moving towards a prototype for GRAIL

Had an interesting meeting today with the ACG group in Education Commons about possible engines for GRAIL to provide the central frame for the environment that the various elements would link to. Mark Hume, formerly at UTSC, developed a really nice architecture there for their web environment that made everything very transparent and easy to find and communicate about. There is a guest login on this page that will allow you to click around and see a version of it: https://intranet.utsc.utoronto.ca/home.php?login=1

Now for GRAIL, obviously there would be lots of different things and it would have a different look and feel and so on, but this is the first time I have seen a model that actually exists that could work as a modifiable prototype for what I envision for this environment. Basically there are two fundamental categories of things: roles and channels. Everything is describable and assignable to a role–and channels are locations for specific aggregations of things like news from the Student Services department etc.
Role categories are assigned centrally but updated locally–making information very current and the resulting interface provides a very dynamic notification location for students.
They are currently scoping out a plan and a timeline for how we might proceed with this. I will need volunteers soon!! (I hope 🙂