[p2pu-webcraft] Annual State of the Content Review

[Dan Diebolt]

*State of the Content*

Every September 18th I conduct an annual "State of the Content" review for
WebCraft.

We turned our scanners loose on the p2pu.org website and compiled the
folowing results. Well actually it was just a couple of dozen lines of
JavaScript but it sounds more impressive calling it a scanner.

The are 12 WebCraft Courses listed as open which collectively listed 107
tasks. Among these 107 tasks there were zero tasks that used an embeded
object (<iframe>, <embed>, <object>) despite the fact that the CKEdit
richtext editor now supports an embdding mechanism (using embed.ly). Among
the 107 tasks there were 3,809 hyperlinks 486 of which were to external
domains (versus p2pu.org, p2pu.lighthouse and other p2pu support domains).
There was a wide range of external links which pointed to references (eg
wikipedia.org, w3.org, php.net etc), personal blogs and websites, articles,
software tools, services and other unclassified sites. Among the more
popular external links the following categories and frequencies were seen:

   - Source Code Archives
      - github.com (40)
   - Etherpads
      - htmlpad.org (32)
      - etherpad.mozilla.org (5)
   - Code Sharing Services
      - jsfiddle.net (22)
      - pastebin.com (8)
      - pastie.org (8)
      - gist.github.com (2)
   - Google Services
      - google.com (9 - search URLs, code, spreadsheets)
   - Video
      - youtube.com (5)
      - vimeo.com (4)
   - FileSharing Services
      - min.us (2)
      - dropbox.com (1)

WebCraft users are using a variety of pads, source code & file sharing
services, and rich media. However, they appear to be unaware that much of
this content can be embedded into their task definitions or that there is a
native syntax highlighter available. In fact, several courses are using the
CKEditor to manually color code their inlined code samples.

*Recommendations:*

   1. Explain the benefits and promote the usage of rich media into the p2pu
   platform using existing capabilities
   2. Prioritize the bug fixing, enhancement and development of embedding
   rich media into the p2pu platform using existing capabilities
   3. Promote awareness and the indexing of best of tools to be used with
   WebCraft Cources (see the community toolbox)
   4. Develop a strategy to allow external embedded content to be bound to a
   user's identity as a database entry in fulfillment of course assignments and
   work product. This capability to should searchable, reportable and indexed
   so that progress can be tracked and that the corpus of accumulated
   work-product feeds back into the courses as additional learning materials.
   5. Priority should be given to embedding tools and services that support
   collaboration and forking of work product.
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