RE: [JPublish-developer] Newbie questions

[Anthony E. <me...@an...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brad Cox [mailto:bc...@vi...] 
> Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2002 12:09 PM
> To: Anthony Eden; jpu...@li...
> Subject: RE: [JPublish-developer] Newbie questions
> 
> 
> At 11:32 AM -0500 2/17/02, Anthony Eden wrote:
> >Your example though is something that teachers shouldn't even be 
> >thinking about.  Things like access control and such should be done 
> >through a UI.  Can you give another example of where a teacher would 
> >actually use programming logic?
> 
> Sure. I suppose I've assumed "interactive learning environment" 
> conveys more meaning than it does. You'd have to examine the 
> http://virtualschool.edu/98c prototype at some length to see this, 
> and its not even online because of space limitations on my server.

Um...for the stuff that is there, there are a few issues.  Try this
link: http://virtualschool.edu/98c/nph-Help.cgi?Topic=Syllabus.TTEF.help
 
> First, the static structure. A "Course" is a sequence of  "Lessons", 
> and each lesson assigns a number of "Tasks", each with a drop-dead 
> deadline a week or so in the future. Each task is a sequence of web 
> pages with fields that are stored in a database which grows as each 
> student submits tasks.
> 
> The dynamic structure is where the interactive stuff comes in. The 
> simplest example is a task that provides expert advice on how to do 
> something (how to ftp files for example), followed by a "How I did 
> it" question (form). The following page typically prints (as html) 
> all student answers to date as "How we did it". This addresses the 
> problem that students find expert advice hard to understand, compared 
> to instructions by their peers, particularly when the teacher and 
> students use diverse platforms and tools (I use a mac, most students 
> use pcs).
> 
> Typical tasks are far more involved than this. I regularly use 
> market-based assessment, where students evaluate each others work by 
> "buying" it from a bank that is managed automatically by controller 
> logic built into the task. This is described at more length at 
> http://virtualschool.edu/jile under References.

I imagine that all of the functionality you describe could be
accomplished without requiring teachers to actually program?  I guess I
still don't see the point in requiring teachers to program when most of
the logic for assembling courses, lessons, tasks, student feedback, etc.
could all be done with a GUI.  Where is the need for program logic which
is not predefined?

<snip>
 
> >>  Have you examined whether its able to cache xml/xslt 
> output streams?  
> >> Want to get rid of my homebrew caching somehow.
> >
> >Well, it could handle the caching of result documents along the way, 
> >but caching of an actual stream?  I don't think so.  Aaron would be 
> >able to answer that the best though.
> 
> The stream runs when the file modtime is more recent than the cached 
> version. The stream output is stored as a timestamped String. Surely 
> it can do that. I just don't see how.

From what I have seen so far, you would create a region (which appears
to a name space) and then you can put objects into that region and the
objects will be cached in a distributed fashion.  Other servers can then
access that same region and retrieve objects.  It appears that it may
take a little work to actually build the JCS code due to dependencies on
other parts of Turbine, but I haven't done it yet so I can't say for
sure.  As I get more into it I will let you know.

Sincerely,
Anthony Eden