Forum OpenACS Q&A: COP Status?

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Posted by Michael Feldstein on
I've seen some posts referring to a Community of Practice (CoP or COP) package but haven't been able to find any real details. What is included in the package? What is the status? What are the plans? Will it be incorporated into dotLRN?

Thanks.

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2: Re: COP Status? (response to 1)
Posted by Jeff Davis on
We developed the cop package at Xarg as part of a national project for local government KM. It consists of the cop-base and cop-ui packages along with the ratings, related-items, views, and clipboard packages as well as do something more sensible with categories for doing KM-ish things.

It's more a subsite configuration than just a package. You can play with an instance at demo.dotknow.org if you would like to see what it does. The code there is a bit out of date but generally it should work.

As for the things there finding their way into dotLRN, I think Ernie was going to do some work on LORS to use some of the components. Not sure what else people are thinking about though.

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3: Re: COP Status? (response to 1)
Posted by Ernie Ghiglione on
Jeff, Michael,

Yes, we use the views package in LORS for running all sort of stats on the content that students have views.

Additionally, I've used the Ratings package for another application and it was really simple to integrate and deploy. Maybe, if needs arises, we can integrate ratings in LORS so teachers are able to rate different learning objects.

Thanks,

Ernie

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4: Re: COP Status? (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Two things should make it into LORS additionally to view tracking:

a) Rating. Rating should not only be done by professors on the whole course, but by students taking the class on each item. Make this rating anonymous and the content will be able to improved considerably based on users feedback.

b) Relationships. The relate functionality displayed at dotknow.org will allow you to support multiple paths through the learning object (course). It has the benefit though that *users* can create their own path based on what they read and what connections they are drawing. If users use this actively, a better default structure for the content can be arranged.

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5: Re: COP Status? (response to 1)
Posted by Jeff Davis on
One thing worth pointing out is that the supporting packages are PostgreSQL only. We would port them to Oracle if we had a client that wanted to run on oracle or if someone else wanted to fund the work :)

Tighter integration with dotLRN would depend on getting it ported to oracle (although some of the changes done to support this sort of functionality could be done in such a way that oracle installs just would not see them).

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6: Re: COP Status? (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on
Having spent a little time with the demo now, I think there are many possible uses of the CoP functionality within the dotLRN environment. Here are a few that stretch beyond LORS:

  • In SUNY's home-grown environment, we enable instructors to assign grades to student posts (and other contributions/assignment) and automatically import those grades into the grade book. Ratings would be good scaffolding for that.
  • The "clipboard" function, combined with a simple text field, would be great to allow students to take notes on content items in a class. Likewise, you could use it to enable students to move content into a portfolio, or even to use it as kind of an improved, dotLRN-internal version of trackback. (I think Drupal may have something like this latter function.
  • It seems to me that it would be fairly simple to wire together a couple of the pieces here to add del.icio.us-like folksonomic bookmarking, which is very hot right now in the edublogosphere. Let the students organize the content according to their own knowledge needs.
I'm sure there are more possibilities. These are just the ones off the top of my head.

Very cool.

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7: Re: COP Status? (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on
Let me add an "aman" to the Malte's and Ernie's ideas for integrating CoP.
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8: Re: COP Status? (response to 1)
Posted by Claudio Pasolini on
Just a curiosity: I remember that the APLAWS project was backed by Red Hat CMS and Portal (former ACS 4). How does OpenACS fit into the project?