Planet Sakai

More fun in Barcelona - Google Summer of Code Meeting

2008-07-05T21:10:20+00:00

My good fortune continues. today I spent the day at Marc Alier's home on the north side of Barcelona near the beach. The first part of the day was spent talking and meeting everyone over a long lunch that included...

The Starfish and the Spider - The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

2008-07-04T23:11:52+00:00

I am like the luckiest guy in the world - after a great week in Paris with my second family of the Sakai community I was able to come to spend the weekend in Barcelona with some last minute arrangements...

US Court squashes privacy data concerns and opens all for Capitalism

2008-07-04T21:27:17+00:00

You may have been following the drama about Viacom/MTV suing Youtube and parent company Google for $1B due to Youtube promoting and supporting piracy and copyright infringement. The case took a new turn, once very bad for privacy advocates (myself included) yesterday. convert this post to pdf.

Alles op een rijtje van SakaiParis08

2008-07-04T17:04:04+00:00

Mocht je geïnteresseerd zijn in de presentaties van de laatste Sakai conferentie in Parijs, dan kun je die terug vinden op de wiki van de Sakai community. Zie dus Conference Presentations - 9th Sakai Conference, Paris, France, 1-3 July 2008 - Confluence.
De video's, die in twee zalen zijn gemaakt, zijn te vinden op een andere website: http://www.cpm.jussieu.fr/CPM/activites/visioconf/sakai_conf.htm (en dat is ook al een indrukwekkende collectie geworden!).

Sakai Fellows

2008-07-03T15:27:15+00:00

This morning Michael Korcuska opened the 9th Sakai conference in Paris.
In his opening remarks he officially named the 2008 Sakai Fellows.
The University of Amsterdam is honoured that our own Alan Berg is elected as one of the 2008 Fellows. His work on automated code review and contribution to the QA process of Sakai didn't passed unnoticed. During the speech Alan got his Fellow jacket and his now one of "the happy few man in black" in de Sakai Foundation

Thoughts on Content Authoring BOF

2008-07-03T14:30:59+00:00

I was very happy to attend the Content Authoring BOF and get some insight into the work and thought that has already happened with regard to this issue. I think it was remarkable how close our respective visions were and how much agreement there was. I was encouraged with how quickly people were willing to discard or admit the limitations of the current tool-focused paradigm.

I was happy that we could articulate (at least partially) the tension between content creation that is structured (and probably based on templates) and content that can be organized any which way ("wild wild west" content authoring). These approaches to content authoring are really more of a spectrum and a potential feature would have to be able to satisfy needs all along that that spectrum.

I liked the idea that we could both accommodate the ability for system-provided templates and also allow users to promote their created pages to templates.

I was also happy that while sequencing and tracking were articulated as important, everyone seemed to agree that neither were crucial for a first implementation.

I was also ecstatic to learn that the groundwork is being laid for Sakai to be aware of content/items/entities inside of tools (like discussion thread, assignments, etc.) in order to accomodate the need to place them on a page and treat them like any other piece of content in Sakai.

In Paris doing some Code (SAK-13886)

2008-07-02T15:43:10+00:00

Well - there is a performance issue in the portal code in Sakai 2.5. There are more queries to the SAKAI_SITE_PROPERTY in Sakai 2.5 than in 2.4. In looking at things there were several instances of "too many queries" -...

Thoughts on Laurillard Keynote

2008-07-02T12:39:00+00:00

I thought today's keynote was interesting, very clear and offered some compelling arguments for teaching with technology that I will definitely be taking back home and using. However, I felt our (meaning NYU's) position in the teaching and learning with technology field is not quite a perfect match with the environment that Diana Laurillard articulated.

Like many US institutions, we are largely a Research university - our instructors (and many of our students) are also researchers. So I felt that the claim that Instructors are wholly unfamiliar with research approaches to teaching and learning slightly jarring. True, they aren't applying ALL those techniques to their teaching, but they are doing some of them. (Post continues below...)

European BOF, a short wrap up

2008-07-02T12:09:37+00:00

On Tuesday morning (july 1st) participants from several European countries talked about two issues:

Should we organise a Sakai regional conference (and where) ?
What are important development issues from an european perspective?

It was quickly decided that we should have a european regional conference. The main aim of this conference should be to "spread the news". Invite newcomers and show them the potential that Sakai has as an elearning and collaboration platform. A second argument for a regional conference is the fact that universities and schools could sent more people to a local conference to exchange ideas and practices then to a place couple of thousend miles away.

