[DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] Wiki's and Sakai
Brian Dashew
Brian.Dashew at marist.edu
Mon Apr 6 10:28:31 PDT 2009
Hello:
I've been reading these Wiki emails with a great deal of interest. At
Marist, we run a 'special topics' workshop on how to use the wiki, both
from a technical and pedagogical perspective. I've only been here a short
time, but the wiki workshops have been the most well attended and well
received of those I have run, which says to me that a) there is certainly
a great deal of interest in a wiki that is integrated into the Sakai
toolbase and b) with a little bit of training (our workshop is
approximately two hours long), faculty can overcome the learning curve in
using wiki markup. Having said that, I can certainly see the benefits of
some of the upgrades suggested, but we do not have the programming
resources to throw behind a solution, so we are flexing to the
capabilities of the tool.
All that is a prelude to my suggestion to move the conversation about a
stopgap measure to an investigation of upgrades necessary for the Sakai
wiki to be widely accepted as THE wiki solution for institutions using
Sakai (i.e., if we need a more robust, user-friendly wiki, what does that
entail? and does that description necessitate one of the interim solutions
that has been proposed?). I think if we can target necessary upgrades,
there will be more clarity in decisions about how to proceed
(integrating/waiting for Sakai 3 authoring capabilities, seeking to
integrate an existing wiki, making specific updates to the existing
wiki?).
I've been through the emails and I've tried to cull the various wiki
requirements (some of which are being met by the current wiki; some of
which are not).
- Simple versioning/roll back [yes]
- WYSIWYG (or FCKEditor?) [no]
- Easy page generation/linking [yes]
- Group awareness [no]
- Role awareness [moderate]
- Defined UX to separate wiki use of authoring from content management of
authoring [no]
- Import/export existing format [to word/pdf, but not to another wiki]
- Copy/paste from word [not while maintaining styles]
- Searching [no]
- Archiving [no]
- Tagging [no]
- Gradebook integration [no, but evidently easy to achieve?]
- Ease of creating tables/grids/graphic organizers [moderate]
- Compatibility (or visibility) of terms of service [if we use external
product only]
- Ease of integration with Sakai (two way) [if we use external product]
I think it probably makes sense for this to live on Confluence as it's
being discussed but I don't have editing rights on the wiki tool space. I
suggest we answer the following questions:
- Is that list of 15 items comprehensive? [if not, let's add to it]
- For each functionality listed: does this functionality currently exist
[I have tried to do that in brackets above]? If not, how difficult would
it be to implement?
- For each functionality listed: how necessary is this functionality to
users being able to implement wiki activities in their classes?
Does this process seem like the appropriate way to start drawing some
conclusions?
Thank you,
Brian
---------------------
Brian Dashew
Instructional Designer, Academic Technology & eLearning
Marist College
Library 317
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
(845) 575-3303
Email: Brian.Dashew at marist.edu
From:
"Christopher D. Coppola" <chris.coppola at rsmart.com>
To:
Michael Korcuska <mkorcuska at sakaifoundation.org>
Cc:
pedagogy Learning <pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org>, Sakai UX
<sakai-ux at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Date:
04/06/2009 11:20 AM
Subject:
Re: [DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] Wiki's and Sakai
I agree that the ideal path is a core capability and perhaps backporting
is an option. I was just thinking perhaps as a 2.x stopgap integration
might be worth cosidering. I'm not in favor of it or against it... I was
just throwing out the idea.
Google docs integration is probably valuable in either case. I've become
less of a fan of Confluence for non-technical users.
/chris
--
rSmart
Chris Coppola | 602.490.0472
blog: coppola.rsmart.com
On Apr 6, 2009, at 2:18 AM, Michael Korcuska wrote:
I guess I'd much rather see the work that is already happening in "3akai"
on content authoring be back-ported to 2.x. This keeps everyone in Sakai
working with similar technology and potentially sets a much easier
transition path from 2.x to 3.0 for users.
And if someone wanted to pursue the integration path wouldn't Google docs
or Confluence be more appealing?
Michael
On Apr 3, 2009, at 21:56, Christopher D. Coppola wrote:
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
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> 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
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
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> (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> ), 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
, 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
Phone: +1-530-754-7259
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--
Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska at sakaifoundation.org
phone: +1 510-931-6559
mobile (US): +1 510-599-2586
skype: mkorcuska
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