Present & Collaborate & Share

Summary

Users will be able to create portfolio presentations from institutional templates with configurable rigidity (from blank pages, through sample content to be replaced, to enforced restrictions on the number of pages). Portfolio presentations may be created by a single (student) user or by multiple users collaborating on a single portfolio presentation. Portfolio presentations will follow the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) design implementation.

User Stories

• Expressive Portfolio: Students are given a portfolio "template" with pages on separate subjects (e.g. Welcome, Goals, Philosophy, Examples of Work and Resume). Student replaces sample content with content specific to their experience, adding and removing pages as appropriate. Faculty or peer advisers will review the portfolio and provide feedback indicating whether or not enough or appropriate content is included in the portfolio.
• Collaborative Interview Portfolio: A group of students will be conducting interviews, each filling out a form corresponding to the interview, and collaboratively creating one portfolio from the multiple student interviews.
• Collaborative Grant Evaluation: A group of researchers will be creating a portfolio for a grant evaluation and have different users contribute different pieces.
• Collaborative Shared Project Experiences: A student service learning group or leadership group wants to build shared portfolios about project experiences, without requiring a designated person be finally responsible for owning the portfolio.
• Collaborative Institutional Portfolio: Institutions and programs seeking to create and share institutional portfolios demonstrating the accomplishments of an institution or program want to build shared portfolios to highlight the assessment of student learning and other institutional or programmatic outcomes.

Functional Details

Portfolio presentations will be created as a type of Sakai 3 site, with extended properties and services to implement the actions described below.

Portfolio prseentation creation will follow a "suggestive model" of creation, where sample content and pages are provided, but specified page content are not enforced by portfolio software. This provides the flexibility fo create guided or non-standard portfolios subject to review by faculty or peer advisers. Longer term functionality could be added that would restricted the number of portfolio pages to the initial sample set.

Actions:

• Create: create multiple page-level presentations with explicit navigation links (need pages, and intra-page navigation or sub-pages: perhaps intra-page navigation and allow formatted)
  • Sakai 3 provides multiple page navigation for portfolios/sites; including hierarchical navigation. Full featured site-templates are being developed (/wiki/spaces/KERNDOC/pages/22665136063)
  • Sakai 3 does not (yet) support ability to create a page in Site A based on a page from Site B (perhaps based on page templates?)
• Rigidity: Adding/removing pages may be optionally restricted
  • Sakai 3 does not yet provide this functionality
• Theme: choose a style theme that controls how the presentation is displayed, allow user personalization to themes (ex:  change banner image, colors of headers, etc.)
  • Sakai 3 currently supports themes for sites
• Collaborate: enable collaborative editing of presentation by multiple users
  • Sakai 3 currently supports "collaboration" in the form of adding members to sites with varying access rights
• Duplicate: create a copy of existing portfolio presentation site
  • Sakai 3 does not yet support this
• Publish: Presentation and presentation contents will be copied to a persistent location independent of course-management content which may be removed. Presentations may be added as workflow artifacts and they may be unpublished at any time. Presentation URLs must be short and readable.
  • Sakai 3 should be extended to allow duplication of (portfolio) sites to facilitate publishing presentations. Publishing a presentation would involve duplicating and setting access rights as public. Additional publishing options might be required to adjust rendering, re-naming the presentation.
• Export: download presentation site as a HTML or PDF document
  • Sakai 3 does not yet support this
• Print: Printable representation of portfolio presentation site (e.g. PDF)
  • Sakai 3 does not yet support this
• Share: share with a restricted or unrestricted (public) set of users
  • Sakai 3 supports sharing with individual users (e.g. site members), but needs to support sharing by group or optionally support for guest access, email notification
• Comment/Feedback: optionally enable or request comments (which must not interfere with style & visualization of portfolio presentation)
  • Sakai 3 does not yet support this
• Delete: Remove portfolio presentation site
  • Sakai 3 currently supports
• Tag: tag with semantic or free-text tags (e.g. indicate portfolio meets a specified competency or indicate it's been "approved/vetted" for display in a gallery of institutional portfolios)
  • Sakai 3 needs to support services and UX for this, but underlying Sling/Kernel framework does support tagging
• Web-services: query for URLs of published, public portfolios (e.g. for displaying in a public gallery of portfolios)
  • Sakai 3 does not yet supoort
• Browse/Sort/Filter: Browse and sort portfolio presentation sites
  • Sakai 3 supports but additional sorting/filtering functionality may be needed
• Search: Search portfolio content leveraging Sakai 3 search functionality
  • Sakai 3 currently supports

Attributes

• Artifacts: any single piece of content (e.g. form, assignment, ...)
• Owner(s): users who may edit portfolio
• Comment: optionally enable user comments (subject to same style as portfolio, or on a separate page); portfolio owner can choose to approve comments for public display (e.g. blog-like threads) or leave them private
• Pages: support paging within expressive/free-form or templated portfolio
• Template: optional constraints on what content can be selected and how the portfolio will be rendered

Goals

• All artifacts (images, etc) included in a portfolio must be easily viewed by any shared user
• Email notification of shared portfolio presentations
• Sharing a portfolio should be distinct from collaborating on a portfolio (different user sets)
• Collaborative portfolios should either support equal ownership, or support transferring primary ownership to another

Assumptions

• Share-by-role functionality is being explicitly dropped (share-by-group meets real user needs and share-by-role is confusing to users)
• Base Sakai 3 share functionality will be leveraged and extended as needed to support portfolio sharing
  • Guest user access to shared content may be implemented as a lightweight "token" authorization scheme such as is used by Google Calendar & Google Docs

Diagrams & Mockups

Creating a portfolio presentation site:

Viewing a portfolio presentation site:

Implementation Details

• Will site templates support permission structure where a portfolio user creates a portfolio site from a template, but is not allowed to edit the site (only enter data into the structured form data widgets)?
• When a portfolio is published, widgets should be rendered differently (hiding structured form data input buttons)
• Perhaps Portfolios could become part of the student's profile (published portfolio part of their sakai social network)
• Could collaborative portfolios benefit from something like EtherPad (http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/)?
• Should comments be threaded? Should they be inline? Should they be specific to a particular portfolio page or generally applied to entire portfolio?
• Perhaps portfolios with fully required content would be created automatically as the user creates the required content?
• Need to be able to add a page to Site A based on a page from Site B (perhaps based on cross-site page-templates?)
• Portfolio Name/Title - user's may want a different 'name/title/heading' for portfolio than the site title (e.g. same portfolio title, different portfolio for grad school vs job application).