Posted by techczech on July 17, 2009 at 10:34am
Is anybody out there using Drupal for building e-portfolios?
I was at a Mahara conference recently and attending a talk about LEAP2A (http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/LEAP2A_specification) a new interoperability spec. Efforts to make it compatible with RDFa are underway and I was wondering if anybody from the Drupal side would be interested in joining in the discussion.
Comments
Learning exercise module
Creating a module that lets users enter solutions to exercises that are embedded in book pages. A view will show a list of the user's solutions to the exercises. This forms a portfolio of the user's work.
Kieran Mathieson
kieran@dolfinity.com
Necessary?
I've been tracking LEAP for a while now, in a headscratching kind of way. To be fair, I have that reaction about most institution-centric standards, such as SCORM, SIF, etc.
In very general terms, they seem more designed to support the needs of the institution/school, with the needs of the learner thrown in as an afterthought. This isn't done out of malice or ill-will or incompetence (well, SIF might be an exception to that) but because the focus of the people designing the spec have system-level goals as their main perspective.
A look at their Practice Scenarios (which, the page notes, are not to be confused with their Interoperation Scenarios, despite the facts that the LEAP spec is designed to allow interoperability in practice) shows a set of scenarios that could potentially be met with something as lightweight as RSS. And now, if they are working to make LEAP2 RDFa compliant, why not just use RDFa ? Given the amount of interoperability you would get out of the box by using either of these two existing open standards, I do wonder what makes LEAP2 necessary. The benefits of true interoperability built on widely used and established open standards outweighs any potential benefit that could be conveyed by creating YAS (yet another standard).
So, while I'm all for interoperability, this doesn't seem to be a direction I'd want to put development hours into. There are more efficient ways of getting this done, and these ways will support more systems with less work than what is proposed by the LEAP work.
FunnyMonkey
Click. Connect. Learn.
Using Drupal in Education
FunnyMonkey
open to discussion
More directly, interesting to see your views. I'd be very happy to comment on any concrete proposals you have for alternatives for interoperability / portability of e-portfolio information, or just contact me directly if you like... :-) And LEAP2A was exactly following the idea of building on established standards (Atom) rather than inventing a new one. But one does have to add what is necessary to do the job...
Necessary development
Hi, and thanks for the interest!
The point about LEAP2 is essentially that it gives the level of structure necessary for real current e-portfolio systems to be able to place portfolio information into an appropriate position within their systems. LEAP2A does this in a way that is (as far as we could design) easiest to implement for blogs and blog-like systems, because it builds on Atom. The main stakeholders determining the form of LEAP2A have been system developers, not institutions. Two of the e-portfolio systems most widely used in the UK are about to release user tools allowing import and export in LEAP2A format (that's PebblePad and Mahara).
LEAP2R (under development) effectively does just what you suggest -- to use RDFa to represent exactly the same information as is able to be represented in LEAP2A, but without the Atom structures. We'd be delighted to work with you, or any Drupal developers, on the detail of LEAP2R. The outline is given on the page http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/LEAP2R but will be filled in over the next couple of months as my time is available. Suggestions and discussion are always welcome, however.
Best wishes
Simon