Make consistent choices about soting remote data in local JSON files.

[titaniumbones]

How should we manage Canvas (or other LMS) data that we have retrieved once? Most of the time it's fine to treat it as ephemeral, or to store a limited number of attributes in org headlines. In some cases, though, it may be convenient to have offline or otherwise persistent access to the full range of information:

• Student Lists: Sometimes it's convenient to store extra data about students that the LMS doesn't care about. For instance:
  • Nicknames -- this can be especially useful for foreign students who use English names in conversation
  • Github ID -- I use these a lot in some of my courses It seems to make sense to store this information locally. It would be nice to be able to keep it updated (using current student lists rather than outdated ones when people drop/add/etc. )
• Assignment Data: On the one hand, we can just store assignment data in the source text files as properties. This makes a lot of sense within the assignment description source files. But that information also needs to travel to the grading files (which often live outside of the main git repo for the class). It would be nice to osmehow keep all the information in a single place. Should we do this with JSON files?

It's now possible to write JSON to a file before processing it. Let's think about when and how often to do that, and how to access it later.