[p2pu-dev] Webcraft Technical Priorities (formerly) SoSI News

[Dan Diebolt]

> ... find it very confusing to have JSFiddle, etherpads, source code etc
included in the P2PU interface.

An overwhelming trend among those people and web sites that deal with
presenting web technology, programming and design examples is to use various
mechanisms to embed content for convenient and often collaborative and
forkable access to external information, resources and tools.
These embedded resources include code sharing tools, syntax highlighters,
language consoles etc. Gist and jsFiddle are two of the most popular and and
well designed of these services that have excellent embeddable and forkable
features.

*Fork you very much: Gist brings revision tracking to pastes*
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2008/11/hunting-the-perfect-paste.ars

*Stunning Examples of using JsFiddle*
http://andrewwooldridge.com/blog/2011/03/16/stunning-examples-of-using-jsfiddle/

These tools are extraordinarily useful for collaborative peer learning
scenarios across a  broad range of topics including at a minimum the entire
front-end (HTML, CSS, JS, client-side libraries and frameworks) of WebCraft
technologies.

To suggest that the capability to embed content would be confusing is
difficult for me to comprehend in light of the fact that the entire concept
of HTML and friends consists of composing and rendering a page whose
information and resources are drawn from multiple sources identified in the
markup and seamlessly render into a unified page.

Moreover, embedding content is not a single use case confined to WebCraft or
technology. Everything from calendars to spreadsheets are
frequently embedded for the convenience of users so they don't have to click
away from the page they are currently on and disassociate with the site they
were originally on. Additionally, other schools or course will have their
unique needs to embed content such as a math course embedding a graph or
equation, an architecture course embedding a sketch tool, or geo
course embedding a specialized map. Allowing an <iframe> to be added in the
CKEditor by a course organizer is an extremely modest request especially in
consideration of the fact P2PU prides itself on being *experimental*.

The specific issue of embedding an etherpads is only complicated by the fact
that it was designed to be a standalone page with an integral chat console
which might make an etherpad too wide to be embedded gracefully. But even
this issue could be resolved for P2PU if the 33% left side panel in the
Drupal site or the 250px left panel in the Lernanta site were not statically
placed.

Now that <iframe>s are allowed to be composed in the CKEditor in the Drupal
site it is easy to embed and publicly *editable *spreadsheet:

*Embed Course Work Product (via EditGrid)*
http://p2pu.org/webcraft/node/27443/document/28447

The experience would only improve if the left sidebar were did not take up
33% of the page. I raised this specific issue to this list and it fell on
deaf ears.

In consideration of the fact that CKEditor in Lernanta needs only to be
configured to allow <iframe>s - a 10 minute task - I don't see any need to
conflate and confabulate the issue with process, bureaucracy or conference
calls. A tracker is a great community tool but as far as I know it only
recently came on the scene and you are going to have to deal with this issue
 raised by another community member:

http://new.p2pu.org/en-US/courses/p2pu-the-course/content/reporting-problems/

Your average user is never going report a problem using a tracker. More
technical or motivates users should convene a short course to introduce the
tool and share best practices if you want a group larger than the core dev
team using it.
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