[Using Sakai] Twenty-First Century Interactions on Sakai?

[Marshall Feldman]

Hello,

Since I started using Sakai, the most constant and important complaint 
from students has been that Sakai sites are confusing to navigate. This 
stems from the fact that every Sakai tool used for a class has to have a 
tab on the left-side margin. Once you get past about six tools, finding 
your way around the site becomes difficult.

Back in the 1960's a similar problem beset computer file systems. Then 
the good folk at MIT's Project MAC and AT&T's Bell Labs invented 
hierarchical file systems, which helped users organize their files in a 
more coherent fashion. Because it has subpages, Sakai's Lesson Builder 
tool has the potential to end the madness and allow instructors to 
design sensible, coherent, and easily navigated course sites. But 
there's one problem!

Even the relatively advanced Lesson Builder tool is so twentieth 
century. To see what I mean, look at some of these examples 
<http://www.yugiohforums.com/showthread.php?t=54383> of what can be done 
in a modern browser on a web page with just the latest versions of HTML 
and CSS. (For a good example, play the simple game.) Nothing I've seen 
on Sakai comes anywhere close. I know of no Sakai tool that uses 
anything but the simple, twentieth century metaphor of click-a-link, 
open-a-window, fill-in-a-form.

But maybe there's hope. The Lesson Builder lets the course designer 
insert formatted text, which is essentially HTML. So the first question 
is, what kind of HTML? Is it HTML4 or HTML5? Thanks to Sakai's very 
excellent documentation -- NOT! -- I have no idea. Does anyone out there 
know?

Next, and more important, is there any way to use JavaScript or, even 
better, a JavaScript library like jQuery in one of these HTML text inserts?

In particular, responding to students' requests, this fall I'm trying to 
use a syllabus summarized in a table, as shown in this video 
<https://collab.itc.virginia.edu/docs/videos/rale/rale-video.html>, as a 
portal to the entire course and get rid of all the unnecessary noise in 
the tab menu. The course is organized into five parts, and each part 
consists of one or more weeks focusing on specific subjects. For each 
week's subject, I give the students some guidance on how to approach the 
week's material. Sometimes this guidance is a sentence or two, and 
sometimes it's a paragraph or two. If I start putting all this in the 
table, it becomes almost as cumbersome as the accursed left-side tabs. 
So here's the thing.

The most obvious solution is to make the inserted HTML (text) dynamic. 
On a regular web page using a jQuery plugin this is almost trivial. You 
just have a short amount of text and then a "read more" link that 
expands the text when the student wants to read the whole thing. See 
this example 
<http://plugins.learningjquery.com/expander/demo/index.html>. But how to 
do this in Sakai?

In particular, if one inserts text in a Lesson page, how does one load 
the jQuery library and insert the script code to activate the dynamic 
interaction?

Thanks for your help.

     Marsh Feldman
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