Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Firedocs eLML Editor for Ebooks and e-Learning Packages

It is the start of second semester at ANU and my colleagues are putting the finishing touches to their course materials (I am revising my green ICT course for next semester). This has prompted much discussion of suitable tools and formats for e-documents for learning. LaTex is a popular typesetting package with computer scientists (having been written by one). This can produce not only documents for printing, but also well formatted web pages and slides. It occurred to me that there may be some Latex to ePub or IMS Content Package tools. I did not find any of those but did find the Firedocs eLML Editor.

The eLesson Markup Language (eLML) is an XML based format originally developed for a Geographic Information Systems learning project. What got my attention was that the editor for eLML was integrated with the Firefox web browser and the output could be converted ePub eBook format and the IMS Content Package format used by Learning Management Systems, such as Moodle.

Installing the Firedocs editor was simple, but I found I could not actually edit anything. What was not clear was if I also needed to install eLML and/or Eclipse (for version control and file management).

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