Session: 3401

Plone in Education - An Answer to Many Dreams

Rob Zaar, St Johns Regional CC

& Dave Fregon, ozzope.org representative

These session notes seek to inform you about the applicability of using Plone as an intranet/internet solution for a school. Plone can also be used to improve teaching practice through its collaborative tools. This paper is primarily aimed at teachers interested in using Plone as an Intranet solution.

SUMMARY: WHY PLONE?

Plone is an excellent internet solution since it is based on an object oriented database, it is web based, it is open source (free)¹, it is incredibly customisable, it has a huge development community behind it and there are local companies to tailor solutions and provide support. Why haven’t I heard about this before? Plone is the new kid on the block, but with a very impressive family history. Plone is built using Zope (a scalable, stable, powerful system that includes an object database, a web server and several templating languages – NATO uses zope for it’s intranet) and Content Management Framework (Workflow, Personalisation and Cataloguing). Zope has a following in the education sector which has now adopted Plone. With many universities using zope and now switching to Plone as well as many companies taking up the technology, this guarantees its future and support. All these aspects indicate it is a contender. The reason why it is superior is the object oriented database and xml support. An object oriented database is the key ingredient to easily linking objects. Currently there is work making Plone IMS compatible (an XML standard for education objects) – this is the key future proofing ingredient which allows for easily importing, utilising and exporting education objects.

WHY IS EDUPLONE AN ANSWER TO MANY DREAMS?

For the classroom teacher: If you want a website that is easily setup for information sharing, allowing you to check the information before it is public then Pone is excellent. If you wish to use some collaborative tools, There are many available including the Future Learning Environment (FLE3 is zope based but can be used within Plone).

For the school webmaster: Get out of that bottleneck! Plone allows you to set up workflows, roles and permissions so those with the authority can exercise it online, people only get to see what they should, and everyone is happy. It has many object types allowing for many current requirements. It comes with an inbuilt search engine. This is the vanilla out of the box version, but as you shall see there is much more that can be added and customised, eg . it can run off current user databases (add ons called products, can do this).

What is Plone?

Plone is a free, open source Content Management System. The focus of Plone is to provide value at every level of an organization. It comes with a workflow engine, pre-configured security and roles, a set of content types and multi-lingual support. There are many developers, writers and testers from all over the world, contributing to Plone everyday. Plone is based on the Content Management Framework. (also called a Content Management System, CMS). Homepage: www.Plone.org. Plone is a free, open source web based CMS. A college intranet/internet is another name for a web based CMS. Try Plone (http://demo.Plone.org/) or an Australian Community Enabler using Plone (http://demo.communitye.net/)

Why use a web based CMS? (next three sections by Marco Federighi)

The easiest way to understand a CMS like Plone is to compare it with a standard web site design tool, like Macromedia Dreamweaver. In both cases pages can be produced on a remote computer, and submitted for approval and publication. There are, however, four key differences:

1) Any user with the required permission can produce web pages from anywhere, using any standard browser, with no need for any specialist software. A CMS is easier to use than Dreamweaver and FTP, therefore very little training is needed, and many more production tasks can be allocated to unskilled staff. As a consequence, a CMS empowers more users to create and edit content on the Web. Also, less training and lower skills result in lower production and maintenance costs.

• Pages are produced by typing text and uploading files into the site's pre-produced templates. This results in a more consistent corporate style. Thus, even though the number of people producing web pages for direct publication can be large, consistency of style and, more importantly, consistency in content structure is ensured.

• Control of workflow in a CMS can be very finely grained, with the Webmaster's job being effectively devolved to many people working in different places without any lowering of security and, more generally, of quality standards.

• Different versions of a document are automatically saved, resulting in a natural audit trail when required.

These benefits of Content Management Systems suit the information interchange in the school context.

What is Zope?

Zope is an open source web application server, written in Python. It is a scalable, stable, powerful system that includes an object database, a web server and several templating languages. Zope is developed and supported primarily by Zope Corporation, but also by many developers worldwide. Homepage: www.zope.org

Why use Zope and Plone? (From the Plone book http://Plone.org/documentation/book)

Zope and Plone are Open Source Software (OSS). The business model of the people who produce Zope and Plone relies on earnings from consultancy services, chiefly for customisation and enterprise use.

Proprietary and open source CMSes are technically not very different. In both camps we find very good, mediocre and poor products; the quality of the documentation and support also varies widely. The main difference is that open source CMS are produced by rather smaller companies than proprietary ones. This raises doubts on the long-term continuity of these firms, and of the support that they can provide. In my view, however, the difference is more apparent than real. Open source producers are smaller and thus more vulnerable to, say, the loss of one customer or the departure of a key individual; proprietary producers are bigger, but are affected by takeovers (e.g. Allaire, by Macromedia) and the vagaries of the IT stock market (e.g. Broadvision). All in all, BOTH kinds of producers can easily disappear. The difference is that, with an open source product, the source code is available to the user and so is the possibility of maintenance, customisation and development, none of which is available to users of proprietary systems without the active intervention of the producers. This is the key reason to use an open source product.

