After a few situations in which I had to design non trivial learning material (meaning lots of exercises, guides, supporting documents, study guides, objectives, etc.) I'm more convinced than ever that the production process is far from ideal. Sophistication when creating content is advancing both in complexity and in variety, but users are not advancing at the same pace. As it was discussed in previous posts, the need for some intermediate processing is growing.
If on top of this situation we add the lesson the web is teaching us every day, that is, collaboration is inherent to the human being, and usually means better outcome; then the mixture translates into an even more complex scenario.
By looking at how big large collaborative projects are organized, there is always something that strikes me: there are lots of successful projects with organizational schemes fairly loose. Loose when compared to typical exhaustive collaboration platforms that force users to use only certain tools. The net is going in the opposite direction. The freedom to use one tool or another, in general, I perceive it is growing, and at the same time, the amount of material, or generically "objects" that are produced keeps growing.
A few weeks ago I started an effort to translate this observation into something more concrete in the area of learning content production. The result is ADA a rule based toolkit that tries to provide a powerful and scalable division between different content production phases, and at the same time, rely almost entirely in open source software.
The idea is to simplify as much as possible the work on the user front, but keeping some basic procedures to facilitate the automatic processing of as many production steps as possible. An example. I teach a class with one group in Spanish and another one in English. Any document you write in Spanish, it must be translated to English. The same applies to figures, charts, animations, etc. (unless they have no text). At the same time, while teaching a course, handouts need to be reviewed, polished and published at certain times. The reviewing process is a bit tricky with both versions. Not only that, the date to publish a handout might move one or two days back and forth. Bottom line: the production of the original document is a small portion of the entire content management. ADA provides some common rules that can be easily invoked to automate this processing: producing PDF files from powerpoint, 2up PDF files, derive Spanish/English versions from the same document, copy auxiliary files from one location to another, detect dependencies such that when a document changes the derived content is refreshed, etc.
The following figure illustrates the philosophy behind ADA. A community of authors have some raw material to produce content. With the description of some combination rules, the task of deriving an entire web-site from the material of these authors can be fully automatic.
To be totally honest, I'm pursuing this out of simple observation of my own production cycle. I am trying to convince more users to adopt this paradigm. So far I went as far as a plenary meeting for my research group. At least there is one additional user (and developer).
The one hundred mile trip...
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