[Server-devel] EduBlog Revised Project Plan

[Alexander Dupuy]

Greg Smith wrote:
> For starters, there's no group edit needed. They can share "browse" if
> they want to edit concurrently. I was thinking of just "post" or "start
> over" as the first pass.
>   

Like a lot of people, Greg over-estimates the level of collaboration 
possible in shared Sugar activities.  While the Edit activity has a 
higher level of sharing (all children see the same document, updated in 
real-time) this was done as a major feature enhancement (under contract 
from OLPC, I believe) by the Abiword developers.  Sharing in the Browse 
activity is much more limited - you can share links by clicking on the 
star at the top of the screen (yes, that's what that mysterious icon is 
for) but the browser instances are otherwise totally independent, so 
that when one child navigates to another page, the other children will 
not see that page, unless the first child shares the link by clicking on 
the star, and the other children then click on the thumbnail image of 
the shared page that appears in the tray at the bottom.

See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse#Collaboration for the details.

Given this limited level of collaboration in the Browse activity, it 
seems very unlikely that even some hypothetical enhanced and more 
collaborative version in another year would support shared edit boxes of 
the sort provided by the Write activity (especially if those boxes have 
JavaScript or other features associated with them).

I'm not sure what impact this detail has on the plan for EduBlog, but if 
collaborative editing is desired, there are basically two approaches:

* Try to build it into the XS server pages - this would be very tricky, 
and probably only practical in the given timeframe if you build on an 
existing tool like http://www.synchroedit.com/ or 
http://code.google.com/p/google-mobwrite/ and that tool works 
out-of-the-box with the Browse activity (both tools depend heavily on 
JavaScript).

or

* Take libabiword and use it in a blog-posting activity that interacts 
with the XS (Moodle) server pages.

Personally, I think the second is a better approach, but given the 
server-side-only constraint, this takes collaborative editing out of the 
project plan for the initial effort this summer.

@alex

-- 
mailto:alex.dupuy at mac.com