to be done to 
UserManagement anyways).

OPEN ISSUES: Who can change the your_tutor variable? The user himself? 
The tutor? (eg. "Make me this user's tutor). Someone else? Who? And are 
you sure there's just one tutor for each student at a time?

> (at least part a) could be useful in all future versions of FLE. I'm
> quite sure you can do much more elegant work with that than I.)

We'll need to discuss these features in more detail to see if we want 
them. Feature creep is something we want to avoid. ;) Samu will 
probably have something to say about them.

> 2. This should be more interesting and more difficult:
> When user logs into FLE3, it opens an irc-client-applet and connects
> you
> to the server which is running in same machine with Zope and FLE.

Actually, this is already being implemented as part of the ITCOLE 
probject. A Java applet based chat/whiteboard tool has been developed 
in the University of Murcia, Spain and it will be integrated into Fle3.

In case you haven't yet noticed, the user lists inside course views 
already differentiate between users that are online and offline. In the 
near future we'll have a "Chat" button there to initiate a Java chat 
session between the online users.

> Of course this java-applet compromises FLE:s browser compatibilities,
> but
> with us it's not such a problem, WebCT we're using now has
> difficulties
> with almost every non-windows-platform.

Yep, using Java does this, but as it's not a crucial feature, we're 
willing to work with that. And Java applets actually work better in 
non-windows platforms than in windows. ;)

> If we get this to work, I will call it Flebas. FLE3 with Basic
> Awareness System.

Well, since Fle3 already has basic awareness built in, you could call 
it Fle3 with Better Awareness System, so your nice acronym doesn't 
break. But I would urge you to consider if you really need the irc 
client or if you would be happy with the chat system we're already 
integrating. Of course, integrating an irc client into Fle3 as well 
might be a possibility. However, we're thinking of porting the chat 
system's server from Java to Python to make the installation of Fle3 
simpler, so Pythonizing the server side portion of the irc chat might 
also be a good idea. Or not. Depending on if we're going to have this 
irc functionality come by default with Fle3 or not.

If you want to go ahead with the irc chat, we'll be happy to give you 
pointers on how to get the integration done with Fle3.

--
Tarmo Toikkanen
http://www.iki.fi/tarmo/
The Fle3 Team
http://fle3.uiah.fi