The second part of the meeting we talked about different development issues that are important from a european perspective. Localisation and translation are high on that list. A very good suggestion came from our friends from Stockholm. At this moment we lack the funds and time to coordinate ethe different european efforts that are being made regarding to localisation and translation of Sakai into the different european languages. To tackle this we are going to write an proposal for the regional conference next year in which we will ask the different european sakai partners and interested universities & schools to subsidies a person to take on this task.

Last but not least we agreed that we should bring the european discussion group on confluence back to the living.

Following the Sakai conference

2008-07-02T11:55:09+00:00

Chris Coppela built a yahoo pipe to collect all kind of info created during our stay in paris:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=nGiq67JG3RG5qA0In0artA

Sakai and OpenSocial: A Different Approach to Distributed Learning Applications

2008-07-02T05:20:53+00:00

This is a guest post by Dr. Ian Boston for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Dr Boston holds a first degree in Engineering and a PhD in parallel computing. During the early 1990’s he parallelized grand challenge applications in science and engineering. After a frenetic period of multiple startups in Silicon Fen, as a founder, angel investor and board member he returned to the University of Cambridge to become CTO at CARET. The University of Cambridge joined the Sakai Project and over recent years has contributed greatly to its development. Ian was honored to be awarded one of the first Sakai Fellowships and speaks regularly at Opensource meetings in the US, Europe and Australia.

The online world has realized that connections and communications are capable of leveraging greater efficiencies and delivery than application silos. This movement started with the scaling requirements driven by the growth curves of the large internet startups like Amazon and Google. Strangely web technology has not changed much for 10 years but we have all started to realise that the web is a simple place where bytes on the wire is all that we are communicating.

Distributed web applications became possible in the late 1990’s, informed by the numerous parallel distributed applications in science and engineering. Although there are challenges in employing wide scale parallelism and distributed architectures, the discipline leads to loose coupling. The loose coupling allows development teams to communicate with one another through standards and interfaces, and allows the skills mix within those teams to compliment each other rather than being in conflict. The absolute key to success with this style of application and development is sophistication through simplicity; as there is plenty of complexity available to overwhelm all stakeholders.

These dreams are not just dreams, over the past 8 months we, at Cambridge, have been practicing this approach and seen the benefits.

(...)
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Live video vanuit Parijs

2008-07-01T11:36:40+00:00

Je kunt twee live video-streams bekijken vanaf de Sakai conferentie in Parijs, die vanochtend officieel is begonnen. Zie mijn twitter bericht. De streams zijn in RealPlayer formaat, dus die Player moet wel geïnstalleerd zijn.
De officiële URL is http://www.cpm.jussieu.fr/CPM/activites/visioconf/sakai_conf.htm

Sakai 2008 Paris first impressions

2008-07-01T09:24:37+00:00

Due to flight delays, I wasn't able to check out "Fearless Javascript" yesterday like I had planned. However, now that I'm at the UPMC, I see that it's plastered with Sakai signs and it's pretty easy to find your way around. I love the architecture of UPMC - I'm not an expert on architecture by any means, but it has a classic late 20th century european/socialist university feel that seems straight out of a movie. As I suspected, temperature controls in the lecture rooms is also very "european."

Got a chance to meet a lot of new people last night and this morning. One side benefit of saying at the "not cool" Marriott is that I meet and socialize with people I would not normally seek out. It's forcing me to meet new people and that's always good. However, we're starting to see the results of having the sessions at UPMC as opposed to doing everything at the conference hotel - you're less likely to run into people and have those serendipitous meetings during off hours. There also seems to be some mixed feelings about the conference bar as well.

You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato, Let’s Not Call the Whole Thing Off: The Challenge of User Experience Design in Distributed Learning Environments

2008-07-01T04:03:39+00:00

This is a guest post by Jutta Treviranus for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Jutta established and directs the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) at the University of Toronto, a centre of expertise on the inclusive design of emerging information and communication technology. Jutta has led a large number of national and international multi-partner research networks (including The Inclusive Learning Exchange (TILE), the Canadian Network for Inclusive Cultural Exchange, the Network for Inclusive Distance Education, CulturAll, Stretch, Fluid and the Barrierfree project), that have led to a range of broadly implemented technical innovations that support inclusion. She has helped to develop pivotal accessibility legislation, standards and specifications internationally (including W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, IMS Global Learning Consortium AccessForAll and ISO 24751). She is also a member of a number of key advisory panels and task forces (e.g., Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, Pan-Canadian E-learning Strategy, JTC1 Special Working Group on Accessibility). She is the principal investigator on the Fluid Project and on the Board of Directors of Sakai. Jutta holds faculty appointments in the Faculty of Information Studies, the Faculty of Medicine, and the Knowledge Media Design Institute, at the University of Toronto.