Zope is significantly better than other competing products for the following reasons:

• Zope is object-oriented, in the sense that everything appearing in a Zope web site (web pages, images, links, files) is an object and is contained in an object database. The database is hierarchical, not relational, and is particularly suited to hierarchical file structures. Technical people think of databases in terms of collections of tables of rows and columns, related by primary keys. This is different, and mirrors much more closely the structure of an ordinary file system, with objects within objects.

• The Zope database contains all older versions of an object: this is particularly useful for undoing changes, for the control of versions of collaborative documents, and for items requiring an audit trail.

• Zope contains a number of tools that are specially suited to large organisations and collaborative work, and will be described later in the manual. One example: pre-defined database searches, based on flexible search criteria, which automatically display all objects satisfying certain user-specified conditions.

• Zope can be used an all platforms: Unix, Linux, Mac OS, and all flavours of Windows (98, 2000, XP, NT). This is not true of most other CMS, open source and proprietary alike.

• Zope is a very friendly developing environment. The possibility of creating a customisable copy of a script at the touch of a button, while keeping the default version in its original location, is the best safety net I have ever come across.

• In Zope it is easy to design structured XML documents, with workflow linked to the document structure. This is an essential feature for the administrative systems in a large organization, and promotes both corporate consistency in the style and structure of documents and a streamlined work flow.

• Finally, Zope was created for use by large organisations, with the following characteristics: large number of contributors to collaborative projects, with contributors located at different sites and using different platforms; strong organisational requirements for flexibility and security, with the need to define local roles with different permissions to view, write, edit and approve different parts of large projects; scalability to large numbers of objects and servers.

The seventh, cultural difference between the Zope team and their competitors is crucial for large organisations. One of the Zope customers is the US Navy, which uses Zope for the management of RDprojects: a big, public-sector organisation with a keen eye on flexibility and security. The same could be said for most large corporations, public as well as private.

BUT WHAT CAN IT ACTUALLY DO IN THE SCHOOL CONTEXT?

Plone 1.0.5 (most reacent stable version of Plone) can be customised ready for use within a college context (in fact one person offered to share their version of Plone in a college context on the educational Plone discussion list – this will be commented on during the session). Plone 2.0 (which is in beta 2 at the time of writing) has the necessary features for a more robust school intranet/internet. Let’s explore these features.

Zope Products that are useful for an educational site.

• LDAP and other user import products: Zope has over 15 user import products.

• CMFSyllabus: in the early stage of development

• WYSIWYG through the web editor.

• External Editor – edit intranet documents using word! It downloads a copy, opens word, you edit and it saves it back into the intranet!

• CMFContentPanels - allows you to arrange layout and pages using a portlet like approach. 

• Plonesitemap Auto site map generator just released at time of writing!

• There are many more products for Plone (http://ingeniweb.sourceforge.net/Products/, and http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/collective/ ) from chess games to forum tools. There are many other sites where products are listed, eg particular companies, user groups, individuals and educational institutions. There is also a large list of zope products (over 700) at zope.org, some of which can be easily used within Plone, others not.

SO WHO IS USING IT?

This is only a short list of some of the groups involved, which is included here to indicate some of the work being done to develop Plone in the educational context.

• Connexions (http://cnx.rice.edu/) The Connexions Project, an effort at Rice University to provide freely available educational content and the collaborative tools to make that possible, is now running Plone. The Connexions Project currently hosts 1480 interlinking modules of academic content under a Creative Commons license, some of which form 21 full university courses created at five universities worldwide. Among the courses available are music theory, steel design, gene finding, bioinformatics, computer logic, image coding, and digital signal processing. The move to Plone from the previous Zope site started half a year ago and involved Connexions staff and consultants. The effort produced several major features for Plone such as groups integration and the PasswordResetTool.

• Zschool (http://www.zschool.org/main) Zschool is a project based in Italy which has integrated FLE in Plone. FLE (Future Learning Environment) is a zope based. Fle3 is a web-based learning environment for computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). Fle3 is Open Source and Free Software released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). Fle3 is designed to support learner and group centered work that concentrates on creating and developing expressions of knowledge (i.e. knowledge artefacts) and design. Fle3 contains three learning tools and several administration tools.

• eduPlone sprint. (http://Plone.org/events/sprints/paderborn/FrontPage) The Bertelsmann Foundation and the German Zope User Group (DZUG) organized an Educational Plone-Sprint from 2003/09/24 until 2003/09/28 in Paderborn. This addressed various issues and moved eduPlone a step closer to realisation.

