Re: [Fsedu-developers] Getting the show on the road

[Peter Minten]

Stephen Compall wrote:
> 
> On Sunday 30 March 2003 09:16 am, Peter Minten wrote:
 
> > For Book Writing we will need to set a number of conventions. My
> > personal belief is that the books are best written in TeXmacs, due to
> > it's closeness to LaTeX and it's WYSIWIG interface. Any objections to
> > making that a rule? If the former is approved we will need to set a
> > number of conventions to make every book look the same (the LaTeX
> > conventions are a little confusing). It would also be nice to have
> > some script to automatically syntax markup code in the book, does
> > anybody know if such scripts exist and if so where?
> 
> I am personally in favor of what GNU recommends: Texinfo.  We can
> easily output Info, HTML, and printable documents with that format.
> Furthermore, the syntax is much more lightweight than, say, DocBook.

Is there a good WYSIWIG Texinfo editor? We need a good editor to allow others to
work on the books with little experience.

The reason I like TeXmacs is that it's simple and WYSIWIG, it let's me
concentrate on what I want to write. Writing Texinfo in emacs is the opposite,
I'm constantly wrestling with the language elements.

> > For Certification we will need a large Certification Commision with
> > some experienced members (read teachers) in it and some less
> > experienced ones too (for debugging). The Commision will:
> > a) Create specifications about the knowledge a student needs to have
> > to get the certificate.
> > b) Create example exams.
> > c) Check exams to see if they live up to the specifications.
> > The actual certification of students will be done by companies that
> > get their certificates from FSEDU. This will be our primary source of
> > income.
> 
> I do not understand the importance of certification.  Is there a wiki
> explaining this?

Companies need to know who has good skills in Free Software. Certification
builds trust in people and also buils trust in Free Software.
 
> >
> > Both Book Writing and Certification are tied up with the Curriculum
> > subproject. The Curriculum is the collection of all our courses. Note
> > that we will offer courses in all areas of Computer Science,
> > including for example Discrete Math. This is due to the FSA that
> > needs a complete Curriculum.
> 
> Which is accessed through Forum, eh? ;)

Not really. The Curriculum will be put in the FSEDU RDF database, which can be
accessed through Forum, but also through other apps. It's also visualizable with
some scripts involving an RDF reader and a HTML writer, which I'm building at
the moment.

Actually I'm developing the FSEDU RDF database even though Forum support for it
is a long way down the road (unless somebody constructs a GNU.RDF.QL parser and
hooks it up to Redland, without queries it's almost impossible to do even the
most basic Forum stuff).

Greetings,

Peter