On 10/7/07, Jeff McNeill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Wondering if there is any work on microformat or markup of a course > syllabus? Any and all suggestions solicited.
There's no work AFAIK, but I'm interested in researching the topic. I've thought a bit about it, and have implemented microformats in my course websites. (I teach an undergraduate US History survey at George Mason University). Most of the content of your email seems like a good start for a syllabi-examples wiki page, unless other in the Microformats community think otherwise. > > Problem statement: > * Syllabi are a source of much labor by instructors and much > discussion and concern by students in higher education. Yet there > appears to be no standard format either within or across colleges, > disciplines, or courses. Reuse is based on copy-and-paste, > word-of-mouth and serendipitous use of Google. With over 2 million > undergraduate degrees awarded yearly in the United States alone, there > is a large and growing population which use this document format. With > the increasing demand for assessment of higher education (Spellings > report, etc.), the humble syllabus is gaining in prominence. > > Initial information-gathering: > * A cursory review of 14 syllabi of a similar course (undergraduate > organizational communication), across a number of universities reveals > a large amount of common information. One tool that might be useful for research is Syllabus Finder.[2] It searches over 500,000 syllabi on Google. > * It appears that hCard, hCalendar, and citation/bibliographic > microformats may be usefully deployed in this endeavor. Agreed. I use hCard for my contact information. I use hCalendar for my course schedule, and include a link to subscribe to the schedule. I also mark up my reading assignments with citation microformat.[3] Additionally, I use XOXO for my presentation slides, using Eric Meyer's S5,[4] and hAtom for marking up my course weblog. My presentations aren't in my syllabus per se, but are included in my course website in general. In other cases, I've used POSH, like adding class="assignment reading" or class="assignment writing" for assignments and assignment types. > > Other efforts: > * SylViA is a Berkeley iSchool masters project, but is specific only > to one school: > http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/sylvia/docs/schema/syllabus_schema.xsd > Some friends and I have also developed a WordPress plugin, called ScholarPress Courseware, that allows an instructor to add syllabus content to a WordPress blog: contact information, schedules, bibliographies, assignments. My course website uses this plugin. I plan to release it soon, once I iron out the wrinkles and get over the jitters of releasing a new plugin ;) If anyone's interested in trying it out, feel free to contact me off-list. Best, Jeremy [1] http://clioweb.org/courses/history120/fall07/ [2] http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi/ [3] http://clioweb.org/courses/history120/fall07/schedule/. -- Jeremy Boggs Creative Lead, Center for History and New Media George Mason University 4400 University Drive, MSN 1E7 Fairfax, VA 22030-4444 http://chnm.gmu.edu -- _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new
