cando-devel Mailing List for CANDO

On 8/21/05, Paul Carduner <pau...@gm...> wrote:

> By this time I should have a pretty good idea of the lay of the land
> as far as college work load and free-time is concerned.  I intend to
> not only stay with the project as a maintainer but also to develope
> whatever new features Jeff has in mind and do some architectural
> refactoring along the way.  This also includes reintegration with
> schooltool after their next release.

Hi Paul,

Congratulations on making such great progress with CanDo.  I'm very impress=
ed.

The new release of SchoolTool, that is, 0.11 is out now.  This will be
the stable branch for this school year.  We'll be doing bugfixes, etc.
 As we switch away from calendaring to work on the other student
information system stuff, we'll also revert to putting out developer
milestones instead of real releases, since there is no reason to think
people will start using, say, our online gradebook, in production in
the middle of the year.  Hopefully people will poke at it and test it,
etc., but these won't really be supported releases.

So you should probably just settle on 0.11 for production use.  We
will be doing a bugfix release in a couple weeks and probably another
release when Zope 3.1 is done.  At that point we won't have to ship a
whole Zope 3 with the .deb packages.

Also, Stephan Richter has completely ripped apart the old structure of
SchoolTool and SchoolBell and put it back together again in a more
rational structure that mirrors the structure of Zope 3 more
explicitly.  He's working on it here:=20
http://source.schooltool.org/svn/branches/srichter-refactor/schooltool/
 This will end up being the basis for the upcoming milestones and a
spring release, and I imagine next year's CanDo, but I don't think you
should use it this year.

--Tom

> In terms of overall scheduling, I would say we have about two weeks of
> changes left (until Sept. 2nd), until we should
> aim to get our version together for distrubution.

I agree.  Originally we had planned to do a release for tommorow.=20
Which can be done (it only takes about 10 minutes)  But it would make
a lot more sense to spend the next two weeks implementing those last
few user stories (most of which are not difficult), and have something
that is that much more sleek.  Also, if we made a release now, we
would just end up making another one in two weeks, and there is not
much point in doing that.  Eldar should be able to make all these
changes without any trouble, and I will be only an email away if there
is any trouble.  This release would be considered the official alpha
release.

> We then have about
> another two weeks to continue ironing out bugs
> as we train Career Center instructors on it.  Come mid-September
> (Friday, Sept. 16th), CanDo needs to be pretty well locked-down.

After bug fixes our done, we would make another release (the beta) at this =
time.

> A crucial date coming up is September 27th, when we plan to offer CanDo
> to a school besides our own (the VA Beach
> Advanced Technology Center).  I will be going to VA Beach to show the
> product to their school and administrators.

It would be perfect for them to use the official "beta" version.  Then
they would have some idea of what to expect.

> After September 16th, I would like to talk with the team about serving
> and maintaining CanDo for the Career Center
> and VA Beach.

By this time I should have a pretty good idea of the lay of the land
as far as college work load and free-time is concerned.  I intend to
not only stay with the project as a maintainer but also to develope
whatever new features Jeff has in mind and do some architectural
refactoring along the way.  This also includes reintegration with
schooltool after their next release.

- Paul

First CanDoToo user story in testing phase is up.

I'm posting user stories to:
http://linus.yhspatriot.net/candoWiki/NewStories

--Welsh

David Welsh wrote:

> Problem solved by Eldar at 9:53am.  Evidentally there was a server 
> restart that shut us down.
> If Eldar and Paul can check e-mail frequently over the next several 
> days, it will help us to keep working.
> Will continue adding data and creating user stories.
> --Welsh
>
> David Welsh wrote:
>
>> Trying to contact new instance of CanDoToo set-up to solve permission 
>> problems on original instance,
>> using:  http://cando.ypal.net:9080 (the new address Paul Carduner 
>> gave me).
>> Request to contact server is timing out.  There's some problem 
>> there.  Can you guys fix?
>>
>> A little disappointing.  We're in early to work on CanDo, and we're 
>> still dead in the water.
>> Obviously not a great use of the time of the testers to have them 
>> standing by
>> as we sort out permission and logon problems.  We're losing/wasting 
>> time.
>>
>> --Welsh
>>
>>
>>

We are not ready to make a release just yet.  I'm going to set the
date for us to have everything ready for an official release as a week
from next monday.  That is Monday the 22nd.  I hope this works for
everybody.

