ScholarsBox/EssaySeries/TopicsList

In the course of writing the essay series , I will be making excursions into related topics, to explain a concept or to make a supporting argument. To keep the main thread clear, I will collect supplementary materials in a series of Ancillary Notes. Of course, what may be ancillary to the Scholar's Box essays, might be of interest to a general audience because of the possibly more general focus of the ancillary materials.

In developing a roadmap, I would ideally outline all the relevant topics. Instead, I offer a cornucopia of possible topics to explore. The goal will be to prioritize the topics and select specific questions for future essays. Clearly, there is more than we can definitively address. Even so, I find it helpful to brainstorm lists like the following:

Currently working on: What is the current status of the ScholarsBox -- functionally and technically?

Priorities in writing

There are many drivers in this writing -- and I'm trying to sort them out. Let me make a quick list:

urgent demands; questions that need to be answered right away.
raising funds to support this work
fulfilling obligations to partners and granters: IuCdlCollaboration
making the series coherent for the reader -- there has to be some logic in the narrative
providing answers to TomSchirmer, the programmer doing most of the programming for the ScholarsBox
the need to make what we are doing clear to others at multiple levels of description: ScholarsBox/BlurbsAndPitches (10 second elevator pitch, the 2 minute description, five minute lightning talk, 15 minutes, 30 minutes.....the whole spiel. One thing that I need to work on quickly is the 3-5 page appendix-level description of the ScholarsBox) ScholarsBox/AppendixSection200403

List of Topics

What are the development timeline and plans?
Motivation for the ScholarsBox: why is the Scholar's Box useful and needed?
The origin of the Scholar's Box as the "Teacher's Box of Stuff"
What should the Scholar's Box be able to do in the long-term
the theory of adoption of the Scholar's Box.

Strategic topics

In what way can the ScholarsBox be an end-to-end prototype for GatherCreateShare functionality and as a usable piece of software?
Why is the Interactive University working on the Scholar's Box? How does this work serve the core mission of the IU?
What and whom does the Scholar's Box serve -- institutionally and individually?
What needs exactly are being addressed by the Scholar's Box? What is the "market" for such services? What is the long-term value proposition of the Scholar's Box?
How will intellectual property issues be addressed in the Scholar's Box and the Interactive University?
What are related projects and how do their work compare to the Scholar's Box? What opportunities are there for collaboration between the IU and these projects?
What role is played by such partnerships as that between the Interactive University and the California Digital Library in the Scholar's Box work?
What is the product roadmap, development timeline and philosophy of the Scholar's Box?
How will the Scholar's Box be using an open source model of development and distribution?
How can the Scholar's Box in the long-term? What is the funding model?
How will we evaluate the Scholar's Box?
What are the barriers to success? What risks are there and what are we doing to mitigate them?
If we ruled the world and wanted to make other projects cooperate with us so that the Scholar's Box can work perfectly, what would we have people do?
What are the roles played by interoperability standards and specifications of various sorts?
What do we assume about learning objects, the Web, digital culture, the semantic web in the development of the Scholar's Box development?
Why do we think that Scholar's Box has the potential to transform education and research?
What are some challenges of relating to both a K-12 and higher education community?
Where is the learning in all this technology?
I want to reflect on the connections between KM and Scholar's Box, the rise of a whole genre of programs and what that means for the place of SB in the world. http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/02/27NNcm_1.html

Functional

We need to make a detailed comparison between a fat client vs thin client version of the Scholar's Box. What are the tradeoffs between the two?
What type of media will the user be able to gather? In what way? Drag and drop only?
What interfaces for browsing through large collections of images?
How to build an interface to handle disparate types of media types and disparate metadata fromats?
What do users really want to create? What work products?
How to allow some level of customizability without introducing overwhelming complexity?
Can we make a parallel browser-based interface that will blend well with the current fat client?
How to let users make sense of educational standards?
Interface challenges for connecting to external environments with the Scholar's Box -- how to deal with them?
What are other software systems and tools to learn from in creating the interface for the Scholar's Box?
Built as a Chandler Parcel, how will the interface take shape? Built as a SAKAI tool, how will the interface change?
What level of annotations will we allow? What exactly is an annotation in the Scholar's Box?

Technical

We are depending on other promising open source projects for infrastructure. What is our specific plan for integrating other projects such as OpenOffice.org and Chandler?
How will we work in full semantic interoperability into the technical mix, specifically infrastructure that might come from SIMILE?
What roles do IMS specifications (like Content-Packaging, DRI) play?
How about the role of OKI and the SAKAI TPP?
Any universal canvas infrastructure to be had soon?
What implications are there for the Scholar's Box in evolving digital library infrastructure?
How will the Scholar's Box interact with RSS and weblogging and the whole web alpha geek world?
How to interface with the Multivalent Browser? with Bruce D'Arcus on his work on bibliographics? with OCW? etc....
And many more topics.....