• Ozzope (http://ozzope.org/) is a local zope users group with monthly meetings. There is a list of educational sites in Australia (http://ozzope.org/who/educational) and work on a zope exam product (http://ozzope.org/education)

Also noteworthy is Zope being used in the educational context. There are so many examples here, but I chose two Melbourne based endeavours to highlight the ground breaking work companies are doing in education. These highlight other branches in the zope family tree that can be integrated into Plone.

• CommonGroundLEARNER by Commonground (http://commongroundgroup.com/Software/#) is a content management system for curriculum development and delivery at the school, vocational and university level. It adds to CGML (inhouse publishing/educational XML that integrates 16 publishing and educational standards including IMS) and CommonGroundPUBLISHER some specific functionalities related to educational publishing and elearning. Its aim is to make publishers of teachers and educational institutions and thus to capture teaching knowledge, content and experience. The aim of CommonGroundLEARNER is to turn the commonsense of everyday practice into explicit and well presented documentation.

• Opaltree (http://opaltree.com/) OpalTree Systems Pty Ltd had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Commonwealth of Learning to establish a non-exclusive Strategic Alliance to develop a learning management solution for the creation, management and distribution of learning objects for developing countries. The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is the world’s only intergovernmental organization solely concerned with the promotion and development of distance education and open learning. COL is helping to increase the capacity of developing nations to meet the demands for improved access to quality education and training. The Cadria demonstration (http://opaltree.com/content/fs_downloads.html) gives you some idea of its potential.

In Australia there are two excellent examples of Plone being used in the educational context

• The Source: (http://source.tafevc.com.au/) The Source is an initiative of the Office of Training and Tertiary Education in partnership with TAFE frontiers. Launched by the Director, Office of Training and Tertiary Education on the 19 August 2003. The Source provides a single access point for Victorian Vocational Education and Training practitioners to collaborate within communities and source current information on e-learning and flexible delivery practices and activities. The Source was developed by Netc (http://www.neon.net.au/netcoop_info/) who are already developing college intranet/internet solutions.

• Victor High School in South Australia (http://web.vhhs.sa.edu.au/Plone) Use Plone for their intranet/internet and are very happy with it.

IMPLEMENTATION

Plan A – Do it yourself. Go ahead download it (http://Plone.org/download) and install, join the mailing list (http://Plone.org/development/lists), read the Plone book (http://Plone.org/documentation/book) and away you go. Most of the basic customisations are accessible and can be completed by following the guidelines in the documentation. There is however a hurdle to get over to achieve the more advanced customisations. You will need to learn some Python which is what zope/Plone is written in, and the Zope Templating Language. For most tasks the directions are clear enough and help is only a mailing list or chat room away. But if you get stuck or want the commercial support then there is Plan B.

Plan B – enlist the help of a company and the best contender is Netc (http://www.neon.net.au/netcoop_info/). They created ‘The Source’ for TAFE frontiers and are already working towards college intranet solutions.

Plan C – wait until others have done all the hard work and the out of the box solution is freely available. With so many features already available, why wait? The migration tool works well with standard Plone sites. This will allow the staff’s learning curve to match the new features.

Realistically, a combination of plan A and B is the best. It is important to understand what Plone can do and thus decide what you would want in a school intranet solution, but to have a company actually do most of the hard work. Since Plone is so customisable, it allows the school to continue development of the intranet without the company. Plone is able to separate roles out very well and this allows staff with particular skilling to play their part. Plone is community oriented and I think this is one of its appealing features.

THE FUTURE

The plan is for an out of the box eduPlone, ie an educational feature rich learning portal. As time goes on, what is now research will be standard features.

Within the school context, Plone should be able to be auto-populated from current user databases, documentation uploaded and organised, class groups created (possible integration of timetabler), roles and permissions, workflow, college communication (eg newsletter workflowed online). Other possible integrations include role marking, assessment manager which could lead to report writing integration.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Why waste money on licences when you can spend your money creating jobs here in Australia and get a better solution?

CONCLUSION

Plone is just one open source Intranet/Internet, but one with already many features and far more to come. Plone is customisable at many levels, with many organisations already sharing products and instances. You are not so tied down with Plone. Plone is the answer to many dreams.

HANG ON, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO COVER IN YOUR SESSION?

Answer your questions. Take you through some of the basics so you get to see just how easy it is to use and how powerful it is and deal with questions about linking with apache (no problem there are many ways to do this), hardware requirements (multiplatform), software requirements (the single install will load Zope, CMF and Plone and provide a management interface with it up and running at the click of a button) and cons (I think the real disadvantage is the learning curve both IT and staff, but utilising the resources of Netc will overcome this and there are many features that are easy to administer).