Description | ACE

Project Goal:

  • Our primary goal is to create a place where members of the academic community can build, manage, annotate, share and reuse diverse sets of resources.
  • Users will be able to:
    • manage resources located using disparate search tools (Google, library catalogs, Google Scholar, on-line journals)
    • add local resources
    • group and regroup the materials for different purposes
    • add metadata (tagging and annotating resources)
    • share their lists and annotations with collaborators or with students
  • Material used in a single course or research project will be reusable and extensible by the individual or by the community
  • Preserving the body of annotations and associations between items developed over time by members of the community also builds a valuable storehouse of knowledge that could be used for developing additional services such as recommending

Example application - Teaching Assistant (TA) preparing material for a course:

Imagine you are a TA here at SIMS or in another department planning a course that was offered last year. Generally you only have the reading list, but wouldn't it be great if you had more than just a reading list. It would be very useful to have the resources from the community of students, TA(s), and instructor who were involved with the course last year. For example, comments on the readings, marked up text, and/or links to the wiki or blog. Having access to the workspace created by last year's class will allow you as a TA to make more informed decisions regarding which readings to keep, which to toss, and the contributions from the community last year may help students as they are working through the course this year.

Deliverables:

  • a report describing all four phases of our work and summarizing our experience
  • a lightweight, small-scale proof of concept to demonstrate the essential functionality of the envisioned system

Our approach:

  • Identify core user tasks/goals. This phase includes literature search as well as interviews with members of the target audience.
  • Information modelling.
  • Technology assessment, to identify tools that are currently in use (Connotea, Cite-U-Like, Delicious; Wikis and blogs, etc.), particularly those that might serve as an extensible base.
  • Finally, construction of a lightweight proof of concept focusing on core tasks.
  • These phases, particularly the first three, will overlap temporally.

Open issues/scope questions

  • Initially, our concept was focused only on library resources. We realized quickly that this was too limited; modern academic workflow incorporates all kinds of resources outside of what the library offers.
  • A second option we considered was to focus on developing a personal research workspace; certainly this would be simpler and narrow the scope. However, collaboration is essential to scholarly research and teaching, and we were unwilling to limit the project in that way.
  • We are working now, in our first phase, to finalize the scope of supported tasks and functionality within this collaborative framework.

All of us have access to an amazing array of tools that we use to manage the information resources we depend on for research and teaching...bookmarking tools, blogs, wikis, web sites, and more. What interests Christine and me most is finding better ways to integrate these to support the way we work today.

Our project development effort is documented in the sections available to the left. If you have comments, questions, or constructive feedback, please let us know by sending e-mail to The ACE Development Team.