Having kicked off an essay series on the Scholar's Box, I now feel the need to lay out some overall context for the essays. After first providing a very brief description of the Scholar's Box, I describe the framework in which I have been organizing my thinking about the Scholar's Box. I end with a representative -- though far from comprehensive -- outline of topics to be covered in this series.
Before proceeding further, I feel the need to offer the following caveat: This series of essays represent are my perspective and may or may not reflect the viewpoint of the Interactive University as an organization. Others of us will undoubtedly be jumping in with their own perspectives. For instance, Chris Ashley will also be writing about a ![[WWW]](/www/moin/htdocs/classic/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
wide-range of topics related to the Scholar's Box. Nonetheless, my series of essays should be an informative glimpse into what we are thinking and where we are heading.
So briefly what is the Scholar's Box? We've described the Scholar's Box in a number of different ways. Here's one that I have found helpful:
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The Scholar's Box is a tool that will enable faculty, students, and the public to create, manipulate, annotate, and share personal collections of digital materials gathered from multiple sources and repositories -- core activities in both scholarship and teaching. In creating ideas, developing presentations, sifting through evidence, researching papers, or compiling readers, scholars build de facto collections from which they create their desired product. Gathering, manipulating, organizing, annotating, and sharing personal collections of cultural objects is also a core activity that supports many teaching and learning practices and styles. Ideally, the Scholar's Box would enable users to draw upon multiple sources in seamless, integrated ways regardless of underlying protocols and data/metadata encoding schemes.
In other words, the Scholar's Box gives users three core areas of functionality:
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Gathering digital content with metadata and context from many sources.
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Creating custom collections and learning content: the ability to manipulate, annotate, transform content
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Sharing collections and documents with others. Connect content to other tools.
Tranforming a basic description of the Scholar's Box and the sketch of its core functionality into pleasing, robust software sustained in a broad institutional context is what we at the IU, with some key partners, are currently hard at work doing. The Scholar's Box is a work in progress, in the early stages of its evolution. I am hence writing these essays for multiple purposes: to share what we have accomplished, what we are doing, and where we are heading; to shape our design and clarify our thinking; to engage with other related work and the communities of people who might be interested in the Scholar's Box; and to explore various questions that come up in the process of designing, implementing, and bring to fruition the Scholar's Box. Also, I hope that you, my readers, and I will also have a bit fun while we're at this business.
In working on the Scholar's Box, we have already run into numerous challenges and issues to sort through. I tend to sort them among three broad categories listed below. (Like all categorization schemes, the rubric is not perfect. Some topics bleed between two or three of the slots, while some topics are best filed under miscellany.)
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Strategic issues: Strategic issues are concerned with the context -- broadly defined -- for the Scholar's Box, matters that affect the overall direction for the development of the Scholar's Box. These topics include relationships between the IU and other groups, the questions of how we move ahead as an organization, matters of evaluation, long-term sustainability, and large-scale trends in the worlds of education, software, and the culture as a whole.
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Functional issues: Functional issues are concerned with the Scholar's Box entirely from the user's perspective. We have written pieces of a functional specification for the Scholar's Box but this essay series will push forth the work formally. As Joel Spolsky
argues, a functional specification "doesn't care how the thing is implemented. It talks about features. It specifies screens, menus, dialogs, and so on." We will be writing about personae and use case scenarios that inform our development. Because we often have terribly ambitious goals for the Scholar's Box, we need to be extremely careful about stating the features that will not be implemented, at least in the short term -- "nongoals" as Spolsky wrote.
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Technical issues: The flip-side to the functional matters are technical ones, concerned with the internal workings ("plumbing") of the Scholar's Box and the details of connecting the Scholar's Box to other systems. There has been a strong teme of exploring what's possible and likely and transitioning to what is also practical and doable. A central challenge is how to architect for immediate goals while keeping in mind more ambitious longer term vision. Is it possible to architect the Scholar's Box to be both a tool and a set of modular services that can be repackaged with alternate interfaces and embedded in other platforms -- while working with the limited resources we have?
