Draft 2.6 Requirements and Goals

Goals

• Deliver small scale local pilot to UCB campus starting no later than fall 2008
• Contribute to and leverage work in the Fluid project to develop a component for file upload
• Explore the relationship between file management and presentation within Sakai to help evolve UX in this area

Requirements 

Within the IG interface, OOTB Instructors/Maintainers will be able to

• Select one or more image files on a desktop for upload
• Select a zip archive of image files on a desktop for upload
• Incorporate one or more image files with their descriptions (which fields?) from within the Resources repository
• Add a description to images - during upload or incorporation from Resources or anytime thereafter
• Create and edit a working title for each image independent of its file name on the desktop or the Resources repository
• Sort the files alphabetically by working title and/or filename
• Place image files in an automatically generated top level collection* that is visible exclusively to Instructors/Maintainers (or do we require that collections be created before files can be added to IG?)
• Create one or more collections of images
• Create a collection with contents identical to a zip archive during the upload process
• Reorder images within the collections (persisted across sessions)
• Move images among the collections (persisted across sessions) -- perhaps this is an extension of the lightbox component
• Copy images from one collection into another
• Remove images from any and all collections
• Re-order the collections
• Sort the collections alphabetically by title
• Set a timed release for collections
• View count of images in a collection

Within the IG interface, OOTB TAs and Students/Access will be able to 

• View collections as organized  by the Instructor/Maintainer 

 or

• Sort the files alphabetically by working title and/or filename
• Reorder images within the collections (persisted across sessions)
• Re-order the collections (persisted across sessions)
• Sort the collections alphabetically by title
• View count of images in a collection
• Reset collections and images to Instructor\Maintainer-defined organization

Repository 

Performance

• Automatic image scaling? How do we balance performance, archival, file space, pedagogical considerations?

AuthZ

• Permission to create and manage collections should be applicable to local, institutionally defined roles

*For documentation purposes, it is critical to keep the nomenclature attached to file management within a repository distinct from what is used to describe similar functions within the IG tool. Let's try to reserve the term "Folders" for the file manager/repo and "Collections" for IG (Unfortunately, "Galleries" is often awkwardly redundant). We may need to distinguish between collections and presentations, too, if we find that required file management-like operations on IG collections need to be separated from the actual organization of files as they are presented to end users. Or perhaps we should consider simply using Presentations rather than Collections, if that split does not come to pass?

Future Phase Requirements

• Allow metadata to be specific to a context - much information like filename, worktitle, location should live with the file wherever it is used.  There is also information specific to where and how the image is being used that is important (e.g. these 2 images together represent the evolution of Picasso's work around technique).
• Allow sharing of images
  • peer to peer
  • departments
  • ad hoc groups
  • student to student & student to instructor
  • Different users can add their own meaning/context to images
• My Workspace Image Gallery allows users to maintain all their images.  They can pull or push them in to other contexts. 
• Allow powerpoints in the Image Gallery since many faculty are starting to use it as a way to create their lectures (rather than just the traditional side by side comparison they did with slides). The ppt should be able to run as a slide slow just like a collection. In essence, the ppt file is a collection.
• The ability to drag objects to specific spots on the screen, or dragging objects such that they might overlap other objects, or leaving blank "spots" between objects to move other objects to later.
  • Similar to a traditional lightbox, users should be able to very interactively create ad hoc "piles" of images that they might title with a concept. Then they sort the piles in many different ways as they move toward creating an image by image order for lecture.
  • Peter Knoop: As an example, I have a bunch of thumbnail images of students' screens from ImageQuiz, on which they've sketched out a response to a question or a concept map in class, and I want to quickly drag them into a few different piles to sort out the responses. Everyone can look at the size of those piles to see what the proportions of responses are for different opinions; if it's a right-wrong type experience, then there is hopefully just one big pile. I might also choose to grab a pile and spread them out in a snap-to-grad, auto-arrange way to talk about the variability in a set of the related responses, but leave the other piles on the sides of the view for reference.