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The Resource Tool provides several means to upload images into a collection: singely, multiply, zipped, and via WebDAV. Once in place, access permissions can be specified, release and retraction dates defined, and order imposed. Note that some of these operations are not enabled by default in the Sakai 2.3 release.
Use Cases
Instructors
- Create collection
- Organize images within a collection
- Organize collections (within the gallery) by subject, class session, ?????
- Assign students a collection for review (for an exam for instance)
- Assign students an image for review
- Assign students a certain group of images (may come from a variety of collections) for review (all images of Frank Lloyd Wright's early work from the semester for instance)
- See what students see
Students
- Find a particular image and see details for review
- Find a collection and review it
- Browse collections in the course
- Study for an upcoming exam (review course images)
- Find image(s) for an assignment
Once we have a solid design to support the primary goal, we can start thinking about how we might be able to tweak things to support the secondary goal if time, resources, etc. allow.
To be clear, I'm not assuming that users will be able to complete each activity (use case) above in the system (and likely they won't). To understand the user's experience though I like to think through how the set of activities that help meet the goal will be affected by the system. So, for instance, for "assign students an image for review"... it's not likely we'll support the "assignment" of the image but understanding the complete activity will help me understand the experience without thinking about the gallery tool as a silo. It will also help me get real with trade-offs. Already this list reminds me how much we will be depending on the resources tool and the ability for users to create their collections in meaningful ways via the Resources tool.
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These use cases lack a clear definition of collections vs. galleries. From a content hosting point of view, there is no difference. Presumably, galleries are an ordered set of images. A collection might be a set of galleries and sub-collections. This has a serious impact on the Gallery Tool design since it affects how the user navigates to a gallery to view it's images. |
Viewing and Sequencing
The Gallery tool provides four five main functions at this time:1.
- Navigate to a gallery.
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- View and edit metadata associated with a gallery.
- View the gallery as an array of thumbnails.
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- View an image full sized, perhaps in a pop-up window.
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- View the gallery sequentially, perhaps in a pop-up window.
When an image is displayed full size, it should include it's name and description text (if any). It may be possible, when a single image is select for display, to jump into the seuqence for that image. That would allow the user to then move back and forth in the sequence and see near by images (etc).
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The application is considered to have three four main states:
- NavigationCollection
- navigationGallery Metadata
- Gallery ViewThumbnails
- Image View (and sequencing)
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