In the course of writing the essay series , I will be making excursions into related topics, to explain a concept or to make a supporting argument. To keep the main thread clear, I will collect supplementary materials in a series of Ancillary Notes. Of course, what may be ancillary to the Scholar's Box essays, might be of interest to a general audience because of the possibly more general focus of the ancillary materials.
In developing a roadmap, I would ideally outline all the relevant topics. Instead, I offer a cornucopia of possible topics to explore. The goal will be to prioritize the topics and select specific questions for future essays. Clearly, there is more than we can definitively address. Even so, I find it helpful to brainstorm lists like the following:
Strategic topics
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Why is the Interactive University working on the Scholar's Box? How does this work serve the core mission of the IU?
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What and whom does the Scholar's Box serve -- institutionally and individually?
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What needs exactly are being addressed by the Scholar's Box? What is the "market" for such services? What is the long-term value proposition of the Scholar's Box?
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How will intellectual property issues be addressed in the Scholar's Box and the Interactive University?
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What are related projects and how do their work compare to the Scholar's Box? What opportunities are there for collaboration between the IU and these projects?
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What role is played by such partnerships as that between the Interactive University and the California Digital Library in the Scholar's Box work?
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What is the product roadmap, development timeline and philosophy of the Scholar's Box?
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How will the Scholar's Box be using an open source model of development and distribution?
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How can the Scholar's Box in the long-term? What is the funding model?
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How will we evaluate the Scholar's Box?
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What are the barriers to success? What risks are there and what are we doing to mitigate them?
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If we ruled the world and wanted to make other projects cooperate with us so that the Scholar's Box can work perfectly, what would we have people do?
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What are the roles played by interoperability standards and specifications of various sorts?
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What do we assume about learning objects, the Web, digital culture, the semantic web in the development of the Scholar's Box development?
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Why do we think that Scholar's Box has the potential to transform education and research?
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What are some challenges of relating to both a K-12 and higher education community?
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Where is the learning in all this technology?
Functional
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We need to make a detailed comparison between a fat client vs thin client version of the Scholar's Box. What are the tradeoffs between the two?
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What type of media will the user be able to gather? In what way? Drag and drop only?
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What interfaces for browsing through large collections of images?
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How to build an interface to handle disparate types of media types and disparate metadata fromats?
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What do users really want to create? What work products?
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How to allow some level of customizability without introducing overwhelming complexity?
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Can we make a parallel browser-based interface that will blend well with the current fat client?
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How to let users make sense of educational standards?
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Interface challenges for connecting to external environments with the Scholar's Box -- how to deal with them?
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What are other software systems and tools to learn from in creating the interface for the Scholar's Box?
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Built as a Chandler Parcel, how will the interface take shape? Built as a SAKAI tool, how will the interface change?
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What level of annotations will we allow? What exactly is an annotation in the Scholar's Box?
Technical
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We are depending on other promising open source projects for infrastructure. What is our specific plan for integrating other projects such as OpenOffice.org and Chandler?
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How will we work in full semantic interoperability into the technical mix, specifically infrastructure that might come from SIMILE?
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What roles do IMS specifications (like Content-Packaging, DRI) play?
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Any universal canvas infrastructure to be had soon?
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What implications are there for the Scholar's Box in evolving digital library infrastructure?
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How will the Scholar's Box interact with RSS and weblogging and the whole web alpha geek world?
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How to interface with the Multivalent Browser? with Bruce D'Arcus on his work on bibliographics? with OCW? etc....
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And many more topics.....
Coming Up: ScholarsBox/EssaySeries/CurrentState Although there is a lot of context to set, very little context-setting will make sense without grounding in the specifics of the ScholarsBox. In the next essay or series of essays, I will describe and assess the current state of the Scholar's Box. Instead of just long sections of text, I promise some diagrams next time!!
