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Pink

Toshiyuki Takeda
Visiting Researcher from Kwansei Gakuin University
(In collaboration with Dan Suthers)

Pink, named for the Ruby language in which it is being written, is our newest kid on the block and still under initial development. It is based on Suthers' notion of "artifact-centered discourse." Most human discourse in learning and work references and relies on external artifacts as resources for conversation, most obviously (but not only) when the artifacts are explicit topics of conversation. Yet, online learning environments fail to provide representational and computational aids for this role of artifacts in online discussion. Pink begins to address this problem by linking threaded discussion with textual documents. Each text is associated with a discussion group. One can embed iconic anchors in the textual document and use these to reference parts of the document in the discussion notes. Notes are organized by conventional topic threads, but can also be accessed via the anchors they reference.

In addition to Takeda's Ruby implementation, we are experimenting with similar functionality in two student projects. Kukakuka uses servlets to provide a web-based interface to NNTP groups linked to web pages under discussion. NNTP-enhanced Belvedere provides a Java NNTP client that links news postings to objects in Belvedere diagrams.