[Using Sakai] Suggestions wanted for short-term Sakai customization projects

[Marshall Feldman]

Brian Moynihan wrote:
> I am putting together a proposal for for a course here at UNC to have a 
> group of  students develop customizations for Sakai, and I was wondering 
> if anyone had any suggestions of something that would be workable. The 
> group working on the project will be composed of
> three upper-level undergraduate Computer Science majors putting in about 
> 300 hours of development work. They are fairly experienced with Java but 
> do not have any experience with Sakai.
>
> UNC is currently running a Sakai pilot through Unicon, but we would love 
> to take advantage of any local talent that will offer to help. 
> Unfortunately I only learned about this opportunity so I only have until 
> about noon on Wednesday 8/26 (EST) to come up with ideas for the proposal.
>
> Does anyone have any ideas of something that would be of appropriate 
> scope, and hopefully of some wider use to the community?
>
> Thanks in advance for your help!
> -Brian
>   
I'm not sure what you mean by "workable." If you mean doable in the 
context of a class, I'm not sure as I've never looked at Sakai's innards.

On the other hand, if you want ideas for a relatively simple project 
that would be a great boon to the greater Sakai community, consider this.

Linking to Sakai's tools poses two serious problems. First, linking to a 
given tool from either another tool or from a user-authored web page is 
not as easy as copying and pasting the URL. At best, most links entered 
this way open up the entire Sakai window within the frame. At worst, 
they don't work. Only in a few cases (e.g., to a specific Assignment 
from a tool that allows HTML composition) do they work acceptably. 
Second, even when they work, they are not portable across different 
replications of a site.

This project would create a correspondence table between a simple syntax 
for referring to Sakai tools (e.g. "~~Schedule") or locations within the 
tools (e.g., ~~Wiki:<PATH>, ~~Schedule:<DATE>, ~~Forum:<TOPIC><THREAD>; 
) and the actual, workable URL for the item. When a document contains 
the reference syntax, the software would look up the corresponding URL 
and substitute it in the document. The correspondence table would have a 
standard set of reference names, each corresponding to the root level of 
a given tool (e.g., "~~Forum"), and the corresponding URL. If the 
reference name has a modifier (e.g., "~~Forum:'my thread'"), the 
software would locate the appropriate element within the corresponding 
tool. The table itself could be initialized either manually or by having 
the software scan the tools for their corresponding URLs.

Good luck.
-- 
Dr. Marshall Feldman, PhD
Director of Research and Academic Affairs

Center for Urban Studies and Research
The University of Rhode Island
email: marsh @ uri .edu (remove spaces)


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