Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 10:13:47 -0400
From: Mark Guzdial 
Subject: Concrete Project Moving Toward STC

I really liked Noah's new mission statement!  A focus on document
technology is more appealing than the Virtual Messenger approach, I feel,
because it's more concrete, obviously more flexible, and less dependent on
AI-complete problems that we haven't solved yet.

I'm also much more excited because I can see much more concretely what I
can offer.  Please see the image below:
http://guzdial.cc.gatech.edu/st/muswiki/screen.gif

This is a screenshot of a MuSwiki (Jarek has seen this really working).
The right hand side window is a browser.  It works just like a normal Web
browser -- it fetches a page from a server, and displays it.  There are
links to different pages and to different servers.

There are two aspects that make this interesting:
(1) First, it's a Swiki: Anyone that can read the page can also write on
the page.  This is an idea that I'm using in my Swiki work now
(http://pbl.cc.gatech.edu:8080/myswiki).  While we're exploring some fun
collaboration ideas with this, we can do Swikis with normal Web browsers,
which is not quite so exciting..
(2) The more important idea is that it's drag-and-drop with any kind of
animated/interactive element.  The lower left hand corner is a parts bin --
you can drag pieces out of there and drop them into the browser.  Some of
the parts are animated or interact with the user -- that works, too,
cross-platform.

Techie side of things:  This is written in Squeak
(http://squeak.cs.uiuc.edu) by my student Lex Spoon.  It's written on top
of John Maloney's Morphic UI. Another student, Ivan Brusic, is working on
making Squeak's Morphic into a ZUI for his Masters project, so that we can
zoom into and around this browser, drop in chunks that are very "deep", etc.

Pieces that I can now help with: I have a lot of experience with multi-user
shared documents, and we have a platform that we're starting to use now
with collaborative drag-and-drop and interactive shared documents.  There
is a clear path to integrate the lessons of Ken's PAD++.

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html