Discussion tool

an e-mail from Stephen with replies interjected

I copied the comment below. I know a bit more about how things work
now but I'm wondering where is the best place to have this discussion
(Jira issue comments; Wiki page with comments; individual email;
email list)?

FYI: The brainstorm is obviously just a gated form of discussion:

from: http://wise.berkeley.edu/docs/PMDocs.html

4.2.1 Brainstorm
Prompts students to author a short response to a question, and then
lets them see and evaluate each other's comments.

4.2.5 Discussion Forum
Threaded on-line discussion forum with many options, such as the
"Gated" discussion, in which students are first asked to respond to
an opening topic, and then these responses are all visible as the
base comments of an open-ended discussion.

Are there any other existing step types that have the functionality
of aggregating data from multiple learners and feeding it back?

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Web-based discussion service for SAIL

I've done some design work on this and wanted to get your ideas on
how it would be integrated with which Pas steps or pods – first some
simple use cases and then some more specifics on how to integrate
user id's etc.

There are two general cases:

1) Simple discussion thread: a general text oriented threaded
discussion application. This model can easily be extended to support
simple html styling and file attachments.

2) Rich component discussion thread: add to the first case the
capability of rendering and editing arbitrary interactive components
that are also part of the discussion thread. Here's a simple example:
assume a Java component for editing and rendering mathematical
equations. The initial topic post describes a scenario and presents a
nicely formatted equation that describes a relationship in the
scenario. The post ends with a challenge asking the group to describe
a change in the scenario and to edit the equation to match the
change. An extreme example of a rich component discussion thread is
the threaded discussion web application we created in 1996 called
GTree. This was a Java applet delivered from a web application where
the initial topic post was an image layer and the discussion content
was entirely based on drawing in an overlapping layer.

Here's a draft of a simple use case that would work with #1:

Pas discussion step: This is a new step type. During authoring the
initial topic post is created and saved. When instantiated at
learner-time the pod uses the web renderer to display the discussion
for both that pod and for the discussion cohort the learner is in.

Questions:

How is the learner discussion cohort defined, where does the data
come from, and what is it called?

What is the user model, how is it integrated across the WISE web app,
the SAIL Framework, and the Pas Learner Runtime?

I'm going to refer to the WISE web app generically as a portal in my
notes below and assume that I don't need to understand anything WISE
specific yet.

The developers create a Pas discussion step type with associated
external discussion web app and publish this step type to Pas
authoring system. How in general is a new step type published to the
Pas authoring environment? How are step types described to the portal?

An activity author creates a curnit with a Pas discussion step and
publishes it. I know the authoring app saves the curnit back to SAIL
but what info is passed along to the portal? It will be needed for
the next step.

A teacher with just one class decides they want to try out a Pas
activity. The register themselves and their students on the portal
and browse the available activities (curnits). She reads the titles
and descriptions and tries a couple of them out. She's looking at
them for what content they cover, what grade range, how long they
take, and what kind of reports she can get from her students using
them. On Thursday she schedules one for next week Sun-Fri. Sunday
night she logs in to the portal and switches her role to student so
she can make sure the activity is available to her students Monday
morning.

Monday morning she discusses the topic and the students login to the
portal and see a description and link to the only activity scheduled
for them and start it. When they get to the discussion step a web
panel is visible that shows the initial topic post along with any
responses already generated by other students and the teacher in her
class.