Design Lenses Brainstorming Page

Brainstorming Notes

 We would like to use this page to brainstorm next steps in the Sakai Learning Capabilities Design Lenses initiative that was implemented over the last year.

1. Move from theoretical to practical by working to apply the Lenses to one of the areas targeted for development this year under the Sakai 3 initiative.
   1. We could review the current Sakai 3 Road Map (which is still being refined) and identify areas with Q1 and Q2 that would benefit from a lenses application exercise.
      1. Although some work has already begun on Sakai 3, we could take a bigger picture view and apply the lenses to the "basic" capabilities that have already been developed as means to identify future development work that would need to happen to make that particular capability "complete".
      2. I (Josh) would be interested in selecting something like 1.7 from the Road Map (1.7 Basic resource creation, description, discovery and presentation workflows (including video resources on external servers and personal storage on Xythos) and applying the lenses to this as it is a core capability and although some work has been done already it is far from complete.  Applying the lenses here would allow us to see how "on track" the work to date has been as well as provide designers/developers with a vision of what the end "complete" version of this needs to be.
      3. I (Josh) would also be interested in 2.5 in Q2 which seems focused on the first set of widgets.
      4. I (jacques R.) am interested in 2.1 (learning structures) and 2.4 (assignments) in Q2 and 3.4 "Add structured pages that allow a more free form assembly of dashboard widgets in containers with flexible templated permissions to cover portfolio and OpenSyllabus use-cases" in Q3.
   2. We could approach some of those doing develop and design work and ask them how we might be able to assist using the Lenses.
   3. (From Salwa) Conversations with developers at the conference show  that what they would find more useful than high-level terms are stories about users and user's goals. It may be that we need to focus on the items in the learning capabilities spreadsheet and connect them more directly to the lenses in an organized fashion.(It was after all an effort to classify the myriad items in the spreadsheet that led to the development of the lenses.)  I'm thinking of the items in the spreadsheet as Lego blocks which we can combine in different ways to come up with various workflows that fit within a lens and that make clear what the user(s) involved wants to do. These workflows could be ones that we have seen in practice, or ones that have emerged through faculty interviews and through the development of personas and/or coursonas. The lenses are then the "index" of teaching and learning activities and the spreadsheet items that fit a particular lens are the practical application/stories.  That would allow us to apply the lenses to ongoing work in a more practical manner and would allow us to give developers the user goals they need to guide future development.
   4. The functional analysis team for Sakai 3 is developing a Research and Analysis toolkit with four possible tracks for developing requirements for items on the Sakai 3 Road Map.  There will likely be opportunities for members of the T&L group to participate in the research and analysis phase of requirements definition.
2. We need to work to refine the current work that came out of last year.
   1. We need to refine the lens and facet definitions
   2. We need to add to the learning capabilities and fill in "gaps"
   3. We need to finalize the name for the overall set of materials
3. Publish information on the work we've done
   1. Some have suggested that we consider writing a book or other articles on the work as means to make those outside of Sakai aware of it and get more involved.