[Edu-sig] How best to publish?...

[lexberezhny]

> At 03:50 PM 05/13/2000 -0400, Jeffrey Elkner wrote:
> >I have a question that I think is of importance to our efforts.
> >
> >What format is best suited to creating content that can be both
> >web ready and generate good looking printed copy from the same
> >source?  At this point I have settled on learning DocBook, but
> >the big problem with DocBook is that the tools needed to use it
> >affectively are propriatary and expensive.
>
> Given the desk-top publishing tools we almost all have
> access to, I think local authorship of lots of curriculum
> materials is the likely trend.  Teachers have their own
> creativity and ideas about what they'd like to share with
> students, so I think it's unnecessary to work on the model
> of a mass-publisher, thinking "what I do and put on the
> web is going to be used in exactly this form by other
> teachers."  I mean, you can do that, but I think you're
> probably wasting energy.
>
> Best is to put really good ideas, and working Python stuff,
> in the public domain, with the expectation that other
> teachers will edit/recombine, crediting you of course, if
> you're a source, but desk-top publishing their own materials
> for local distribution, materials which incorporate their
> own thinking and attitudes.  The whole point of cyberspace
> curricula is that you're NOT tied to some centralized
> bureaucracy with a one-size-fits-all mass publishing
> approach.

But wouldnt that be nice. If you have a common format for materials,
preferably in XML/DocBook, you can easily reference materials by keywords,
and categories contained within the documents them selves. Following some
standards may make it easy for teachers to find materials. But the most
important aspect is having a format which can be read by many tools, and
from this common format you can easily generate HTML, PostScript, or what
have you. In order for this to be possible there needs to be a commonly used
format for publishing this type of material!

> It's the ideas that are important, and that I value when
> I find them on other teacher websites.  I don't really
> care if they've archived a lot of camera-ready hand-outs,
> because I can easily author similar materials myself,
> customized to my needs, am not really depending on
> others for such "end user" aids (like I've made a whole
> book of nifty color overhead transparencies, using my
> Epson Stylus and special 3M cels).

Not all teachers have the know-how or even the time to do these things. And
having a common format may help teachers by limiting the number of tools
they must learn, in order to use these materials.