[IAEP] Note-taking

[Tony Anderson]

Hi, Sora

Yes. The 'library' portion of the schoolserver uses a Django app to 
create a database of 'accessions', items in the library. These are 
organized into collections and then further into topics. As an example,
a course is in the db as a topic, a unit in the course is a collection, 
and a lesson is an accession (a zipped folder).

An accession can be any file (hence the zip). I hope to expand this 
system so that books in the OLE Nepal Pustakalaya, Gutenberg books, and 
books in Rachel can be added as accessions (instead of a file name, the 
db record would point to a url).

The idea would be that a comments on a book (accession) would be linked 
from the accession record.
There is also a Django app (kls), which provides a record for each XO 
user (student or staff) and a record for each XO (inventory). The 
comments made by a user would be linked also to the user. In this way it 
would be easy to look at all comments and rankings by a user or to look 
at all comments and rankings for a given item in the library.

The library contains Sugar activities, audio recordings, video 
recordings, images and lessons, as well as ebooks so ther more generic 
term accession appears useful.

Like most of my projects, this one is 90% complete. The comment link is 
needed. I plan the comments/rankings to look like those in Pustakalaya 
(www.pustakalaya.org). Unfortunately, that app currently only works in 
the internet version. I also have not added the 'url' links capability 
to add other items. Look at Rachel as an example of how the Gutenberg 
collection could be organized into collections for greater accessibility 
(by the way, this sort of direct link is far less demanding on the 
server than the current search method).

Yours,

Tony
On 02/22/2015 09:42 AM, James Simmons wrote:
> Sora,
>
> The goodreads website https://www.goodreads.com might be useful. You 
> can do rankings of books, reviews, have threaded discussions, post 
> favorite quotes, interact with G+ and Facebook, and other things that 
> the words "reading socially" would suggest.
>
> I wrote a free book the might be of some use to you:
>
> https://archive.org/details/EBookEnlightenment
>
> It is also available on the web. Here is the chapter on the Pathagar 
> book server, which might be of interest:
>
> http://en.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/the-pathagar-book-server/
>
> James Simmons
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 4:45 PM, Sora Edwards-Thro 
> <sora at unleashkids.org <mailto:sora at unleashkids.org>> wrote:
>
>     Thanks for the additional input, everyone. James, Gonzalo, Tony,
>     some responses below:
>
>     On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 4:14 PM, James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com
>     <mailto:nicestep at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>         The catch is it only works with plain text files.
>
>
>     Yes, my original thought was we could convert PDF to plain-text
>     files and just use the Write activity to do highlights and such.
>     But, some of the content we're working with is not OER (that's
>     what happens when you need high-quality books in a specific
>     language), and I'm not sure if they'll be okay with us
>     manipulating the files like that. We've got to choose how many
>     battles to fight with them. Thanks for passing this tool on -
>     looks like it's better suited than the Write activity for reading.
>
>         On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 2:51 PM, Gonzalo Odiard
>         <godiard at sugarlabs.org <mailto:godiard at sugarlabs.org>> wrote:
>
>             I am available to work (on contract) in these features if
>             you are interested.
>
>
>     Thank you for the offer, Gonzalo. Fortunately, we do have some
>     money raised to pay programmers. Right now I'm just trying to
>     identify which tasks to ask people to tackle. Bear in mind that
>     this is my first experience with software development; thanks for
>     being patient,everyone, as we try to figure out what is and isn't
>     doable, and what is and isn't worth doing.
>
>     On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 7:52 PM, Tony Anderson
>     <tony_anderson at usa.net <mailto:tony_anderson at usa.net>> wrote:
>
>         Also on the list is a 'comments' capability so that learners
>         can make comments and give rankings for the books they read
>         from the school server library and which would be linked to
>         the book entry on the school server.
>
>
>     Do you currently have a system in place for organizing books on
>     the schoolserver? I know on the Haiti IIAB release we have a
>     searchable copy of Project Gutenberg; I don't know how easy it is
>     to add entries to that. In the past, we just added books by
>     creating another link that goes to a page with a list of the PDF
>     files available. But since we're looking at adding at least 300
>     more books, plus whatever the texts the students are able to
>     write, so searching  by title would be nice / necessary. We're
>     also looking for sorting by level and topic. Finally, the ability
>     to comment and give rankings is essential if you want students to
>     start reading socially. If you've made / plan to make any headway
>     on the above, I'd love to hear more about it. Thanks.
>
>

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