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

[Clay Fenlason]

+1 to the idea that a more usable wiki, alone, will plainly not
satisfy most of our users, and that we're better off abstracting away
from wiki conventions and attending to the capabilities people find so
valuable within them.  I'd also echo the feeling that treating this as
a wiki integration problem can make it seem a peripheral concern
rather than locating the issue where it belongs:  at the core of what
Sakai offers.

John makes a strong point that although this approach lies behind a
lot of the Sakai 3 work, it need not be exclusive to it.  Is the
interest in the wiki capabilities strong enough to allow for a
collaboration that cuts across Sakai versions to happen?

On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 12:26 PM, Michael Feldstein
<michael.feldstein at oracle.com> wrote:
> One more note on implementation. I have suggested so far that this is
> something that could and possibly should be built into the Sakai core. But,
> as I have brought up several times before on these lists, there is a second
> way to achieve this aim--one that may require little or even no coding. If
> every page in the Sakai 3 UI is simply HTML and Javascript, then every page
> can be managed in a standard web content management system, which would
> bring page versioning, rollback, and granular access privileges for free,
> along with some other capabilities such as the ability to require different
> access privileges for editing different portions of the page, approval
> workflows, and other good stuff. My current instincts on the best way to go
> here has evolved somewhat; I now believe that it's a good idea to take the
> first route (i.e., building the basics into core) but also to make sure that
> the conventions followed facilitate individual adoptees taking the second
> route for the extra value added where that makes sense for them.

On that implementation note, what if it what were deeply rooted in
Sakai was a 3rd-party framework for providing (scriptable) RESTful
access to content?  It seems to me that would offer the promise of
accomplishing the various aims you lay out, doing so in a unified way,
and not having to write the core functionality ourselves.  "Sakai
core" itself might be a misnomer where it's really specializations
(especially in the way of authorization complexities) riding on top of
something more generic.  I think K2 is heading this direction.

~Clay