Planet Sakai

May 15, 2008

Peter Knoop

Project Coordination Meeting, 1-2 May, St. Paul, MN (updated)

News Item: Updated by Peter A. Knoop (knoop@umich.edu) to revision 2 on May 15, 2008 10:03. Created by Peter A. Knoop (knoop@umich.edu) on May 15, 2008 09:14

After the recent JA-SIG meeting in St. Paul, MN, a number of members of the Sakai Community took advantage of the co-location time to gather for a day-and-a-half Project Coordination meeting. A number of agendata items were proposed prior to the meeting, and that set was further refined at the meeting itself, building in some cases on interesting conversations that emerged during the JA-SIG meeting. The main points from the meeting are summarized in the following paragraphs, and further discussions on these topics has continued in many cases on the Sakai email lists. (Audio recrordings of most of the sessions, courtesy of Kirk Alexander are also available.)

Kernel – Ian Boston updated the group on his continuing experimentation with a Sakai "kernel". The ensuing discussion identified two potential milestones for a kernel release. The first is a near-term "K1" kernel release that brings things together in one place, but doesn't require much in the way of changes for developers. The second is a longer-term "K2" release that brings all the components of the kernel into a single jar, which will require major refactoring of the code. The overall goal of a kernel release would be to: reduce the number of lines of code owned by core services, improve performance, simplify database concerns, address bugs, and reduce the number of methods so developers can more easily figure how things are done.

Assignments2 – Indiana and Georgia Tech continue working on the next generation of the Assignments tool, with a goal of having the new tool in production at each institution in August. Some of the key highlights of that version of the tool include: a switch from the velocity-based presentation technology of the original tool to RSF, streamlining of gradebook-assignments integration, increased unit testing, versioning of submissions. (A more detailed update from Clay was posted to the Sakai email lists.)

Content Hosting Service – Cambridge is continuing work of putting JCR underneath, adding testing, and finishing mirgraiton code. Michigan will be able to help load test it when further along.

Resoruces – Ray Davis is working with Jim Eng to improve the Oracle conversion scripts/utilities for those moving to Sakai 2.5, whom need to migrate content from an older version of Sakai. The conversions are necessary in order to take advantage of some of the significant performance improvements 2.5 offers.

Content Viewer – There is still interest in this tool, however, the project team has not recently had much time to work on it.

MySakai and MyCamTools – Nico Matthijs demonstrated his new "portal" for Sakai users, which provides more of an iGoolge or Facebook like experience. Builds on JSON-based technogologies for delivering Sakai. Cambridge is purusing the use of this technology to help with rapid-prototyping and evaluation of the work Nathan is doing for the Sakai UX initititve. (A more detailed update on this work was posted by Nico prior to the meeting, check out his blog entry.)

Entity Broker – Steven Githens provided a visually inspiring update on the Entity Broker he and others are doing.

Gradebook – Kirk Alexander gave a brief update on Gradebook, and the work UC-Davis is going to be doing on it in the future.

QA – Megain May outlined recent activities in the QA arena, including: the foundation is hiring a person to help develop test scripts, there continues to be progress on the incorporation of the static code review results into the development cycle, and work continues on developing a generic test environment.

Top 5 – Everyone had the chance to share their top-5 areas of Sakai in which they would like to see improvements, as a way of kicking of broader conversations on how to foster collaboration around issues that need more than one organization's involvement.

Project Management – Within the general area of project management, one topic that saw significant discussion was how to attract agreement and collaboration among those with resources to work on Sakai, as to what to work on in Sakai. Particuarly, how to address the realization that some issues need folks to help work on them for which the issue many not be one of their own top priorities.

Site Info – Discussion about Site Info and Worksite Setup. There is siginficant interest in improving it, and one path forward for the short-term might be to start breaking it down into helpers to ease maintenance, while over the long-term work on improvements based on the direction Nathan's UX working is taking in this area. The JSON-based work from Cambridge could help significantly with the UX work here.

Outreach – A sub-group met to discuss Sakai Outreach activities, including the development of a circular or brochure highlighting key points about the software and community.

Content Authoring – Continuation of discussion around re-thinking content authoring in Sakai. More details and continuing discussion.

