Background

Last April the Hewlett Foundation conducted an external review of Connexions as part of our application for additional funding. Two of the reviewers were David Wiley and Brent Lambert from OSLO. At the review they revealed that their site was about to start hosting discussion forums for courses in MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. We were all getting along well (hey, how often do I get to work with someone else named Brent?) and decided one night to try a covert collaboration of our own.

The idea was to use their site for hosting forums for Connexions modules, similar to the way they host the MIT courses. I wanted a tighter integration than MIT was doing, however. Their courses simply link off to the discussion forums. I wanted our site to actually include a list of posts so that readers could see activity right away, drawing them into the discussion. A single late night of hacking between Brent and I produced a workable prototype: every Connexions module could have a link to automatically create a forum on the OLS site. Using libxml2's python bindings for a bit of screen scraping and I was able to list the titles, authors and dates of the most recent posts right there on the module.

Today

And that's essentially how it still works today. I've traded HTML screen-scraping for parsing an RSS feed, the creation of forums is guarded by an HMAC hash with a private key, and the code has moved from an External Method to a CMF tool. But the basics are the same. More evidence that python and Zope are fantastic rapid development tools. We actually could have pushed for an earlier deployment, but we wanted to get the new module look finished first.

The future

My next wish-list item for the next generation of module discussions is for authors to be able to monitor all of their content at a single URL (HTML or RSS). I think this will help them to get involved in the discussions without feeling overwhelmed at checking a huge list of forums.

There are other community-driven features in the works as well. Watch for author profiles and a page to list all of an author's content. Both coming soon!