[Edu] (my) first comments on the note

[Massimo Ramella]

*This is a message that I orginally sent to a small group of persons 
involved in the first draft of the note 
http://volute.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/projects/edu/edumatters/edumatters-fmt.html*

Hi!

I have the following comments/questions about the content of the note:

1) ContentLevel: seems to me that the value "General" may be quite 
useless. Since ContentLevel is supposed to filter resources, a value 
"General" would not help much being all inclusive. On the other hand, 
the subdivision into elementary,....,University is also quite useless 
given the large variety of curricula in different schoolsystems. The 
difference between curricula is large in Europe, and very large between 
schools of all IVOA member countries. Therefore what is at a highschool 
level somewhere may be middle school or university somewhere else.  This 
was the comment :-) The question is: Would it be possible to have 
"Education" together with Research and Amateur?

2) it seems to me that the note implies that educational resources other 
than data (i.e. docs,tutorials,videos....) should be those internal to 
VO (like the tutorials used in VO schools, for example). Is it so? I 
would strongly support a wider collection of documents. One example of 
document that should be possible to find within VO Edu is the attached 
guide of Pedro Osuna (he gave it to me asking if it was ok to include it 
among VO resources, even if VO is only tangentially involved and the 
cover is corporate ESA -- btw I told Pedro that in my opinion the guide 
should definitely by collected among VO Edu resources).

3) another point that is not clear to me is if we think that we should 
also preserve Edu resources by mirroring (or hosting) them on our VO 
servers. Personally, I think that we should keep these resources (or 
mirror them). Many projects produce very valuable resources but have a 
short independent life (one to few years) and it is a general waste to 
have their products be forgotten somewhere (or even deleted).

Well...I think this is it...I hope my comments/questions can be useful, 
given the I can not really contribute anything software-side....

Cheers

Massimo

-- 
Massimo Ramella
INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste
via G.B. Tiepolo 11
I34143 Trieste
Italia

tel. +39 040 3199 140