Talk:LEEP Program Features
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I foresaw people contributing to the pages themselves. If others think this is a problem, let me know. Until people object, I've copied Dave's comments to the main article. -Ingbert
The invitation to contribute wasn't clear about discussion section vs. editing the topic pages themselves. With this one, it seemed appropriate to begin in the discussion section.
In my view, the most important LEEP program feature is the least utilized: support for multiple protocols (not just multiple browsers) and the degree to which content management and interactivity are relatively decoupled. We could be doing a better job of this, but what worries me is how much worse we could be doing.
Right now it is at least *possible* to interact with the message boards using an authenticating NNTP client. That means you can use an actual text editor, instead of the faux editor that one can approximate in a web browser. A blind MLS student would have a chance of integrating her RBD and speech software successfully. Sending email to the boards has some occasional problems (mostly due to deceptive advertising on the Express Mail menu) but that works reasonably well (true crossposting would be nice). Connecting via FTP requires that you figure out the port number, but that works too. It is really important that we not lose sight of how valuable these features are.
There's lots of room to do even better: authentication via our LDAP, integrating the LEEP files with the other shared file systems as was done with classrm0*. But if we assume that everyone will use a web browser then that would be a mistake. If we deploy a solution that intimately couples content storage with the front end (however friendly) then we're courting major problems.
Dave
