Re: [dita-learningspec] Real-World Implementation Report

[john_hunt@us.ibm.com]

Eliot -

Thanks so much for sharing this detailed
usage report. 

This is indeed good and encouraging
that the learning interactions domain provides a solid starting point for
your more specialized interactions.

I have a couple of questions for you
- 

1) is it safe to assume that processing
for your specialized interactions could also build from the base interactions,
or would you anticipate the need for a completely new set of specialized
processing? On this front, by next Thursday I expect to have some basic
interactions processing for true/false and singleSelect, and it will be
interesting to see if that holds up with your specialized forms.

2) are there additional elements or
attributes you need in the base set for specializing?  For example,
data is available in most places, but it looks like you're using some other
1.2 elements. We need to be sure that the base design makes available/does
not exclude anything that might be needed for a custom design.

Again - thanks for sharing the report.
Looks like we have the basis for a good usage endorsement here.

John
___________________________________
John Hunt
DITA Architect / Lotus Information Development Center
Chair, OASIS DITA learning and training content sub-committee
IBM Software Group/Lotus Software
john_hunt@us.ibm.com

From:	Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com>
To:	dita-learningspec@lists.oasis-open.org
Date:	03/19/2008 04:58 PM
Subject:	[dita-learningspec] Real-World Implementation Report

---

Thought I would report on my experience so far using the 8 March
Learning specialization as a base for my test-prep publisher's question
content.

So far it's worked remarkably well. Here is a typical instance of my
specialized markup:

<question>
  <p>This is a paragraph before the question proper.</p>
  <multiple-choice>
    <prompt>What is the volume of this figure?<art><image
          href=""art/93OH_PT1_A01.eps">           <alt>This is the alternative text for the figure</alt>
        </image></art>
    </prompt>
    <mc_answer>
      <answer_option>
        <answer_text>18 cubic centimeters</answer_text>
      </answer_option>
      <answer_option>
        <answer_text>36 cubic centimeters</answer_text>
      </answer_option>
      <answer_option>
        <answer_text>48 cubic centimeters</answer_text>
      </answer_option>
      <answer_option><answer_text>54 cubic centimeters</answer_text>
        <correct_response/>
        <feedback>Width times height times length: 3 x 3 x
6</feedback></answer_option>
    </mc_answer>
  </multiple-choice>
</question>

Here <question> is a specialization of "container" (new in DITA 1.2)
that serves to bind the interaction to any lead-in blocks and to
classifying metadata.

<multiple-choice> is a specialization of lcSingleSelect and the mapping
of the subelements should be clear enough. I specialized primarily to
provide more familiar/friendlier element type names, but I would expect
most uses of the learning specialization to do the same.

The <art> element is just a ph specialization that binds one or more
<image> elements to classifying metadata (for this client art instances
are "managable objects" in the CMS that would be used by reference).

One aspect of this markup approach is that I largely avoided the need
for multi-paragraph questions, although I am running into some bad
examples in tests that emulate state-specific tests, such as this question:

<question
  outputclass="boxed">
  <p>No one lives his or her life alone. We all have families. We all
have friends, or at
    least, people who come and go in our lives. Some people have
influence over us, some
    people do not.</p>
  <p>Write a composition about someone (a family member, a friend, even
a stranger) who has
    had some influence, positive or negative, on your life.</p>
  <p>Before you begin to write, think about what force of this
individual’s personality
    might have had an influence on the way you act or see the world.</p>
  <open-ended>
    <prompt>
      <b>Now write a multiparagraph composition about a specific moment
or moments where
        things might have changed for you, where you had a realization,
or came to a
        decision thanks to that person. Write your answer on a separate
sheet of paper.</b>
    </prompt>
    <open_answer/>
  </open-ended>
</question>

If you read the question you'll see that it's really two questions
("write a composition" and "write a mutli-paragraph composition") but in
the test it's presented as a single question. The markup here is not an
exactly correct semantic representation of the original question.

It might be better, for example, to have my <question> element allow
multiple "open-ended" elements, which would allow me to more accurately
reflect the intent of the test.

Unfortunately for this client they have to emulate what a given state
does--they can't appeal to good practice or necessarily apply editorial
authority.

I defined a few generic topic types to organize the publication content:
test, question_set, etc. and have a specialization of section called
"question_group" that allows me to have groups of related questions that
might have a title. These all allow me to model the organizational
structure and content of the print publication. My "question_set" topic
type can be used within the context of a publication to reflect
subdivisions or as a standalone topic that serves as a pool of one or
more re-usable questions.

As part of the project for this client we are managing questions as
individual objects in the CMS with the goal of building a simple
question management system that will focus on being able to search for
questions based on their classification within both subject taxonomies
as well as with respect to state-specific learning standards.

Our general business goal is to generalize this functionality within our
RSuite product so we can provide some general out-of-the-box learning
content support features. These will in turn leverage our general DITA
support features, so having the Learning specialization is of tremendous
value to us as service and software providers as well as of obvious
value for our current and potential clients.

For a level of effort benchmark, I started on this last Friday morning
and spent about 8 hours over the weekend coming up to speed on the
Learning specialization, including taking the time to provide some
feedback, and so on, and then created sample docs and refined my
specializations iteratively using OxygenXML as my development
environment. By the end of the day yesterday I had a pretty solid markup
design and representative sample docs reflecting real published test and
prep lessons. Most of that time was spent working out the details of my
higher-level organizing structures. The actual question markup was very
easy to design and implement from the Learning specialization once I
understood what the general pattern was.

I spent a couple of hours today building an HTML preview transform for
use from our CMS product but I'd need to spend about the same amount of
work extending the Toolkit's HTML process to support specific
specializations. (and could largely reuse the code I wrote for my
preview script.)

So so far so good. This client doesn't really do anything with
objectives or other aspects of learning content--the focus is almost
entirely on questions. Right now their business focus is on improving
their print workflows but they do have a medium-term interest in more
electronic deliverables so I'm hopeful that the Learning base will pay
dividends there.

Cheers,

Eliot

--
Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions Architect
"Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together"
Main: 610.631.6770
www.reallysi.com
www.rsuitecms.com

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