May 21, 2008 -- Follow up authoring call

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Last updated: May 21, 2008 by Former user (Deleted)Version comment
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Call in information

Wednesday, May 21, 2008
9am-10am Pacific Time (16:00-17:00 UTC) compare times
Sakai001

  • IP Address: 156.56.240.9
  • Telephone: 812-856-7060
  • Conference Code: 348
  • PIN: 72524

Expected Attendees

Call notes

Agenda:

  • Use cases for content authoring

Notes:

  • Mark Norton intends to work on this project as it develops. Offers Sousa as a basis for the work.
  • Jim suggests a demonstration of Sousa from.
  • Jim: Sakaibrary subject research guides are the main project. We need to go through a requirements process. Jim's idea is that there could be a general authoring service that could be called on when you need to author content.
  • Mark: One-line requirements, borrowed from Kuali. People rapidly create simple requirements and they are gathered up later.
  • Noah: Free-form vs. structured authoring distinction is critical. Both very important in the portfolio world. Uses FCK editor now but TinyMCE would work as well.
  • MK Question: How hard would it be to make a new free-form HTML template. Noah: Not too hard, requires changes to the XSL files. Also leveraging FCK template editing (may be hard to apply across sites).
  • Matt: Fixing the FCK editor is the biggest problem. Relative links don't work so you have to create absolute links. This causes problems in importing content from site to site. This would be a giant step.
  • Noah: The cross-site authorization issues are complicated.
  • Matt: We don't want links going to the legacy course.
  • Noah: If we allow people to paste content in (e.g. from word) we can't control the links. If we use the "browse to server" functionality we can do better.
  • John: The portfolio work is promising, but will it work for the rest of Sakai? The XML and meta-obj stuff seems unique to OSP. Portfolio and Teaching/Learning use cases are the same. Why can't these be brought together?
    • I want to maintain my personal profile, this seems very similar to free-form portfolio.
    • The OSP matrix is providing evidence against certain criteria. This applies to teaching and learning very clearly.
    • Tagging/Goal Management are relevant in both places. Goal Management is an instructor-centered view, tagging involves more student agency.
  • John: Which approach (OSP or as-yet-to-be-defined general method) is preferable. What would it take for OSP to change? What would it take for everyone to use the OSP approach.
  • Noah: Not sure that the simple "page authoring" use case is best addressed by the OSP approach.
  • Jim: Underlying technology for SRGs is RSF and JavaScript (to control where the editing is happening). There is no template capability. It is a tool right now, it isn't a plugin capability.
  • Nathan: What do people mean by structured/unstructured?
  • John: Structured means you're trying to enforce rules about what the author is able to create. This isn't necessarily bad. We need approaches to both ends of the spectrum. What is the authoring environment for creating the rules? These are the choices that unite us or divide us.
  • Michael: Sakai has many examples of structured editing. We need a better unstructured editor with templates and the ability reference meaningful entities in Sakai.
  • Noah: Entity browser does some of this, but isn't perfect.
  • John: Challenges are: What uses cases are we trying to work out? (mentioned google sites). One of the dilemma's is whether to use wiki or HTML (probably will do both). Is would be great if we could align the OSP and "rest of Sakai" ways of dealing with content authoring.
  • Noah: Two categories. Things we can share now vs. things we need to plan down the road.
  • John L: If we could clean up the FCK editor and make it a helper that can be used anywhere.
  • Jim: Next step. Demo day! Josh/Mark/Anthony/Jim/Noah.