Attendees

Michael Feldstein (Oracle)
Ian Boston (University of Cambridge)
Michael Korcuska (Sakai Foundation)
Megan May (Sakai Foundation/Indiana University)
Chuck Serverance (University of Michigan)
Jim Eng (University of Michigan)
Lydia Li (Stanford University)
Ray Davis (University of California, Berkeley)
Eli Cochran (University of California, Berkeley)
Steven Githens (University of Cambridge)
Michael Zackerson (Rsmart)
John Lewis (Unicon)
John Norman (University of Cambridge)
Jason Shao (CampsEAI)
Anthony Whyte (Sakai Foundation)
Clay Fenlason (Georgia Tech)
Nico Matthijs (University of Cambridge)
Lance Speelmon (Indiana University)
Kirk Alexander (University of California, Davis)
Oliver Heyer (University of California, Berkeley)
Ian Dolphin (Hull)
Nate Angell (Rsmart)
Peter Knoop (Sakai Foundation/University of Michigan)

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by Peter A. Knoop at May 15, 2008 05:03 PM

Sean Mehan

UK HEI Usage of VLE

Alejandro Chiner recently posted some information about the results of his survey on large VLE implementations in UK HEIs. 63% of R4 HEIs are using a commercial VLE centrally, but 23% are using Moodle and 10.5% are using Sakai. This reflects significant shift in this space and the exercise should be conducted again in 3-4 [...]

by Sean at May 15, 2008 02:36 PM

different service start model on RH EL

Kept forgetting how to start/stop services on RH, as we mostly use Suse for linux. They are different: service nfslock stop service nfs stop service portmap stop umount /proc/fs/nfsd Now start service in following order: service portmap start service nfs start service nfslock start mount -t nfsd nfsd /proc/fs/nfsd convert this post to pdf.

by Sean at May 15, 2008 11:31 AM

Cost model for preservation of research data for UK HEIs

Please note that an online executive summary and a full report (which can be downloaded in both Word and pdf versions) of the HEFCE-funded research data preservation costs study “Keeping Research Data Safe: a cost model and guidance for UK Universities” have just been published on the JISC website convert this post to pdf.

by Sean at May 15, 2008 11:26 AM

Erin Yu

OpenCollection Workshop 2

Traveling to NYC

I flew Porter! I LOVE Porter! it was the best flying experience I’ve had! from downtown pick-up to free internet and snacks in the lounge.. and iMacs in the lounge! I also liked the little in-flight lunch in an environmentally friendly paper box.

Participatory design

I don’t normally have access to users in the museum domain (who does?), whereas I do have relatively easy access to students. This second workshop was a unique opportunity for me to hang out with 40-50 museum professionals and talk about their experience as users; i didn’t want to let it go to waste.

Since the topic is on user experience and interface anyway, I thought why not do a miniature user research with them, provide instructions and tools to express themselves, and feed the information we get into design and development. Isn’t that the whole idea of participatory design?

Lucky for us, the users were mature with lots of sophisticated opinions and were very willing to share them. The hard part was coming up with the right questions to ask them. I think between my blind preparations, Jutta’s filtering and impromptu facilitation, and Colin’s tips and support, we were able to pull together a successful workshop - not to forget the hard work of the rest of OpenCollection team.

Jutta has mad winging skills. wow… it was inspirational!

What we did

It’s costly to gather together this many users, but that work has already been done for us, and our job was to make the most of the opportunity.

So we were with a roomful of museum folks who are currently using some form of Collections Management System. They had different roles and responsibilities within their organizations that ranged from a curator, collections manager, registrar, director, to “Joe the tech guy”. I’ll just share my personal account here and not bore you with the details of the preparation, presentation, and results gathered (those will go on the wiki).

