[Edu] Another point we should have talked about

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear EDU IG, 

this is a slight edit of a privately circulated mail that was a
reaction to Massimo's comments on 

http://volute.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/projects/edu/edumatters/edumatters-fmt.html

-- I hope Massimo's points are still clear from the quotations.

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 12:06:08PM +0200, Massimo Ramella wrote:

> 1) ContentLevel: seems to me that the value "General" may be quite
> useless. Since ContentLevel is supposed to filter resources, a value
[...]
> somewhere else.  This was the comment :-) The question is: Would it
> be possible to have "Education" together with Research and Amateur?

I agree that "Education" would be more fitting than "General".
However, having that would require a new schema, and that is, given
the way we've built the registry schema files, a fairly disruptive
change.

Thus, it is our proposal to just *define* that "General" means
"suitable for Educational purposeses including schools and continuing
education."

This little sleight of hand should severely reduce technological
problems we might get with the adoption of our recommendations.

> 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).

What makes you think so?  I'd say text suggesting that should be
reformulated.  It is at least my intention that people can register
all kinds of document-like resources useful for VO users.

> 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

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "our VO servers", so I cannot
really comment on this.  But talking about mirroring indeed raises a
very valid point.  It would certainly be worthwhile (for the note?) to
have some sort of "best practices" recommendation of
licensing the material in a way that invites mirroring.  On the other
hand, if we  talk about mirroring, we might need to say something
about versioning and how people can figure out whether something they
find on a mirror is up to date.

Which, come to think of it, might actually be a very valid use case
for the doc/edu registry extension.  I'm adding it just now.


Cheers,

          Markus