[DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] Wiki's and Sakai

Jason Shao (CampusEAI Consortium) jason_shao at campuseai.org
Sat Apr 4 08:30:05 PDT 2009 

>From a functionality/architecture point of view, the idea of loosly coupled
integrations with external services like wikis, or Google Apps, or other
tools seems very attractive.

*however*

There are significant horizontal capability components that while not
impossible to resolve may complicate that scenario. Initial thoughts:

* TOS - ensuring users understand external, but integrated tools may have
separate terms of service, SLAs, data ownership/retention policies, etc.
* import/export - I think the ability to "package" and port a
course/site/project or archive it is something that lots of people want.
Again possible (treat external resources as links? Embed their content?
Cry?) but I think it has some strong implications in user experience and
architecture
* Search - this one might actually be a bit more straightforward

I will make the observation/parallel from the portal world - CampusEAI is
currently heavily involved in building out a social portal, that combines
the integration of enterprise services & applications with natively managed
content like blogs, wikis, discussions, profile, etc. As we continue to get
further down this road, some interesting intersections between user
expectations and boundaries between external and internal content continue
to present themselves up.

So far the balance we've come up with is largely - some stuff is in, some
stuff is out, but there's continual tension on the boarders of that
distinction, and I'm not confident that that particular firewall will hold
or be appropriate in the long run.

Not sure I have good answers for you :) Just a brain-dump of my internal
thought processes these days.

Jason

On 4/4/09 11:12 AM, "Nate Angell" <nate.angell at rsmart.com> wrote:

