The Savvy Technologist

Leaning toward Plone and GEM

I started installing Plone on a test server last week at work. If all goes well, the combination of Plone and some cataloging technology created by the folks at the Gateway for Education Materials (GEM) will form the foundation for the curriculum sharing tool that I’ve posted about recently. We’re at the beginning of this project, but I remain confident that these technologies will help us deliver a tool that gets use by our teachers.

My understanding of the GEM technology at this point is that it’s purely for cataloging. That is, you don’t actually store the content in the GEM system, just metadata that describe the content. The default metadata include items related to subject area, grade level, and keywords among others. I am going to need to extend the existing metadata options to include some specific items that we need to index in order to customize the system to fit the Hopkins curriculum. One example is a link to the Hopkins Instructional Technology Standards for each lesson or resource.

Marking up the curriculum materials that our teachers create is a big issue too. Our search tool can point to any URL to find the actual content, but I need to figure out how best to put that content online. Valid XHTML and CSS are a no-brainer, but I’m not yet sure how much other info I need to include. Take the list of authors, for example. Would this do:

<ul>
 <li>Tim Wilson</li>
 <li>Sally Jones</li>
</ul>

or would I need something more “semantic” to make this work well:

<ul id="authorlist">
 <li>Tim Wilson</li>
 <li>Sally Jones</li>
</ul>

And maybe the curriculum materials should be stored in a database anyway, even though the search tool will simply point to a URL. A database will have to be part of the solution anyway in order to make the notification component of this system work. We’re going to have to have a database with every teacher’s name, the grades or courses that they teach, and an estimate of when the Hopkins curriculum units get taught every year.

I will gladly entertain suggestions from anyone about this stuff. This is nearly uncharted territory for me.