Prior to the workshop, we handed out questionnaire to gather some information on their background and previous experiences with technology in general and CMS specifically.
First thing in the workshop, we went over the results of the survey so everyone gets some sense of who’s in the room.
Then we handed out screenshots from OpenCollection to bring in their perspectives on the current interface (not to criticize it!). This was carried out in a break-out session, where everyone was randomly assigned to one of 8 round tables. It was interesting how most of these tables pointed out a lot of the same things as problematic areas much like what happens in user testing! After a couple of tables, people just presented the new things the previous groups didn’t mention.
After this, we took the spotlight away from OpenCollection and discussed general issues related to Browse and Search. The users had all kinds of crazy cool ideas that a designer or a group of designers alone would never have come up with! And, since they understood the subject matter so well and have experiences with other software, they were able to think of a variety of use cases and edge cases we’d never get to.
On the second day, we did a persona exercise. This was the most fun of all the things we did, for me and for a lot of other participants. Jutta framed it very nicely; she said something along the lines of “after this workshop, we are going to go away and hammer out the application, but since we can’t take all of you with us, we want you to create a surrogate of yourselves so we can refer to it later.” Beautiful. Then I gave a quick intro on what persona is, how it’s used, and presented them with an example persona. We had loosely grouped them into similar roles, and each group seemed to come up with a fictional representative of themselves with ease.
After that was mostly Services Oriented Architecture discussions. I knew it would be impossible for me to stay awake through it, so I scheduled a few user testing sessions. um and also because it’s not every day that I get to sit down with museum people to do user testing. I prepared 5 simple tasks. Initially I thought nobody would finish all the tasks successfully, because I couldn’t see myself completing them. Surprisingly, all users were able to complete the tasks with varying degrees of success.

What I learned (note to self)

Allowing and empowering users to do user research on themselves seem to be very effective. The participants came up with 8 awesome personas in 45 minutes without breaking a sweat! These personas were realistic and detailed, and captured information users feel are important including information the experts may miss or overlook. I’m sure it’s very expensive to bring users together in one place at one time to do these exercises, but I wonder if it’s any more cost-effective than a team of designers spending months on user research.

For group discussions, you need to provide clear instructions (obvs!) and a small number of simple questions. Not because they’re dumb :), but because it’s a big group of people and a vague question can be interpreted in many different ways. Also, people tend to have a lot to say, and discussions tend to run longer than you expect, so it’s better to ask a few simple things rather than many.

Also when organizing something like this, you need to be flexible and creative about last minute tweaks. A lot of things will happen, some things will go better than you expect, something will not go at all. =)

by almondkey at May 15, 2008 01:00 AM

May 14, 2008

Michael Korcuska

Common Cartridge is cool; LTI is even cooler

I spent Monday and Tuesday at the IMS Learning Impact conference in Austin Texas. I got to see a few folks who I often see at learning technology industry events. Folks like Chuck Severance, John Lewis (Unicon), John Blakely (Unicon), Michael Feldstein (Oracle), Linda Feng (Oracle), Mick Silvecko (IBM), Annie Chechitelli (Wimba) and even Bob [...]

by Michael Korcuska at May 14, 2008 08:29 PM

Michael Feldstein

Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

Delayed several days by a database failure at the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Friday, May 2nd, the Final Judgment and associated orders for Blackboard v. Desire2Learn are now publicly available.

This text is based upon publicly available records. Because much of the record is “sealed” and not available to the public, and the transcript is available only upon payment to the court reporter, the complete record, as available to counsel, may provide a different perspective.

(...)
Read the rest of Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment (2,254 words)

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by michael@mfeldstein.com (Michael Feldstein) at May 14, 2008 03:05 PM

May 13, 2008

Chris Coppola

In Search of Certitude

There's an excellent article in the most recent Educause Review called "In Search of Certitude" by Brad Wheeler. It's about the needs, challenges, and support systems used to find quality information. It deals with the abundance of information and how the support systems and technologeis are adapting to provide those seeking information with an appropriate level of confidence in what they find.

The post is an interesting read from an information seeker perspective, which we can all easily identify with. It's even more interesting if you're involved at all in architecting systems (people, technology, organization) to support the complexity of connecting information seekers with the appropriate information. My experience at rSmart, and in the Sakai, OSP, and Kuali communities all have elements of this.

by cdcoppola at May 13, 2008 12:18 PM

May 12, 2008

Michael Korcuska

Githens and LISP and the Code Critiquer

So I was talking to Steve Githens at a bar in St. Paul two weeks ago. He was showing me Sash running as a Sakai tool, which I have to admit I didn’t appreciate to the degree Steve expected. The conversation turned (I forget how, beer was involved) to the fact that I used to [...]

by Michael Korcuska at May 12, 2008 07:51 PM

Michael Feldstein

Stop the Madness!

