Archive:FCX/Unconference/OER Tools and tech

The open.michigan team presented the dScribe framework to extract atomic content from existing material, edit its metadata, clear copyright issues and create new material. They told us that the software powering the framework is still a bit hard to install, since it was developed to work in the Michigan University, but they can open an account in their servers for you if you ask them.

One of the problems we’re facing is how to create, maintain and publish the contents in a way they’re easy to comment and contribute to and, at the same time, high quality. One of the most advanced tools to generate high-quality documents is LaTeX, but the way it works makes it a bit hard to be converted to HTML and published in the web, where contributing is much easier and accessible than having to dive into the LaTeX source.

In this sense, Alqua is investigating plasTeX, a modular and very extensible LaTeX document processing framework written in Python. The aim is to be able to publish LaTeX documents in HTML and provide a per-paragraph and per-formula comment system like the one you can see in the Mercurial Book.

Another approach is to use a markup syntax and a wiki-style site to compose and comment the document and make use of some scripts to convert the markup to LaTeX when generating a high-quality and ready-to-print version of the content. The testing/beta veresion of Wikipedia already allows you to generate a beautiful PDF-book from a set of articles of your choice, so it’s clear that this approach is reasonable.