schoolyard subversion

This entry hasn't been officially posted yet -- we're still working on it, so don't take anything too seriously. Thanks!

I'd like to suggest that NSCDS adopt the CLASS system for our use. The CLASS system, described at:

http://graebners.com/randy/thesis/
http://www.arsdigita.com/doc/education

is an open-source, web-based system for schools. It is currently being used at several schools including CalTech, the MIT Sloan School and ArsDigita University. It is currently being developed by a full-time team at ArsDigita, so the software will be continually updated and feature requests will be listened to. The designer of the system, Randy Graebner, is a friend of mine, and has promised to assist us with our set-up and use of the system.

The CLASS system includes a number of powerful features, allowing students and professors to collaborate on various school assignments, share information, check their progress, find out about their homework, and more. It uses a user-centric design, allowing any student to visit their personalized portal page with all the information that is relevant to them -- a calendar customized just for the classes that they take, the homework from all their classes, news from their teachers, and more.

The system is based on the heavily tested ArsDigita Community System, powering hundreds of high-volume, powerful web sites world wide. The ACS includes many features that would be very useful for our school, including a calendar system, a web-based email system, a file-storage and web page publishing system and a bulletin board system to allow everyone to communicate and share information. Many more features are available, and more are constantly being written by independent developers around the world. Because the ACS is an integrated system, users only have to log in once, and can use their personalized portal page to keep track of all features of the web site.

The toolkit is completely open source, making it easy for anyone to add to or modify it, and also making it a great project for NSCDS students learning to program. Students could use the system to learn the basics of website programming, fast becoming the most popular (not to mention most interesting) type of programming, because the software works on any computer of any operating system with a web browser.

The ACS is also the core of a course on software engineering for web sites taught at several universities around the country, including MIT, University of Hamburg, NYU, Caltech, UCLA and University of Michigan:

http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/one-term-web

I took a shortened version of this course in Boston this summer, and enjoyed it very much.

All portions of the system, including the CLASS module, the ArsDigita toolkit, the database, the operating system and the web server are free and open-source, using industry standard parts, making it very affordable and easy to administer.

For a demo of the system, visit:

http://swartzfam.com/aaron/acs/education.html

Bottom line:

• It's free
• It's popular
• It's easy to set up
• It's powerful

If you have any questions, or would like any more information on the system, feel free to ask me. If I do not know the answer, I'd be happy to ask my friends who designed and are currently working on the system.

Many thanks,

Aaron Swartz

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talk to me! aaron@swartzfam.com

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