Re: ANN: Active Learning Environment (Velocity/Java/XML)

[John Wubbel <jo...@johnwubbel.com>]

Dear Dr. Cox,

I was very interested in your post of 1/22/04 regarding your
announcement of the ALE. I took a copy and thought that perhaps a quick
deployment into my portal would allow me to experiment with it a little.
I was wondering if you were making any progress on the documentation or
had received any off-line comments that were constructive and useful. It
was my belief that ALE was a servlet and therefore should have dropped
right into my Tomcat container. Perhaps I need to give it some more
study time because I did not get it working yet. And because of other
interruptions in business it is hard to get back to it. 

If this was intended to be a servlet, then why not take your ant build
process and generate a war file. This might be the easiest way to "drop
and play" in order to minimize installation and configuration.

I was interested in your work for evaluating it as a possible
alternative to other e-learning initiatives for our Enterprise Security
Portal (ESP). Right now the portal securely supports safety and security
incident reporting, messaging and we have the ability to collaboratively
publish and distribute confidential documents. We have been thinking
about the training that goes along with a companies plans, policies and
procedures by using such products as Lectora or RoboHelp. However, I
like the idea of your inventing the experiential approach in your
software toward learning. I am sitting here dreaming about its
application in the corporate world where we are trying to get employees
to become comfortable in situations where they must react to policy and
carry out procedures with the happening of an event.

Also a question, would not the use of ALE courses in a portal
environment solve the problem of separate instant of Velocity engines?
Our ESP and many portlets are all Velocity based so if we were to create
a portlet dedicated to offering a series of courses to an employee
population, the servlet serves all course portlets and an instance of
the engine running should not have a great impact. Unless I am not
understanding in full the architecture of a course and how it executed.

If you have time to comment, I would be interested in learning where you
are at with the ALE docs and deployment. Thank you kindly.

Sincerely,

John Wubbel
Securitydirector, LLC 

On Thu, 2004-01-22 at 17:00, Brad Cox wrote:
> This list might be interested in the alpha release of Active Learning 
> Environment (ALE) at http://virtualschool.edu/ale. Its an ambitious 
> application of Java, XML and velocity for web-based experiential 
> learning.
> 
> Your comments and suggestions would be MOST appreciated! Still 
> working on the tutorial and installation instructions but most of the 
> system is there now.

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