[Tb] A Reader-Writer Bulletin Board Tb?

Hi Oliver,

As a discussion board "administrator" I have a number of useful
privileges, but nothing like what I think you probably mean by a
"direct" hook into the data.

It's unfortunate that Tinderbox doesn't do this, or provide the means
for users to do it, but the solution I have obtained is to use
Marc-Antoine Parent's TinderToolBox. Even this required some extra
custom-programming by Marc-Antoine, but the end result is pretty
nice. I set up a single note with boilerplate code inside it (TTB
can do this), a different variant for each "thread"/page of the
discussion board. When I run this document through TTB, each of
these naked notes goes to the DISCUS bulletin board, grabs its
designated page, and sorts the different students' entries into
separate notes that are children of the original note that spawned
it. Each child note has a number of useful attributes (specified in
the boilerplate code) corresponding to the student's name, the title
of the reading, the time of the post, and suchlike. Once I've got
all these things, I can create agents, one for each student, that
will collect up their posts. And I can of course do all the
linking-type stuff that a plain vanilla database would be hard
pressed to support the creation and depiction of the way TB does.

Jerry

At 9:53 PM +0200 7/17/04, Oliver Wrede wrote:
>Hello.
>
>I think the issue here is to get the data out of DISCUS in the first place.
>
>Can you import data from DISCUS directly? Is there a way for you to
>extract that data into some sort of ASCII text?
>
>
>Regards,
>Oliver Wrede
>
>
>
>Am 09.07.2004 um 21:28 schrieb Jerry Balzano:
>
>>Hi all -
>>
>>I have a class of students, posting responses to readings online.
>>The software (DISCUS) collects their postings on web pages (one
>>page per reading) using tables, with the student's name in the
>>first column of the table, and their writeup in the second column.
>>Although I've done some programming in different languages, I've
>>not yet used Tinderbox in other than "plain vanilla" style.
>>However, it would be great if I could use Tb to grab and organize
>>all this information for me, i.e. manage a monster document full of
>>notes with "student" and "reading" attributes, and (e.g.) having
>>found a match to an "student" attribute in column 1 of a page, then
>>create a new note consisting of the contents of column 2. This
>>looks like exactly the sort of thing Tinderbox is good at doing,
>>right? And even -- to go a bit farther -- setting up agents that
>>would continually update the monster document as students posted
>>new responses? I've just not done this before, and the first time
>>is always the hardest. I'd be most grateful for any hand-holding
>>anyone would be willing to do with me on this.
>>
>>Thanks!
>>
>>- Jerry Balzano
>>
>>--
>>-------------------------
>>Dr. Gerald J. Balzano
>>Teacher Education Program
>>Dept of Music
>>Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
>>Cognitive Science Program
>>UC San Diego
>>La Jolla, CA 92093
>>(858) 822-0092
>>gjbalzano__AT__ucsd.edu
>>_______________________________________________
>>Tb mailing list
>>Tb__AT__lee-phillips.org
>>http://lee-phillips.org/mailman/listinfo/tb
Received on Tue Jul 20 05:30:12 2004