> It is these kind of decisions that I was thinking about in my recent
> blog post about lessons Sakai might take from Drupal:
> http://xolotl.org/node319
> 
> I believe basic content authoring should be part of Sakai's core
> functionality. Collaborative, wiki-style authoring is also core to
> Sakai's purposes as recently defined by Michael Korcuska. Wiki
> requirements are so few above and beyond those for other modes of
> authoring, I think they could be part of core as John Norman suggests.
> 
> If we deem wikis outside Sakai core, then the best path is not to
> choose a single wiki to integrate (woe our integration with *only* the
> oft-maligned, unfortunately-named FCKeditor), but to make easy
> integration with *any* external wiki possible.
> 
> My rule if thumb would be: either core and generic, or pluggable and
> open.
> 
> On Apr 4, 2009, at 5:11 AM, DAVID ROLDAN MARTINEZ <darolmar at upvnet.upv.es
>> wrote:
> 
>> Yes, very interesting conversation. From my point of view those four
>> characteristics (simple versioning/rollback, WYSIWYG, easy page
>> generation and page linking, basic level of access control) should
>> apply to all ways of content generation in Sakai 3.x as they
>> contribute to make the environment much more intuitive and usable.
>> 
>> Relating to integrate existing products within Sakai...Chris, I
>> completely agree with you.. Diego del Blanco and me were talking
>> about this last week. There's no sense in develop what is developed
>> yet. If there is a powerful solution or an application that
>> everybody use, why don't to get it integrated in Sakai? The problem
>> then is which criteria follow to determine to-be-integrated app? Do
>> we integrate only standard-compilant app or do we develop a wrapper
>> layer to be able to integrate several app?
>> 
>> David
>> ________________________________________
>> De: sakai-ux-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org
>> [sakai-ux-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org
>> ] En nombre de Christopher D. Coppola [chris.coppola at rsmart.com]
>> Enviado el: viernes, 03 de abril de 2009 21:56
>> Para: John Ansorge
>> CC: Sakai UX; pedagogy Learning
>> Asunto: Re: [DG: User Experience] [DG: Teaching & Learning] Wiki's
>> and Sakai
>> 
>> Interesting conversation. Nate Angell and I were talking about this
>> the other day and agree that these are the desirable
>> characteristics. There's a screen cast of a product called Mindtouch
>> Deki that I think demonstrates these essential elements. They stay
>> away from calling their product (which is open source) a wiki. It
>> doesn't use wiki text, it uses standards compliant xhtml. Check out
>> the screencast: http://www.mindtouch.com/
>> 
>> Another potential solution at least for the 2.x branch that we've
>> been talking about is to integrate with an existing product like
>> this. Anyone else thinking about that?
>> 
>> /chris
>> --
>> rSmart
>> Chris Coppola | 602.490.0472
>> blog: coppola.rsmart.com<http://coppola.rsmart.com/>
>> 
>> On Apr 3, 2009, at 12:07 PM, John Ansorge wrote:
>> 
>> I completely agree that the Sakai 3 content authoring shows great
>> promise and it would be great to see a little bit of that
>> functionality function in 2.x.
>> 
>> While wiki syntax can be useful, I think for most student and
>> faculty needs WYSIWYG is far more desirable.  I think what most of
>> our instructors/students are looking for in the wiki is this:
>> 
>> *   simple versioning/rollback
>> *   WYSIWYG
>> *   easy page generation and page linking
>> *   basic level of access control (group-aware would be great, but
>> role-based is ok, too)
>> 
>> That's enough to allow group collaboration on a project in the wiki
>> tool without needing to know wiki markup.  The current wiki is
>> close, but I don't think we should underestimate the learning curve
>> that wiki-markup presents for many users.  It's really easy for a
>> typo or small formatting mistake to mess up an entire page when we
>> leave it to humans to generate markup code.
>> 
>> John Norman wrote:
>> 
>> FWIW we see the content authoring solution planned for Sakai 3 as
>> combining the best of both worlds for site creation and wiki pages. We
>> haven't quite figured out what the UX should be to separate out 'wiki'
>> use of authoring (i.e. students can edit pages) from 'content
>> management' use of authoring (site owners - faculty - can edit pages),
>> but the technology is there.
>> 
>> So there are (at least) two options for a collaborative project:
>> 1. Fix up the nearly done work that exists (should be a small task)
>> 2. Introduce the content authoring paradigm into the Sakai 2 roadmap.
>> Mostly working, a step towards Sakai 3, but with a larger QA load and
>> requiring JCR to be active in the deployment.
>> 
>> Michael's Sakai 3 demo (running on Sakai 2.5/K1) shows what this
>> intermediate solution might look like (focus on the 'create new web
>> page' parts and imagine you give your students permission to do this).
>> There would almost certainly need to be some UX work to make this work
>> well for a combined 'content management' and 'wiki' scenario.
>> 
>> John
>> 
>> On 2 Apr 2009, at 01:37, Hardman, Gloria wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Hello all
>> 
>> Our faculty have generally found the Wiki too difficult as well.  A
>> few have done wonders with it and their students participated with
>> enthusiasm.     For most, it is too much effort to figure it all out.
>> 
>> For those who have used more user-friendly Wiki software it is hard
>> to understand why we can't offer a more user-friendly solution.
>> 
>> We were also hoping for a better editor in 2.6.
>> 
>> 
>> All the best
>> 
>> Gloria
>> 
>> 
>> On 4/1/09 4:59 PM, "May, Megan Marie"
>> <mmmay at indiana.edu><mailto:mmmay at indiana.edu
>>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi everyone,
>> Here at IU we're disappointed that the WYSIWYG editing capabilities
>> aren't going to make the 2.6.0 release (see message below for the
>> announcement/rationale).     We've found that faculty try the wiki
>> in Sakai but end up switching to free and inexpensive hosted
>> solutions because they are so much easier to use.   Obviously, the
>> wysiwyg would greatly improve the user experience but it wouldn't
>> resolve the 'ease of use' issues we're hearing about.  This has made
>> us wonder if it might be wise to explore other options, like
>> integration with existing wiki applications.
>> 
>> Do other institutions receive similar feedback?   Has anyone looked
>> into integrating Sakai with a different wiki solution?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Megan
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> From: Pete Peterson [mailto:plpeterson at ucdavis.edu]
>> Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 4:45 PM
>> To: 'Sakai Developers'; 'Sakai QA';
>> production at collab.sakaiproject.org<mailto:production at collab.sakaiproject.org
>>> 
>> Cc: Michael Korcuska; Knoop, Peter; Anthony Whyte; Pete Peterson;
>> May, Megan Marie; Stephen Swinsburg; David Horwitz
>> Subject: Important information about Sakai 2.6.0 and the rWiki tool
>> 
>> Greetings Sakai Community,
>> 
>> We have been unable to resolve a number of issues with the 2.6 rwiki
>> code, centered around the WYSIWYG editing capabilities and data loss
>> under certain conditions.  At this point in the release cycle we are
>> opting to replace it with the 2.5.x version of rwiki, making the
>> necessary changes to make it compatible with the 2.6 codebase.  We
>> are also re-applying some of the minor fixes and improvements
>> intended for the 2.6 version of rwiki to the 2.5.x-based version
>> (see SAK-15866 
>> <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866><http://jira.sakaiproject
>> .org/jira/browse/SAK-15866
>>> <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866
>> 
>> 
>> for more details).
>> 
>> 
>> Summary
>> *        We have rolled the rwiki code back to the 2.5 version which
>> has proven stable in many production instances.
>> 
>> ·        Many of the updated rwiki features that are present in
>> trunk/ the original 2.6 version, have been merged back into this
>> version. Details of this effort can be viewed at SAK-15866
>> <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866
>> 
>> 
>> <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15866><http://jira.sakaiproject
>> .org/jira/browse/SAK-15866
>>>  (many thanks
>> 
>> 
>> to Steve Swinsburg for his work on this issue).
>> 
>> *        This new hybrid-rwiki has been tested and seems to work as
>> expected.
>> 
>> 
>> With regards to the WYSIWYG editing capabilities for rwiki scheduled
>> for inclusion in  Sakai 2.6 (SAK-8535
>> <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-8535
>> 
>> 
>> <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-8535><http://jira.sakaiproject.
>> org/jira/browse/SAK-8535
>>> ), we will
>> 
>> 
>> continue explore options for implementing such functionality at a
>> later time.  This is an oft requested features, so if you are
>> interested in helping us explore and implement possible solutions,
>> please contact Peter Knoop <mailto:knoop at umich.edu><mailto:knoop at umich.edu
>>> <mailto:knoop at umich.edu
>> 
>> 
>> , Sakai Project Coordinator.
>> 
>> 
>> If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please send them
>> to us by 3/31/2009.
>> 
>> Thank you for your time and support,
>> 
>> Pete Peterson
>> QA Director, Sakai Foundation
>> plpeterson at ucdavis.edu<mailto:plpeterson at ucdavis.edu>
>> Phone: +1-530-754-7259
>> 
>> 
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--
Jason Shao
Director of Product Development
CampusEAI Consortium
1940 East 6th Street, 11th Floor
Cleveland, OH 44114
Tel: 216.589.9626x249
Fax: 216.589.9639

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