Thanks,
Paul


> > From: Brian Sutherland <ji...@we...>
> > Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 11:22:10 +0200
> > To: je...@di...
> > Subject: Re: cando package...
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 11:29:21PM +0000, je...@di... wrote:
> >> Paul and Eldar can let you know where to get the cando source for pack=
aging.  It is almost at the point where it is ready for that.
> >>
> >> It can be checked out from cando.sf.net, but Paul will have to tell yo=
u which directory, or you'll get a bunch of junk that you don't want (we ne=
ed to fix that).
> >
> >I had a look and have some nit-picks:
> >
> >* There are a lot of wrongly executable files (how can I execute
> >  cando.jpg?).
> >* You are missing a license, also the there needs to be a license text
> >  at the top of every file or it would be quite illegal to distribute.
> >* No documentation, a minimum would be installation instructions and
> >  dependencies.
> >* For Ubuntu purposes, it would be necessary for you to start making
> >  releases and tarballs, but we are quite far away from that.
> >
> >Other than that, I'm quite confused how you or if you got schooltool to
> >work with Zope2???
> >
> >--
> >Brian Sutherland
> >
> >Metropolis - "it's the first movie with a robot. And she's a woman.
> >              And she's EVIL!!"
> >
>

It's a little late, but here's the official student page template that
I made from the dtml file.

Look here:

http://ipython.scipy.org/

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eldar Omuraliev <eom...@gm...>
Date: Aug 6, 2005 9:25 PM
Subject: User Stories Status Update
To: can...@li...


Update on the user stories status

CanDoToo -- Week 5
Carduner, Welsh, Eldar
8/6/05

--DONE-- Don't show field to enter a competency,
before the first skillset has been created.

--DONE-- After adding curriculum link to a competency, we need a button
that will take us back to the add competency group interface, and that
will automatically refresh that interface to show the competency with
its new link.

--DONE--Update page titles, such as sections, still says "Evaluation"
in the heading. Same goes for Spreadsheet grading, it says "mass
grade"; make it say "grade section"

--IN PROGRESS--append course number as a prefix on reports, so headers of
competency columns can just read "001", "002", "003", etc.

--DONE--In the "grade section" interface spreadsheet, keep skillset
titles in the column headers, even in the simple view; also, please
extend student names into columns with the skillset names, as was done
with CanDo1.

--DONE--When logging on as a student, competencies should show with
their curriculum links.

--DONE--Give students the option of seeing their scores as "simple" or "ver=
bose"

--DONE--Allow students to add evidence links.

--DONE--When students log onto their sections, show their GPA.

--DONE--When students log onto their sections, show their competency rating=
.

--IN PROGRESS--When a student logs on, give them an overall competency
log sheet (a
blog/Wiki), where they can communicate with their instructor about
their overall progress; instructors need to able to access this log
sheet and communicate with their students.

So basically there are 2 user stories left. Paul is working on the
wiki/blog. As soon as we get the page template of official report view
from David Woo, 4th user story will be finished.

Cheers.
-Eldar

this is the current state of the user stories as of now... (in cvs)

CanDoToo -- Week 5
Carduner, Welsh, Eldar
8/4/05

--DONE-- Don't show field to enter a competency,
before the first skillset has been created.

--DONE-- After adding curriculum link to a competency, we need a button
that will take us back to the add competency group interface, and that
will automatically refresh that interface to show the competency with
its new link.

--DONE--Update page titles, such as sections, still says "Evaluation"
in the heading. Same goes for Spreadsheet grading, it says "mass
grade"; make it say "grade section"

--VOID--NA--append course number as a prefix on reports, so headers of
competency columns can just read "001", "002", "003", etc.

--DONE--In the "grade section" interface spreadsheet, keep skillset
titles in the column headers, even in the simple view; also, please
extend student names into columns with the skillset names, as was done
with CanDo1.

--DONE--When logging on as a student, competencies should show with
their curriculum links.

--DONE--Give students the option of seeing their scores as "simple" or "ver=
bose"

Allow students to add evidence links.

--DONE--When students log onto their sections, show their GPA.

When students log onto their sections, show their competency rating.

When a student logs on, give them an overall competency log sheet (a
blog/Wiki), where they can communicate with their instructor about
their overall progress; instructors need to able to access this log
sheet and communicate with their students.

On 7/31/05, David Welsh <Dav...@ap...> wrote:
> >1) Change menu item "EVALUATIONS" to "SECTIONS"
> >
> >
> NOTE:  Teachers think about setting-up classes (or to use the School
> Tool word, "sections", not about
> setting-up evaluations.  Classes/sections include students, teachers,
> competencies, a grading system, and the capability
> to actually grade students (I like grade over evaluate; more
> straightforward).

I'm a little hazy about how this stuff actually works, but I think we
can create a CanDo "translation" using SchoolTool's
internationalization machinery that could switch the terminology to
match your usage.

---Tom