[DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] micro-commentary use case for gradable content in Sakai 3?

[Robert Squillace]

Dear All,

I wanted to support John's point about the value of an annotation tool capable of handling commentary on material outside Sakai.  I think such a tool would be enormously useful, and could in fact make humanities faculty fall in rapturous love with Sakai 3.  The reason is social reading - social reading is probably the killer app for  faculty in humanities fields, as Lucy Appert and I discovered at a summer roundtable she organized in our program.  Even technophobic faculty members who haven't the faintest idea why they would ever tag anything or participate in an online network with colleagues will say things like, "What I'd REALLY like to be able to do is have a text online that all my students could mark up TOGETHER, the way I encourage them to mark up their individual books (which they avoid doing because they want to sell them back to the book store at the end of the semester)."  

An annotation tool that allowed commentary on e-books outside Sakai might provide the very functionality they are describing (if such a tool could allow the posting of links, attachments, and images, all the better).  Some of our instructors have used applications like Book Glutton, but it has the same problem that all 3rd party apps have - the comments students post belong to Book Glutton and live only on the Book Glutton server; they don't belong to the student and can't be stored in a personal repository, shared outside the Book Glutton site, etc.  Even the ability to annotate particular passages the instructor has snapshot (snapshotted?) from whatever source (within fair use, of course) would be extremely welcome - being able to post, say, a T'ang Dynasty Chinese lyric or a Shakespearean soliloquy that all students in a class could annotate would be a godsend for many instructors, and the ability for students to maintain ownership of their annotations is crucial.  [Furth
er out, one could even imagine a class collaboratively turning a plain-text edition of a work (the e-book equivalent of a Dover thrift edition - and, of course, very few e-books include any scholarly apparatus at all) into a critical edition - or such scholarly editing at a higher level among faculty colleagues].

Yours,
Bob Squillace

Dr. Robert L Squillace
Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs
Liberal Studies Program
New York University
726 Broadway, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10003-9580
(212) 992-8735
rs84 at nyu.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: John Norman <john at caret.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Monday, September 13, 2010 4:47 pm
Subject: Re: [DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience]	micro-commentary use case for gradable content in Sakai 3?
To: Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus at gmail.com>
Cc: pedagogy Learning <pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org>, Sakai UX <sakai-ux at collab.sakaiproject.org>

> I think it is easy to recognise this need, but I think when we get to 
> design time, we might want to make sure we can handle commentary on 
> material that may not be inside Sakai. I can't summon a convincing 
> example right now, but say all students were encouraged to publish a 
> blog on Blogger. You might want to be able to snapshot an article and 
> comment on it for teaching purposes, with those comments (and maybe 
> even grades) being available to Sakai later. I suspect that if we 
> design with this potential situation in mind we will create a more 
> powerful and flexible solution.
> 
> John
> 
> On 13 Sep 2010, at 14:21, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 3:14 AM, Kenneth Robert Romeo
> > <kenro at stanford.edu> wrote:
> >> This is a great question - it is exactly the kind of capability 
> many of us
> >> in the T&L group are hoping for in future versions of Sakai.  I 
> guess the
> >> more pertinent question (or impertinent, depending on how you look 
> at it)
> >> is *when* this kind of capability is going to be supported in 
> Sakai.  If I
> >> am not mistaken, it is not in the roadmap yet.  Even just a best guess
> >> might be more possible than it was a year ago ....
> > 
> > FWIW, my point in raising the use case was just to make sure it's
> > considered as part of the formal design process, with the assumption
> > that if it is not, then a) the feature surely will not be there in
> > initial versions of Sakai 3, and b) it may be more difficult to add 
> it
> > later.
> > 
> > The link Michael sent, I believe, shows that micro-commentary is a
> > known general problem, and so not difficult to implement. But I
> > imagine the edu-specific "wrinkle" I mentioned would offer some UI/UX
> > challenges, and hence some resources.
> > 
> > Bruce
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