Poor or inconsistent design and development of the UI is widely recognized as a systemic problem within academic community or open source projects and the major impediment to more widespread adoption. This problem is also a barrier to innovation – to improving pedagogy, research and administration activities within academic software. There is widespread agreement that the greatest need for innovation in this field is in the area of human interaction and support for more effective academic workflow. Cumbersome, problematic UI development processes and UI frameworks within community source software projects make it very difficult to contribute innovations.

For a number of reasons UI development in these projects is commonly left to programmers, with little input from skilled designers. It is frequently tackled at the end of the development process. Components of the UI are often developed redundantly, inconsistent across applications and inadequately tested and refined. Architectural frameworks for the UI are also inconsistent, redundant and poorly thought out.

Another challenge faced by community and open source software projects in academia is that they must address the needs and preferences of a very diverse group of users and constituents. These differences arise from institutional preferences (including branding); conventions of an academic discipline (e.g., math vs. English); cultural or linguistic differences; differences related to age, role or perspective; different teaching and learning approaches; and differences related to disability and environmental constraints. Although it is acknowledged that a consistent UI across tools and functions would greatly improve the user experience (especially when using an ever-increasing set of tools), it is very difficult if not impossible to agree upon a single UI design.

The Fluid Project attempts to address these challenges by providing a UI architecture that supports UI transformation at runtime for individual needs and preferences or during configuration for institutional preferences. This transformation is made possible by a rich, living library of reusable UI components that have been tested for usability and accessibility. The architecture and UI components work across platforms and applications. Thus each user can have a consistent, personally-optimized user experience across tools. In addition Fluid provides a toolkit of user experience design resources. Fluid is an international project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in its second year (http://fluidproject.org).

(...)
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Frankrijk wint (open source kampioen van Europa)

2008-06-30T17:25:58+00:00

Een mooi artikel over de stand van zaken met betrekking tot open source in 16 landen in Europa is te vinden op de website van de 451Group. 451Group is een onderzoeksbedrijf met betrekking tot software en de IT industrie. Dit bedrijf is misschien nog niet zo bekend als Forrester of Gartner, maar dit artikel (en de rest van het weblog) is zeker het lezen waard. Zie 451 CAOS Theory » Open source champions of Europe

I’ve spent the past three weeks profiling open source policies and adoption projects at the 16 nations competing in EURO 2008. Congratulations are due to Spain, which deservedly won the football championship on Sunday with a 1-0 win over Germany.

Just for fun I thought I’d also declare a 2008 Tour of Europe Open Source Champion. In deciding the winner I decided to follow the same organizational structure as the football, so read on to find out which eight nations made it out of the group stages and how I whittled it down to an eventual champion.

Er verscheen onlangs nog meer over Frankrijk en open source (waarbij Frankrijk een ruime overwinning boekt op Italië!). Het is een goede keuze geweest om de huidige Sakai conferentie in Parijs te organiseren!

Extension of CIPHR to include some useful HR data

2008-06-30T14:52:03+00:00

Looks like we are going to use CIPHR for UHI EO HR needs, and there are some similar moves at some of the Colleges around the network. We had a demo by the CIPHR people. Despite its warts, we will probably buy it, but its only useful for the first of the three tiers that [...]

Distributed Learning Environments and OER: The Change Management Challenge

2008-06-30T08:42:51+00:00

This is a guest post by Patrick Masson and Ken Udas for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Patrick Masson is currently serving as the Chief Information Officer for The State University of New York, College of Technology at Delhi. As CIO, Mr. Masson provides oversight, leadership and vision for the college’s Campus Information Services including enterprise/desktop applications, technical centers and labs, server/systems administration, network & telecommunications, online/distance learning, the campus print shop as well as user support such as help desk services. Dr. Ken Udas has served as the Executive Director of Penn State World Campus since August 2006. He has assumed leadership roles in online and distance education since the mid-1990s. In addition to distance education administration and leadership, his professional interests include educational access, open educational resources, and internationalization of education.

