Tagging comments?

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Anonymous's picture

Hello!

I'm curious - is there a good (and ideally easy) way to incorporate tagging of comments?

I'm thinking D6 here. Is node comment a good way to go? the only way to go?

Has anyone been down a similar road before? Any pitfalls?

Looking forward to any tips you might have!

Thanks!

Comments

Usability issue

bonobo's picture

We did some work with this in D5 using nodecomment and tags for comments. In user testing, it confused the bejeezus out of users.

Sample questions:

"Are these tags different from the tags on the post?"

"Why would I use this?"

"Do I need to fill this in?"

"But the first post is already tagged. Why should I tag this again?"

In short, unless you have users who understand tagging, or could add tags via comments to the original post (much like the issue queue on d.o) I don't recommend using this.

And, for a site used by non-technical to moderately technical users, I definitely don't recommend using tags on comments. You'd probably be better off using Solr to allow for more effective searching.

Cheers,

Bill


FunnyMonkey
Click. Connect. Learn.
Using Drupal in Education

Dear Bill

Hilongos's picture

Dear Bill,

Thank you for your clever idea. Im just wondering if this feature already functioning to Drupal 6.

Currently this

Jammu's picture

Currently this is being used right in most social networking sites.


Authorhouse

great feedback - as always! Here's the background

dmcw's picture

Bill,

That's great feedback!

This particular project is really in the "dream" stage at the moment. Perhaps I should have described the idea a bit more.

We've been working with an instructor teaching a distance education course who has been putting some really exciting video materials in one of our collaborative sites.

The students have been using standard comments to have discussions about the videos. In a class of 75, the result is a huge comment thread. It is great to see the interaction happening, but it is also clear that it is difficult for students to find the areas that they want to discuss.

We also started to think about ways the students interact around "lectures" - taking notes / discussion / reviewing notes / study groups - and it became clear that we might want to look at giving students a richer, more collaborative set of options on the site.

As we looked at this, we started asking some questions, and things snowballed:

  1. How can we help students find the areas of the discussion of most interest to them? (tags? ratings? ...?)
  2. In addition to discussions and questions, can we help students take notes on the lectures, and share their lecture notes and study materials right there in the site?
  3. If so, how do students track topics across lectures?
  4. Could we make it easy for them to reference particular time-points from the video lecture? Could they pull a still or a section of transcript down from the lecture into their notes?

And we kept on rolling - question after question - thinking through what looked like (on the dry erase board) a pretty awesome set up for collaborative note-taking and discussion.

So, though this is really just a side project at the moment, we thought we'd experiment a bit and perhaps put together a rough prototype.

We weren't sure - should we be trying to re-purpose comments (the line of thinking above), or re-purpose something like the book module and outline designer (lectures and lecture notes often being organized into outlines). Should we be going after some other approach entirely?

Ideas? Thoughts?

Anybody want to collaborate to build this thing and revolutionize collaborative note-taking?

