Hi everyone,
I teach an intro to IT survey class for the LIS school at Illinois. The
one-major-topic-a-week syllabus doesn't really give us time to deep dive
into IT topics, but it lets us explore them and give contextual
understanding to the building block pieces. Ideally, every topic has
some sort of hands-on exercise that gives real life experience with the
concepts/technologies. The exercises are usually independent, but I've
been kicking around the idea of using a simple OSS OPAC to teach
different elements of the class as a semester-long big cascading lesson.
Examples:
Lesson: Linux, ssh and the command shell
Exercise: Installing Ubuntu, getting comfortable with that environment
Lesson: OSS and software ecosystems
Exercise: Get a LAMP stack setup on the OS, install the OPAC
Lesson: Interfaces, usability, accessibility
Exercise: Use the OPAC, populate it with some data, assess its usability
Lesson: HTML/CSS
Exercise: Use CSS to skin the OPAC, customize the HTML for your "site"
Lesson: Data management, search, IR
Exercise: See if we can peak under the hood about how the OPAC's search
works
Lesson: Interfaces to data: databases, XML, SQL
Exercise: Use the OPAC as an living example to work with those interfaces
Lesson: Cloud computing, 2.0/social network integration
Exercise: Not sure yet...
This idea primarily came from trying to get some simple XML/SQL
exercises that didn't suck (the setup for these environments is almost
as involved as any exercises itself), and the fact the previous classes
really liked dissecting the nextgen catalogs we've explored from a
software selection and 2.0 integration perspective.
But here's the catch, and this is why I need your experience, Code4Lib.
I'm not an OPAC admin, and have no experience running or hacking them.
I'm looking for recommendations for software that would help me with the
goals above, without being too difficult or overwhelming for the
students or me. :) It doesn't have to be a good/complete OPAC,
necessarily -- just a teaching tool to give experience with the lessons
above.
Should I be looking at koha and evergreen and the big ones, or are there
small projects that you're aware of that might be better? My preference
would be MySQL and PHP, but as long as the supplemental tools and
documentation are good, I'm flexible. For example, if there are tools as
good as phpmyadmin to browse postgresql, I don't think it really
matters. I'm willing to sacrifice "good" for "simple and transparent". I
don't think Rails is a good place to go with this because I don't want
to teach MVC/Rails. (Maybe I'm wrong?)
Oh, and I'd also like a small project with great documentation, but I've
been around OSS long enough to know that's a diamond in the rough.
Sadly, the reality is (for most of these exercises) if the project
documentation is lacking, I'll have to write that as well.
What are your thoughts on this endeavor? Any recommendations? Thanks!
Dave
PS. This is not a job ad posting. ;)
