[Fle3-dev] Rethinking Knowledege Building

[Teemu Leinonen]

Hi,

I have been lately (again) thinking how we could overcome the limitation 
of threaded discussion in the Knowledge Building (KB). I would like to 
make it more explicit in the KB's user interface that it is not just 
another "discussion forum" or "bulletin board" (in a way it is but there 
is different idea behind the KB). To do this I have thought two possible 
solutions. The first one is rather simple to implement. The second one 
needs a lot of work.

(1) Relocate the "select knowledge type drop down menu + reply button" 
outside the note background colour and change the naming of the button 
to be "add note".

This is a little change but may have some significance. Still the note 
is a "reply" to the note above, but the feeling for the user could be 
that "the note I just read aroused thoughts in me, and I want to add my 
note to the KB on this theme, as well". The note written wouldn't be 
anymore so clearly "reply" to some earlier note (still we could keep the 
threaded view).

(2) Make it possible to create links between several notes. Actually 
this is an old idea.

When writing a note you could select several notes on what your note is 
related with. There is not any simple way to implement this in a web 
browser UI. Actually, only sensible way would be to have some kind of 
track and drop UI where user could draw links between the notes. Maybe 
this could be implemented with SVG, Flash, Java, DHTML, etc.? The first 
version of this kind of "map view" could just be another alternative 
view (thread, author, knowledge type, date) to the KB. Later, when the 
multiple linkking will work, it could replace the thread view.

        - Teemu

____________________________
Teemu Leinonen
http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/
Office: + 358 9 756 30 296
GSM: +358 50 351 6796
Media Lab, UIAH Helsinki
http://www.mlab.uiah.fi
Future Learning Environment 3
http://fle3.uiah.fi