Could be really fun.

~~~
doug worsham
http://lss.wisc.edu/~doug

Cool!

bonobo's picture

Hello, Doug,

Thanks for the additional context -- now this is clearer --

RE your 4 main points:

1. How can we help students find the areas of the discussion of most interest to them? (tags? ratings? ...?)
2. In addition to discussions and questions, can we help students take notes on the lectures, and share their lecture notes and study materials right there in the site?
3. If so, how do students track topics across lectures?
4. Could we make it easy for them to reference particular time-points from the video lecture? Could they pull a still or a section of transcript down from the lecture into their notes?

1-3 can be done using either pre-populate or the nodereference url widget:

http://drupal.org/project/prepopulate
http://drupal.org/project/nodereference_url

On your main video/lecture nodes, place a block with two links: Discuss this asset, and add notes about this asset. These links will point to the node/add pages for either a "discussion" content type, or a "notes" content type (or possibly, you could have just one content type used for both functions). These discussions would be taggable, and would also be linked to specific assets.

Then, you can modify the search backlinks view that ships with views to display, on the media asset, all discussions/notes about the asset. If you wanted to take it a step further, you could use the Apache Solr search integration to get related content based across discussions, notes, and assets.

RE 4, there are definitely more sophisticated ways of doing this, but one lighter-weight possibility could involve sharing the video assets as a multiple video files displayed together using a playlist -- the Flowplayer does this nicely, and this demo shows a version of this in action: http://flowplayer.org/demos/plugins/javascript/playlist/instream.html

Custom code would be required to connect a node to a specific element within the playlist, and this approach lacks the ability to target things on a second by second basis.

Cheers,

Bill


FunnyMonkey
Click. Connect. Learn.
Using Drupal in Education

which one?

bkinney's picture

Bill,

What is the best way to choose between prepopulate and nodreference_url? Is one more robust? Easier to use? I'd like to create content type that contains a reference to the page a user was on just before creating a node. This would be used for personal note taking. Something that only the originating user would be able to edit, and that would be accessible any time he returned to the page. I have a general approach in mind for doing this, and either of the mods seems like a big step in the right direction. Which one should I install?

Amount of info

bonobo's picture

Hello, Becky,

It gets down to the amount of info -- if all you want is the node reference, then nodereference_url is the clear choice.

If you want to prepopulate several fields, then prepopulate is definitely the way to go.

In short, nodereference_url is easy to use out of the box, and does one thing very well: create a nodereference.

Prepopulate allows more flexibility, but generally requires a little more setup for end users. For example, we usually use a php snippet to generate the url to be passed to the node that will be created with some fields prepopulated. The usage.txt that ships with prepopulate gives a good overview of how it can be used.


FunnyMonkey
Click. Connect. Learn.
Using Drupal in Education

Thanks for your help

bkinney's picture

We went with node reference. It is pretty slick.

Google Wave

Logic's picture

Many of the collaboration features or ideas you mention have been implemented by Google wave. You might want to see what features and UI capabilities they implemented before choosing an approach. They probably put more resources at this effort than the Drupal community has for education.
See: http://wave.google.com/
I found this by following a video recommended by the Drupal founder.

We will certainly be

dmcw's picture

We will certainly be watching Google wave!

Thanks Logic!
~~~
doug worsham
http://lss.wisc.edu/~doug
http://unionblend.uniblogs.org/

How many videos?

michelle's picture

You could always make a forum per video, but that doesn't scale well if you have a lot of them.

Michelle


See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region

fabiangebert's picture

Hello everyone,

thanks to dmcw for pointing me to this thread.
We've implemented something along the same lines for Moodle (already stable) and are currently thinking of a Drupal integration.
Comments on this thread could be helpful for us.
Thanks for any feedback in advance :-)

http://groups.drupal.org/node/23351

(live demo with moodle on http://moodle.mediabird.net/ or standalone http://www.mediabird.net/)

Cheers
Fabian

Looks like a good recipe!

dmcw's picture

Thanks Bill! Great advice!

I think we had first thought about re-purposing comments because we had imagined the form sitting directly under the video, and we weren't sure how to best establish and track the relationships between the video nodes and the notes nodes. We realized we were probably going to have to figure out how to make sure submitting a comment didn't disrupt the flow of video playback.

It looks like your solution will take care of all of this - in part by popping up the add node form in a new window. That should solve the problem about not disrupting video playback. It will mean that users will have to manage two windows - something that may prove tricky for some. Any ideas on doing this within a single window?

Thanks again - this looks like a big step in the right direction!

I'll be sure to check back in here as we try to sketch this out.

~~~
doug worsham
http://lss.wisc.edu/~doug

Doug, Would this

jct's picture

Doug,
Would this help?
http://drupal.org/project/ajax_comments

-john

absolutely

dmcw's picture

If we follow the comment route, something along those lines is essential.

Thanks for the pointer.

~~~
doug worsham
http://lss.wisc.edu/~doug
http://unionblend.uniblogs.org/

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