Amsterdam Conferences - Resource meeting to discuss OSP designs

Some notes from the meeting about the OSP suggested designs for the Resources tool

Members of the Resources team at the Amsterdam conference met with Jan Repko and Tom Lewis to work through the suggested designs that OSP had made for the Resources tool (note that these suggested designs were originally prepared some years ago).

Teaching related use cases: (suggested by Jan Repko)

Students in a course write papers on different subjects. Their teacher categorizes the documents as originating from course xyz in fall 2007. At the same time he organizes them on subject as these papers are going to be building stones for his own research.
A scientist shares a version of a document with his peers. They comment on the document and the researcher creates a new version in which he incorporates the comments. This new version is work in progress. At the same time he is teaching a group of students and he wants to share the older version of the document with them as course material. (version management)
A student wants his thesis to be reviewed by some fellow students. So he gives these students read rights on his document. (sharing from person to person)

Present (intermittently!):

Jan Repko, University of Amsterdam; Tom Lewis, University of Washington; Mara, UCB; Jim Eng, UMich; Jason Shao, Rutgers; Mike O, Whitman; Harriet Truscott, University Cambridge; Clay Fenlason, Georgia Tech.

Suggestions were as follows:

Uncouple the site structure from the resources, so that they can be freely shared

e.g. Jan wants to share a resource with a steering committee. Rather than adding a file to the steering committee site, he tags it as 'steering committee group'

This could be achieved via tagging.

The upcoming implementation of JSR-170 will support tagging much better

There is a potential clash of ideas between the hierachical file store and the tagged file store (though it could be a hierachy of tags, as in the OSP diagrams)

Could we have a tag view toggle v. hierachy view toggle?

Mara - experience with Lightbox suggests that people would like to have resources in a place of their own which they can then link out into individual courses.

Organisation policy: a use case repository, for doing use case unit tests. So we gather together all the user research in a place, and we can "test" our designs against the use case bank.

Tom Lewis - research at Univ of Washington suggests that users believe there is one place where the authoritative version lives, and that other places are seeing versions
of this.

Jason Shao - issue of collaborative writing - how does versioning work with this?

Mara - you want to be able to delete things from view in a site, without deleting it from your central place so you can use it next year

Jason - concerns, do people realise the idea of linkage from a MyWorksite to a course site? do users understand this, or will they be utterly confused? e.g. there is a level of confusion about what people are doing when they edit Word documents 'online'.