Fluid and free form portfolio

[Sean Keesler]

Well, we didn't develop all of the use cases that a reworked free-form
portfolio would be able to support at the conference, but we did start to
think along similar lines, John.

There is tremendous opportunity to make a big difference in the OSP tools if
we can pool resources to pull this off. The concern I have has been that the
OSP tool development has been done in fits and starts, with parts of the
tools really falling behind their original requirements. The Fluid group has
a "thing going on" where they have a methodology that they are sticking to
to build parts of applications.

The OSP group needs to do as Daphne recommends and pay a lot of attention to
the work going on here. Not just so that they can consume a widget when it
is "done" (which is never), but to help inform and participate in their
development. It will likely take some coordination between the two groups,
which is a resource issue that I am trying to work out. If there is a role I
can play there, I would be interested in the opportunity.

Part of the issue is that I think that the original uses of portfolios were
very focused on one student "owning" a portfolio, which REALLY limits it
use. After 3 years of using collaborative tools like wikis and Google Docs,
I believe that folks come to an authoring environment expecting to be able
to work together, if they want to. This would really change the educational
appeal of the tools for folks that are not into the other dimensions of the
tools.

Sean


On 12/10/07 3:02 PM, "John Norman" <john at caret.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Sean et al
> 
> During the Sakai conference it became apparent to me that we are on
> the verge of being able to offer a different sort of Sakai
> experience. I would like to outline the concept and see if it
> resonates with your requirements.
> 
> I would like to take advantage of Sakai services in the mode
> discussed at the pre-conference planning meeting as 'helper tools'.
> The services would provide functional fragments into pages with
> appropriate permissions for appropriate roles.
> 
> There would be a page composition tool based on the concepts of the
> drag and drop reorderer/lightbox tool being developed as part of Fluid.
> 
> One set of pages would be about the individual student or academic
> and would certainly include 'professional profile' as a primary
> communication goal.
> 
> Another set of pages could be student portfolios - in the sense of
> portfolio as a tool of educational development - in which the student
> composes a series of pages, or page collections, that are shared with
> different audiences
> 
> Another set of pages would be the course sequence; expressed in terms
> of time, course themes or other organisations of knowledge/work. In
> this set of pages, assignments would be embedded in the page and
> reveal information about the status of the assignment (how many
> submitted/graded for the instructor, countdown to submission date or
> number of peers submitting for the student)
> 
> Another set of pages would be for the research group, expressing and
> tracking the data collection workflow, measuring dissemination
> (connected to individual profiles), etc.
> 
> And another set of pages would be for the club or society - shared
> widely with the institution or general public.
> 
> The page sets would be conceptually similar to web sites and the
> current Sakai sites, but would be much better at offering flexible
> access to different audience groups.
> 
> I'm still trying to work the idea up, but have been tipped into
> revealing my thoughts by this post and Jim Eng's, which I think
> contains similar thinking...
> 
> John
> 
> On 9 Dec 2007, at 07:38, Sean Keesler wrote:
> 
>> I sat on the sidelines of Fluid during the last 6 months. I'd like
>> to start
>> a project to revitalize the "free form" portfolio...the most simple
>> type of
>> OSP portfolio. I'm happy to announce that the we (the OSP
>> functional team)
>> have approved a process going forward that would put use cases and
>> design
>> ahead of development.
>> 
>>> From what I saw of the components in the Fluid presentations at the
>> conference, I am sure that there is overlap ("click to edit" for
>> example
>> would be huge in a portfolio). So, I'd like to volunteer a lot of
>> my time to
>> be involved, but I am not a developer. I hope to coordinate some
>> resources
>> across the community to bring to bear on the serious pain point in
>> OSP.
>> 
>> I know that I can't just jump into the Fluid calls and start
>> hijacking the
>> agenda. What is the best way for me to start working with Fluid to
>> get done
>> what I want to get done? My guess is that just following the
>> instructions in
>> the toolkit will not be sufficient.
>> 
>> ------------------------------
>> Sean Keesler
>> Project Manager
>> The Living SchoolBook
>> 030 Huntington Hall
>> Syracuse University
>> 315-443-4768
>> 
>> 
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>