We have fantastic roles in our organizations. Borrowing terminology from the 1980s, we are “intrepreneurs,” which granted, does not sound as interesting as being entrepreneurs, but still, not so bad. We are branded internally as change agents in what is turning out to be one of the most dynamic areas (online learning) in a rapidly growing part (educational technology) of a changing sector (higher education). We are embedded directly in the culture and practice of higher education, initially invited to provide insight and define direction; assuming programmatic and operational authority. These are large institutions, with all of the trappings of formal, nested organizations, and all of the traditions of large, established, public universities. Both of our organizations have plenty of legacy, pride, and brand loyalty, which taken together help provide a form of cultural cohesion that managers in many other organizations work very hard to achieve. They are things that we value, while also recognizing that they can impede the institution, particularly if the organization considers itself rather successful.

According to the organizational chart, we sit closer to the top than the bottom of our organizations, but are clearly in the middle of the “value chain.” Personally, we both feel and behave as if we operate at the organizational fringes, but in reality, it is not true. We support practices and activities that are not necessarily consistent with the culture and processes we have inherited, and in both of our cases, there are expectations that we will instigate change to accommodate a perceived future, even if that future can not readily be defined. Within our institutions there is a sense of urgency as emerging technical practices and educational activities challenge the traditional academic processes, even its culture, one of centralized authority, top-down decision-making and long-term planing: these are the proliferation of Open Source Software (OSS) and Web2.0 tools, the evolution of the Learning Management Systems (LMS) to the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and on to the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and the publication of not only Open Courseware but Open Educational Resources (OER). While we both serve in critical, central parts of the organization, where our degrees of freedom can feel quite narrow, but our potential impact is significant, those in our position can play vital roles in helping our institutions recognize then adopt these new approaches… but only if we change the way we do things.

This should be easy, right?

(...)
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Architecting an open source software ecosystem

2008-06-29T16:05:43+00:00

I'm en route to Paris for the 9th Sakai conference Saturday morning writing on the plane. Before boarding I ran across an interesting and very relevant post about the French government support for open source.

The post describes a competitiveness cluster in Paris called SYSTEM@TIC PARIS-REGION, that has established a working group on open source (Logiciel Libre) who's goal is to "help structure the open source ecosystem in the Paris area."

Aside from the serendipity of being on my way to Paris for an open source conference when I ran across the post, it touches on something I've been thinking a lot about lately: The sustainability of the Sakai and Kuali open source communities. Specifically I've been thinking about what the ecosystem around these communities will need to look like in order to be sustainable. Stakeholders will want to help architect the new ecosystem and foster it's evolution as they appear to be doing in Paris:

The state played a key role, by providing a framework, the competitiveness cluster, and the funding necessary to catalyze the interest of the actors.

The Sakai and Kuali communities are developing open source enterprise business applications that offer alternatives to what a recent Linux.com article called the "last bastion of the proprietary software giants - [ERP]."

These projects and the ecosystems forming around them are changing fundamental aspects of how software is produced and consumed in education. While we're seeing some great progress, there's substantial inertia to overcome if these efforts are going to produce systemic change. Further, beyond the natural inclination to resist change, there are those who profit from the old regime protecting the status quo with all their might.

Leading colleges and universities like Cambridge, Stanford, UBC, and Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (the location of the upcoming Sakai conference) are investing and working collaboratively to drive these initiatives and overcome the natural inertia. Companies like IBM, Sun, and rSmart are involved as well as foundations like Mellon and Hewlett who have provided a great deal of seed funding for the development of the software. There's a lot of cooperative effort going into these projects from a variety of stakeholders. Still, there's quite a bit of inertia and deliberate protection of the status quo. Programs like the one in Paris will be an important part of the equation.

Sakai in Paris, Day 1

2008-06-28T05:05:31+00:00

I arrived in Paris late Thursday afternoon, so Friday was my first full day in the city. The hotel is very nice although everyone staying here seems to be either American or German–very few French folks choose the Marriott, I suspect, but it is the only hotel with conference facilities in the area. I have [...]

