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
<s...@unleashkids.org <mailto:s...@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 <nices...@gmail.com
<mailto:nices...@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
<godi...@sugarlabs.org <mailto:godi...@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_ander...@usa.net <mailto:tony_ander...@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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