I’m at the IMS Learning Impact conference. Another conference, another T-shirt. I expect to get at least 5 conference bags and T-shirts this year. I already have way too many T-shirts and way too many bags. At this point, I am starting to use them to insulate my attic. It’s absurd.

Therefore, I am hereby starting the Conference BYOB (Bring Your Own Bag) movement. Here’s how it works:

If you’re a conference organizer, offer to give a gift card (Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble…whatever) to anyone who brings their own bag and shirt. Just put your pile of stuff out, with gift card on the top, and I’ll gladly cram it into one of my 57 existing bags. You save shipping costs on all that bulky stuff, I get something I actually want rather than extra stuff to haul home and stuff in my attic, and we both help to save the environment.

Deal?

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by michael@mfeldstein.com (Michael Feldstein) at May 12, 2008 02:17 PM

Chris Coppola

Open Source ERP - The Cure All

I'm in Chicago for the sixth Kuali Days event this week. It's a gathering of the Kuali communities and an opportunity for newcomers to learn about Kuali Financial System, Research Administration, Student, Rice, and more. While anyone can download the Kuali software from the website, or get a pre-configured appliance to evaluate the software, Kuali Days is the only real opportunity to get a first hand sense for what's going on. Kuali, like Sakai, is much more than just software. There's a tremendous opportunity for peer collaboration. It's a professional development event as much as anything and there's no substitute for being here.

This morning I read Joseph Panettieri's article called "Is Open Source the ERP Cure-All?" in Campus Technology. It deals most directly with open source as an alternative to proprietary systems but it goes beyond that to talk about 3 sourcing options: Traditional on-premise, SaaS (hosted applications), and Open Source. I think there's a risk in talking about these three as alternatives because it's mixing apples and oranges a bit. On-Premise and SaaS (On-Demand) are two different ways to acquire/deploy/pay for software. Proprietary and Open Source are two different methods for developing and licensing software. Clarity here is important as there are still many misconceptions. One thing you might miss if you think of these things as "alternatives" is the importance of open source in the delivery of SaaS solutions, for example.

I appreciate how much Joseph and Campus Technology pay attention and inform our community about these important developments.

May 11, 2008

Fluid Project

Welcoming Jess Mitchell, Fluid’s New Project Manager

I’ve been waiting for over a year to write this blog post. I’m extremely excited to welcome Jess Mitchell on board as our new project manager for Fluid. Earlier this week, Jutta Treviranus sent out a great introduction to Jess on the fluid-work mailing list. Here’s a quick excerpt: “Jess comes with an incredibly rich [...]

by colin at May 11, 2008 11:06 PM

Aaron Zeckoski

Fun with Maven 2 dependencies

I learned some new Maven 2 tricks this weekend while experimenting with things. In general it can be a real pain when you are developing a piece of framework code which a few projects depend on and you find a minor issue which requires a new release. Typically you have to go around updating lots of POMs. Well, no longer! In maven 2 you can now specify version ranges which can save you a lot of updating when newer versions of packages come out.
Normal maven 2 depedencies look like this:

<dependency>
<groupId>org.sakaiproject.entitybroker</groupId>
<artifactId>entitybroker-api</artifactId>
<version>1.3.3</version>
<scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

Unfortunately, if a bug fix is released for this which is 1.3.4 then I will not pick up on the new version and would have to explicitly put it in. However, if I want to pick up any minor version updates for a project and I want the minimum version to be 1.3.3 (but less than 1.4.0) I can do this:

<dependency>
<groupId>org.sakaiproject.entitybroker</groupId>
<artifactId>entitybroker-api</artifactId>
<version>[1.3.3,1.4.0)</version>
<scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

A word of warning though, if the packages you are using do not adhere to standards of versioning you can really get in trouble if a new version comes out with an incompatible interface. Of course, if that happens you simply adjust the version range in the POM.

