HCMC Blogs

Hello everyone!

It was nice meeting you all. Here is the link to the article I told you about: http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/NetWorks/NW44/Blake.htm LANGUAGE LEARNING AT A DISTANCE: SPANISH WITHOUT WALLS.

The article shows the results of the research on learning Spanish online (based on the online course "SPANISH WITHOUT WALLS")

The authors found out that distance-learning students perform better on discrete grammar tests than their classroom counterparts enrolled in a traditional classroom format. They also discuss possible reasons for this difference along with student attitudes toward distance-learning language courses.

From your experience, how do you think, what are the other advantages of online language materials?

Julia.

I thought I'd check out the Scraps project on Safari, to see how well the JavaScript components work, and I see only a blank page when I go to the link in your previous post. I also tested on Opera, and I get a blank page there too. We should organize some proper testing for Scraps on the KHTML browsers (Safari and Konqueror) and on Opera.

Simple search is working, with limits. It only searches for single keywords, and finds them anywhere in the metadata, even in the tags. In other words, the search backend is crude. It will support Boolean operators, phrase searching, maybe fuzzy search, etc. The advanced search will add searching limited to specified tags in the metadata.

The client side is farther along. The Search panel has a text field; enter a keyword and press Enter to start the search. Search results (if any) will appear in a grid below the text field. Clicking on a row in the grid will select the corresponding node in the tree, will load the Object's metadata, and will load the Object's image if it has one. All of the matched nodes will also be marked with a different icon in the tree (note: I seem to have broken that... fix tomorrow). Yet to be added are buttons that let you move to the first, next, prior and last matched nodes in the tree.

The demo data has been cleaned up a bit. Any Object that does not have an image (most of the second level Objects) will have its tree node disabled; clicking a disabled node will do nothing at the moment. This will change soon, so that clicking an Object that does not have an image will cause the parent Object's image to be displayed, and the clicked Object's rectangle to be highlighted.

The (limited) search is available now in the online viewer demo. Click on the Search tab at the bottom left to begin.

http://lettuce.tapor.uvic.ca/~scraps/viewer/viewer.php?collection=ww_one&artifact=dodds_scrap.

Created a db in eXist, and uploaded the document along with the skeleton feature structure doc.

Then I went to start working on the Cocoon setup, and found that there are no group permissions set for the devshire user, so I couldn't get in. Resolved this (with Greg's help) through the sysops.

Back and forth with Ryan in operations to get an sql db called timescol created. He did that, but I'm unable to log in to it following the information he provided - so have contacted him to ask how to proceed.
When we get a new account to host the production site, I'll contact Ryan and have him provide that account with admin privileges on the db.

Started by adding a list of project titles with links at the top of the showcase projects page and then normalizing the entries for each of the projects.
When I tried to validate that I discovered that the piece of code generating the 10 most recent blog titles was generating code that didn't validate, so with a bit of help from Martin and Greg I found the problem, looked through the php documentation to find a solution and ended up using the htmlspecialchars method on the href string returned by the call to the rss feed.

Complete April 20.

One of our older sites, the Latin Driller Killer, is looking a bit messed-up -- I'm not sure why, but a lot of the CSS and content is styled wrongly or not styled at all.

The related site, Wheelock, is fine (I've just done some more regular updates), but the Drill site is a mess. It's used by Latin 101, 102, 201 and (occasionally) 202 students, and GRS would like it fixed.

Once the new icons were in place, I had to re-do all screenshots for the tutorial, help and example documents. Then I worked through the tutorial and help files, and updated them, adding information about the new features and the new schema. In the process, I removed the SVG schema from the schemas folder -- it's not needed for validation, because all its definitions are built into the main schema by ROMA. That simplifies things considerably. I also updated documentation to include more detail about the Nuvola icons.

ADMINISTRATIVE MEETING WITH SCOTT
VARIOUS ITEMS, PLANNING