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

Tue Sep 14 08:13:25 PDT 2010

We actually tried using Flickr for social viewing a few years ago, but the problem we ran into was that the discussion threads did not actually accompany the image on screen; the discussion functionality was off on a separate page, so you couldn't easily read the discussion and look at the image simultaneously.  I think what faculty imagine when they think of social reading ranges from a standard threaded discussion to something more like FreeMind - the use cases are many.

Yours,
Bob

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: Nate Angell <nangell at rsmart.com>
Date: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 10:25 am
Subject: Re: [DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] micro-commentary use case for gradable content in Sakai 3?
To: Michael Feldstein <michael.feldstein at oracle.com>
Cc: Robert Squillace <rs84 at nyu.edu>, John Norman <john at caret.cam.ac.uk>, Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus at gmail.com>, pedagogy Learning <pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org>, Sakai UX <sakai-ux at collab.sakaiproject.org>

> An addition to your use cases that I think pertains to Bruce's
> original use case and in Robert's would be for *threaded* commentary
> between a user and instructor, or multiple users, which would cover
> the iterative feedback and group annotation use cases. If there were
> ties to Sakai, it would be just like anchoring a typical threaded
> discussion between some number of users to a specific passage/image.
> 
> Flickr provides a pretty usable image annotation capability that might
> serve as a good model.
> 
> - Nate
> 
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Michael Feldstein
> <michael.feldstein at oracle.com> wrote:
> > This idea is expanding fast, so let's try to segment the use cases. 
> Here are a few:
> >
> > - Users can individually mark up text-based content in the LMS.
> > - Users can collaboratively mark up text-based content in the LMS.
> > - Users can collaboratively mark up text and/or images in the LMS.
> > - Users can collaboratively mark up text and/or images out on the web.
> > - Users can collaboratively mark up texts and/or images for eBooks 
> where individual copies are stored on their offline readers and 
> synchronized online periodically.
> > - Any markup in any of the scenarios above can take a grade, rubric, 
> etc.
> >
> > Some random thoughts about the use cases:
> >
> > - Marking up items within an image is a different ballgame than 
> simply marking sections in the HTML DOM. But it could be very useful.
> > - Once you start marking up stuff outside the LMS, you need to start 
> looking at a browser plugin like Zotero (or a smart phone app). Maybe 
> there's a way to suck the external page into the LMS and mark it up 
> within an iFrame or something server-side, but that's beyond my 
> technical ability to evaluate.
> > - Marking up offline resources strikes me as by far the hardest 
> thing to do, for a variety of reasons. It's probably not practical at 
> the moment.
> > - This could be a separate, LMS-independent open source project that 
> could plug into various LMS and non-LMS projects the way Marginalia 
> does. Approaching it this way might enable us to attract other developers.
> >
> > A word of caution: There are a few private source solutions along 
> these lines, and if you've looked at them at all, you'll know that the 
> UI can get very complicated very quickly.
> >
> > - m
> >
> >
> > --
> > Oracle
> > Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager
> > Phone: +1 8188172925 | Mobile: +1 9179218895
> > Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions
> > 25 Christian Hill Road | Great Barrington, MA 01230
> >
> > Green Oracle     Oracle is committed to developing practices and 
> products that help protect the environment
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Robert Squillace [mailto:rs84 at nyu.edu]
> > Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 9:58 AM
> > To: John Norman
> > Cc: Bruce D'Arcus; pedagogy Learning; Sakai UX
> > Subject: Re: [DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] 
> micro-commentary use case for gradable content in Sakai 3?
> >
> > 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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