Request for Documentation: Asides

Lyla Fischer

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Oct 27, 2015, 11:45:28 AM10/27/15

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Hi All,

As some of you know, I have been working on getting the XBlock SDK to be more user-friendly as I have been working on my Static Web Page Authoring XBlock. A very prominent feature within the standard development environment seems to be something called "Asides". However, despite the prominence, I can't seem to find any documentation on what they are or what they are supposed to be or what they are supposed to be used for. I would be willing to update the documentation on behalf of the community if I had the knowledge-base to do it, but I can't figure it out from reading the code. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

-Lyla Fischer

Cole Shaw

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Oct 27, 2015, 12:25:34 PM10/27/15

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Hi Lyla, thanks for undertaking this!

There is not much documentation about Asides, since the feature is still under development. We gave a talk about them at Open edX last week, you should be able to see the slides and video here, soon.

Short-version is that Asides are meant to “decorate” a set of XBlocks in your course / platform to provide extended functionality, outside of the individual XBlock's content. So in the XBlock SDK, you’ll see thumbs up / down voting on everything — where you can think of the votes as metadata reaching across all the XBlocks. You could also imagine an Aside that shares a Like on social media for certain content, or a widget that lets course authors tag individual problems with learning outcomes (which might then be used in analytics). You could integrate these features into custom XBlocks (and duplicate the standard XBlocks…lots of work), but Asides lets you write one light-weight class that then applies across all XBlocks, which makes certain use cases simpler to implement.

Some edX folks might be able to provide more info (Cale, Beth?), and Ross might have additional thoughts.

Thanks!

Cole

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Lyla Fischer

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Oct 28, 2015, 6:57:53 PM10/28/15

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Thanks for the explanation. Would it be fair to say that the difference between an Aside and a Mixin is that a Mixin must be declared in the source code of an XBlock, but an Aside can be added to an XBlock after compilation? Are there other differences between Asides and Mixins that would be good to document?

-Lyla

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Cole Shaw

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Oct 29, 2015, 9:08:07 AM10/29/15

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Hy Lyla, so it’s good to contrast with Mixins, and that’s a good way to highlight the difference between the two. I would add to that a little bit, in the sense that it’s not really adding the Aside to an XBlock, more like rendering an Aside next to an XBlock — you just have to configure the platform and tell it where to render the Aside (more of an administrative task rather than a coding task, like with Mixins).

The configuration aspect is still under development, but the current state is: You install the Aside into the platform, like you do with an XBlock, via setup.py. In the platform (not the XBlock SDK yet), there is a Django admin field where you can then blacklist XBlock types (chapter, sequential, html, etc.), and the Asides will render on all remaining XBlock types.

As an example that it’s currently just a “render next to” feature, if you export a course using Asides from Studio, you will not see any Asides XML (I know Workbench shows the Aside XML at the bottom of the page, but it doesn’t show up in the main platform). Not sure if that will change in the future as the feature gets developed more.

But yes, theoretically an Aside could be rendered next to any XBlock, despite the fact that the Aside is not declared in the XBlock’s source code.

Hope that helps…

Cole

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Lyla Fischer

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Nov 10, 2015, 11:22:07 PM11/10/15

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Hi Cole,

I'm really glad that I got to see the presentation that you and Ross gave at the OpenEdX conference, even if I had to wait a while for the video to be processed and posted. That presentation gave a lot of the context that I couldn't get from reading source code. One of the main things that I noticed was the feature is still in its formative stages, and that significant work still needs to be done. I noticed that the main current application area of Asides is to Semantic Tagging, and that on the top of the list you presented for further development was the ability to have finer control over when Asides are rendered. Is there anything else that I should have taken away from that presentation?

While I appreciate any clarifications you might be able to offer at the current stage of development, I'm nervous about doing too much documentation on Asides while it is still so early in its lifecycle. However, I think that the general idea has a lot of potential, and I especially love the demonstration that I saw of your semantic tagging feature. I'm currently working on a client_side_authoring XBlock, where I am trying to expose as much XBlock functionality as I can on the client side. One of my hopes and dreams for its eventual development is the ability to offer integrations with other services, including tagging services. I hope that we will find an opportunity to collaborate on Asides and semantic tagging in the future.

-Lyla

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Piotr Mitros

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Nov 11, 2015, 2:52:29 PM11/11/15

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I'll actually second Lyla's request for documentation here. Right now, asides are a black box, and the only people qualified to bring them to completion are the ones who worked on them initially. Incomplete, but documented, other developers might be able to bring them incrementally closer to completion.

Piotr

John Swope

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Apr 13, 2016, 9:22:21 AM4/13/16

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Hi, is there any update on where we are with Asides/Semantic Tagging? I am working with a client that wants to use it. I'd be happy to build out/document some of this if it helps the group.

John