Forum .LRN Q&A: Collaborative graphical editing tool?

1: Collaborative graphical editing tool?

Posted by Mohan Pakkurti on 11/04/02 05:51 PM

hi!

Does anyone here know about the feature in WebCT that allows multiple users to edit graphical documents in realtime? Like a whiteboard on the web. Can someone point me to any documentation, comments or reviews of this feature?

There is a design school in Sweden that is interested in possibly funding an effort to develop such a package, and I wanted to know if there is anyone else interested in such a feature right now. The school has been considering WebCT and I have shown them a demo of dotLRN. They like it very much, but they need this graphical editing feature!

2: Re: Collaborative graphical editing tool? (response to 1)

Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 11/04/02 07:52 PM

Mohan, as a quick fix for this requirement you could suggest a commercial solution. Blackboard, for example, licenses software from another company to add this to their software. You can create an account on blackboard.com to test it in context: http://coursesites.blackboard.com/

It is a nice tool, a "virtual classroom" with a chat (where individual users can be blocked or given the floor), whiteboard (which can also load external websites for group scribbling), and realtime Q&A. Here is a demo from the company that makes it: http://www.tutornet.com/Demo4Web/index.html It might even have a decent API so data can be archived in the DB.

I would be interested in hearing about open or closed alternatives that are strong enough to warrant the time, energy, and/or money. Anyone?

I set up a test course on one of our local installations of WebCT for Mohan, if anyone is interested in testing WebCT (3.6.x Standard Edition) send me a mail.

3: Re: Collaborative graphical editing tool? (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 11/04/02 08:31 PM

Hi Mohan,

check out Javanti (javanti.org). It is like a graphing board software as you envision, it's open source, the developers are cool and they work on Interfacing the system with the Whiteboards that allow drawing with a pencil to the computer (forgot about it).

In any case I will ask Tobias to contact you as well in addition to posting on this thread.

4: Re: Collaborative graphical editing tool? (response to 1)

Posted by Rich Graves on 11/05/02 02:49 AM

It's not a realtime whiteboard, but TWiki has another open-source Java draw program based on JHotDraw.

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/TWikiDrawPlugin

5: Re: Collaborative graphical editing tool? (response to 1)

Posted by David Kuczek on 11/05/02 09:13 AM

Malte,

could you describe javanti's features in more detail... They don't reveal that much on their website!

6: Re: Collaborative graphical editing tool? (response to 1)

Posted by Bjorn Thor Jonsson on 11/05/02 11:40 AM

Haven't yet tried this but "the latest addition to Jabberzilla is a collaborative whiteboard for use on SVG-enabled builds of Mozilla. All of its communication takes place over Jabber XML messages. These messages are processed in JavaScript, and appended to the XML DOM of an SVG document frame for display."

http://jabberzilla.mozdev.org/