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

[Matt Clare]

Hi Marhall,

	I think you make a good point, and I think it's one that the community is aware of, though perhaps the community at large is not giving the issue the attention it merits. 

	Sakai OAE addresses most of your concerns, however Sakai OAE does not have many to the tools/uses you mention and it is likely not the solution to the CLE-based concerns you've identified.

	The Sakai CLE does ship with jQuery.  It's found at <your installation>/library/js/jquery.js .  Many tools make use of it (Forums and Lesson Builder being two easy to spot examples).  Many do not.  It would be up to the tool developers to make use of it's functionality and recent comments from Sakai CLE developers suggest they are scrambling to fix bugs, let alone add features/functionality.

	For your use case, and in the interest of you having a solution for September, if you are comfortable adding HTML files to Sakai you can use the provided jQuery library and the examples you site for things like your syllabus.  The Web Content tool offers a simple way to replace the syllabus tool (my own practice). As for adding this JQuery-based functionality to tools, from an "end user" perspective you'd need the security features that prevent JavaScript from coming from "end users" disabled (there are a number of ways to do this, the simplest way is having your Sakai admin let you use the CKEditor of the FCKEditor) then you could include the techniques you linked to.

	To answer your question, Sakai uses a transitional version of (X)HTML4 - as indicated by the first line of each HTML page -- not that this excuses not documenting the answer to this question!  Good news is that doesn't preclude HTML5 being used in places.

	In Summary, I think you've identified a key issue Marshal, one the Sakai OAE developers and boosters came to a while ago.  Because your institutions is running the Sakai CLE and because the Sakai OAE does not do the same things the CLE does there's no solution to point you towards today, and moreover, there only appears to be incremental improvements on the horizon for the Sakai CLE - not need wholesale harmonization you've identified.

	If you'd like any advice subverting well meaning technical restrictions with Rhode Islands Sakai server I'd be happy to help,

.\.\att

On 2012-08-24, at 12:53 PM, Marshall Feldman wrote:

> 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 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, 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. 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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  ::  Matt Clare
Centre for Pedagogical Innovation (formerly CTLET)
Part-time Instructor, Interactive Arts and Sciences
Brock University, Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada
www.brocku.ca/ctlet  905 688 5550 xt 4539   Office: SBH315

Isaak/Sakai Question? Contact edtech at brocku.ca or visit  http://kumu.brocku.ca/sakai/FAQ