Designing Learning Technology

Thu, 07 Aug 2003

QuickTopic supports design review
Continuing on the async design review thread, one of the big challenges for design review is finding tools that support collaborative, fine-grained review of documents. We can get collaborative online, via a discussion group, but then posts are disconnected from the content that they refer to in the main document. We can also annotate the document in Word, but then the author has to collate everyone's comments (unless you pass the document around serially, which costs time) and reviewers don't get to see others' comments. QuickTopic seems to nicely address this issue for HTML documents, allowing paragraph-specific commentary from multiple users that appears within the source document itself. (I found out about QT via a post on Social Fisking, which is a different use entirely, but the connection seems clear.)

@10.50 #

Design collaboration with Plone
We've begun to explore using Plone as a design collaboration support tool. At Inquirium, we do a lot of distributed design work, and have been looking for a means to coordinate asynchronous design conversations and design reviews. At a minimum, we needed the ability to post documents and allow asychronous review and comment on those documents. Email works fine for small groups but makes it hard to archive the design process; with Plone, there is a persistent record of the conversation. Plone was the first candidate because it's built on Zope, leveraging technology we're already familiar with, provided deep functionality "out of the box," and appeared to be highly customizable. My guess is we'll use Plone as is for a few months until we really understand its workflow model and how it relates to ours, and then target a few specific adaptations to align the two.

@10.37 #