I’d like to start a discussion on ideas for dotLRN and Web 2.
Our work on the AJAX-Mashup demo (http://www.solutiongrove.com/mashup) has given me a couple ideas on cool things that could be done with Web 2 and dotLRN.
1. The most obvious is to use the Ajax UI with the portal system. This needs to fail gracefully if JavaScript is turned off and be accessible.
2. Almost as obvious: Add a weather portlet to out of the box dotLRN. (For history buffs, a weather portlet was part of the original work done for Sloan by 2 MIT students, Randy Graebner and Aileen Tang for their Master's Thesis in June 2000.)
More interesting is looking at tagcloud.com
There are two pieces here:
3. One is the tagcloud UI. We can create that UI with categories without using the tagcloud website.
Demo: http://winchesterma.net/connections/)
Code: (maturity level 0) is in CVS package name - connections
4. The second piece is the technology behind tagclouds.com (http://www.tagcloud.com/About.php). They use a free service from Yahoo to get key words from content. I think it would be very interesting to put all of the interesting content in a class (documents, LORS items, forum posts, faqs) through that service to automatically categorize the content then create a tag cloud for the class. Refinements: Allow the class admin to remove uninteresting words; aggregate a user centric tag cloud.
5. Contacts might want to integrate with google maps like frappr.com does.
6. I think we might want to look into some of the Web 2 calendar services out there. I’ve seen two basic scenarios where our calendar doesn’t work.
A. A big university: Lots of their stuff is on the dotLRN calendar but there is always some use case we can’t satisfy, from a public calendar to the pizza with 3-friends.
B. A user is only taking one class and what they really want is not their own calendar but to get the info off and into wherever they do their calendar.
If we picked one or two of these new calendar services with a good API and integrated intelligently we might be able to provide a lot more functionality for a lot less effort in these situations. The neat thing about Mashups is that they can feel like part of your website. If your users aren’t thrilled with their dotLRN calendar experience take a look at this option.
Please note that we don’t currently have funding for any of these projects. The goal of this post is to stimulate discussion. We are in no way trying to “claim” this work. Most of these ideas are pretty straight forward if you have funding or interest, time, and skill please go for it!