More info here: http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Dependency+Mediation+and+Conflict+Resolution

by Aaron Zeckoski (noreply@blogger.com) at May 11, 2008 09:02 PM

Michael Korcuska

Sakai Project Planning Meeting in St. Paul

As Dr. Chuck indicated in a comment to an earlier blog post of mine, the St. Paul Sakai Project Planning meetings were quite efficient and successful. A number of topics were discussed and I’ll provide a brief summary here. As usual, while we made some concrete proposals about how to move forward, no [...]

by Michael Korcuska at May 11, 2008 03:14 PM

May 10, 2008

Michael Feldstein

Going to IMS Learning Impact This Week

Ugh. I have so much to say about the JA-SIG conference and had just dug out enough from my work backlog to think about writing a few blog posts. Now I’m going away again and will have my head crammed full of even more stuff to blog about.I’m going to try to get to at least some of the JA-SIG stuff before it fades from my memory, but in the meantime, Sakai Foundation Executive Director Michael Korcuska has a few good posts up about it on his blog.

At any rate, if you’re going to Learning Impact, look me up. I’ll be around for the entire conference (including Thursday morning) and will be participating in the “Analytics and Learning Outcomes” panel on Tuesday at 1 PM.

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by michael@mfeldstein.com (Michael Feldstein) at May 10, 2008 10:49 PM

Cost of Exit

A while back, I picked up on D’Arcy Norman’s complaint about how Moodle doesn’t export content to a standard. In a response to one of the comments on my post, I suggested that open source LMS communities like Moodle’s should encourage adopting institutions to consider the cost of exit as a selection criterion for their LMS. Doing so would encourage them to invest in export capabilities at the time when their commitment to the platform is high.

Well, as Chuck Severence notes, Oxford is considering doing exactly that with Sakai. Check out his post for some good notes on the pros and cons of various export strategies.

Chuck Severence, Oxford, Sakai

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by michael@mfeldstein.com (Michael Feldstein) at May 10, 2008 10:44 PM

Dr. Chuck

Sakai Exit Strategy

Thanks to Adam Marshall of Oxford - the Sakai developer list recently started a discussion about an exit strategy for an organization which adopts Sakai. Not because Oxford is thinking about exiting Sakai before it even enters - but because...

by Charles Severance at May 10, 2008 01:19 PM

Dr. Chuck's Videos

Etudes Overview

This gives an overview of the Etudes course management system. Etudes provides course management software and services to over 20 colleges. Etudes also provides support, training, and coordinated product development to its members. The Etudes software open source and is based on the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment.

by csev@umich.edu (Charles Severance) at May 10, 2008 12:53 PM

May 09, 2008

Anthony Whyte

Gert Sibande College joins the Sakai Foundation

Gert Sibande College (GS), located in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa has joined the Sakai Foundation as a member institution following deployment of Sakai as GS’s enterprise collaboration and learning platform. This is exciting news as Gert Sibande is both the first Sakai adoption and foundation member among Further Education and Training colleges (FET)—academic institutions that provide vocational and occupational training vital to South Africa's economic development.

Gert Sibande has campuses located in Ermelo, Evander, Mpuluzi and Standerton. GS's Sakai installation is intended to serve all four locations, although bandwidth and connectivity issues—a general South African challenge at present—prevent full access to the system. Nevertheless, the provisioning of course sites with content is now underway, faculty workshops have been held and a number of lecturers have begun to use the system.

Gert Sibande partnered with Tecqle Information Technologies to implement Sakai and benefited from advice and support from other South African Sakai institutions, particularly the University of South Africa (UNISA).

For more information on Gert Sibande and its Sakai deployment, contact Shereen Dindar, GS Senior Education Specialist, at shereendindar@yahoo.co.uk.

by arwhyte@sakaifoundation.org at May 09, 2008 10:22 AM

Dr. Chuck's Videos

Canettes Blues Band: Boogie / Tore Down

The Canettes Blues Band performing live at the Mr. Pickwick Pub, Geneva. Their trademark introduction number starts with a 12-bar boogie and works into a song called "Tore Down" by Sonny Thompson. Features the 1964 Plymouth Valiant which is still running and driven daily. (Editing and camera by Dr. Chuck and Jeremy Herr).

by csev@umich.edu (Charles Severance) at May 09, 2008 03:23 AM

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