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

[Jason Shao (CampusEAI Consortium)]

On 4/5/09 2:50 PM, "Michael Feldstein" <michael.feldstein at oracle.com> wrote:

> Ideally, whether the community chooses a third-party component to handle WCM
> or builds its own capabilities, it would be done in such a way that other
> alternatives could be swapped in (either by an individual adoptee or by the
> community, should the third-party component chosen become less desirable down
> the road) with a manageable amount of work.

Michael - I have to admit, I'm not sure I subscribe to the "institutional
pluggability" premise these days. I strongly question whether the idea of
institutions swapping out major components of Sakai or other tools is good
at either the institutional or community level.

The engineer in me harkens much more strongly to the 2nd argument, but
again, I wonder if that's ignoring some realities.

1. Except in relatively simple scenarios, it's much harder to truly abstract
base components without either losing functionality, increasing complexity,
or ending up with a tightly-coupled wrapper layer (I've seen lots of
platforms stuck on the latter, negating the advantages)

2. Rewriting Sakai every X number of years might be completely viable...
We're on essentially rewrite # 3?

Having said that, the CMS + Sakai=templates? Widgets/RESTful hooks use case
seems very compelling to me. Esp. given that Cambridge's initial work could
almost be considered using HTML templates w/o CMS capabilities - this may be
a logical adaptation and raises really intriguing thoughts about being able
to embed learning contexts wherever they may live -- wikis, websites,
portals, desktop applications...

Jason

P.S. In thinking about wikis, I wonder if "user editable, versioned web
pages" and "wiki-markup" are becoming increasingly non-synonomous. Deki,
Google Apps, and other platforms all fit most wiki usage models, while
mostly dropping the idea of wiki-markup for straight HTML or WYSYWIG editing
modes... I strongly suspect that wiki-markup is a transitional technology,
much like I'd argue LaTeX has become...

--
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