Sakai Project Coordination - Day one am

2008-06-28T01:59:14+00:00

Interesting update from Linda Place, the lead of the Performance work group. Many of you might not know this but since the conference last summer in Amsterdam a small group has been working on a proof of concept for a community wide set of processes and practices for performance testing. this includes

provisioning of test environment - creation of sites and users. This is based off of work by Alan Berg
Use of open source tool (Grinder) to create test scripts
Baseline tests and results

Linda, Chris Kretler and Alan Berg will be holding a session that will include a demo Tuesday at 17:00 in Amphi 55A. If you're hear in Paris I encourage you to attend. For those of you not attending, I will blog afterward.

Spin on Broadband outreach in Scotland

2008-06-27T19:35:35+00:00

Well, the BBC have a story about how there will be further broadband work carried out between July 2008 and May 2009 to connect a further 3,800 businesses and households. The Scottish Government is evidently contracting the work out. But there is little detail in the story, and a very ambiguous map… convert this post [...]

The Educational Software Paradox

2008-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

In "The Educational Software Paradox: Can We Learn To Unlearn?," Trent Batson talks about how educational software like the Sakai CLE, Blackboard, Angel, D2L, Moodle, and other systems are caught in a paradox. Though technology would seem to be capable of transforming the way we learn and teach, the systems are stuck reinforcing the status quo. Instead of being designed for transformation they are designed in a way that mirrors the way things are done today and caters to the majority of stakeholders who'd just assume not change.

Trent mentions a hope that open source software might be part of the answer but acknowledges projects like Sakai and Moodle seem to be stuck similar to the proprietary systems--another paradox. We'd certainly expect that, free of the economic limitations of the proprietary model, open source educational software would be "breaking the mold." Some open source educational software, LAMS for example, arguably is. Mostly though I think Trent is right.

Sakai and Moodle, two of the best alternatives to the proprietary systems, don't really break the mold... yet. At least the software doesn't. But Sakai, for example, is more than just software. Sakai is a community that's capable of developing and sustaining software collaboratively. It's a path one can travel along with other education institutions. I believe it's a path that will consistently produce the best software, and yes, I believe it will eventually break the mold. But first it has to satisfy the majority.

What we have today is the foundation for change. The latest Sakai release performs at the status quo as well as Blackboard (better in many ways). It's being adopted and used much like the proprietary systems. But unlike the proprietary systems, Sakai is more than just an application. It's a platform on which many of the world's leading institutions are beginning to innovate. Sakai is a single environment that provides the expected capabilities to serve the status quo *and* serves as a platform on which the innovators and early adopters can drive the more transformative agenda--a foundation for change.

The fact is, we've seen lots of innovative and transformative technology used for teaching and learning. Though it often fails to reach the mainstream users. One reason is that there hasn't been a widely adopted platform on which innovators can build. Until now. Sakai is a platform on which transformative educational technologies can be developed, sustained by a large community, and on which these innovations can reach the mainstream users.

Of course, changing culture and habits is the truly difficult part. Like Trent, I wonder how many are ready to "unlearn their comfort zone."

Het vrije softwareconcept

2008-06-26T22:43:27+00:00

IMG_3080
Originally uploaded by wytze

Vandaag was er weer een Sakai NL bijeenkomst. Het was zoals altijd weer bijzonder informatief, met ook nu weer nieuwe (en ook bekende!) gezichten aan de vergadertafel.
We kwamen vandaag in Amsterdam onder andere te spreken over de opkomst van open source, of in goed Nederland 'vrije software'. De meeste aanwezigen vonden dat het thema steeds meer wordt besproken en ook serieus wordt genomen.
Tom Kuipers van de Universiteit van Amsterdam had het bewijs meegenomen: een artikel in het gratis dagblad "Dag". Een verslag van de bijeenkomst volgt binnenkort.

Patent: Garage Door Opener with Power-fail light

2008-06-25T22:40:55+00:00

Sometimes I come up with an idea that I want to patent but I am so busy that I just blog it instead. Hopefully this will make it into the Internet Archive and folks can send me money when they...

Patent: MagSafe converter/extender

2008-06-25T22:35:39+00:00

Sometimes I come up with an idea that I want to patent but I am so busy that I just blog it instead. Hopefully this will make it into the internet archive and folks can send me money when they...

Writing in the Digital Age

2008-06-25T07:52:18+00:00

This is a guest post by Alex Reid for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Alex is an Associate Professor of English and Professional Writing at the State University of New York, College at Cortland. His research focuses on issues of rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy in media networks and emerging media technologies. His recent book, The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition (Parlor Press, 2007), received honorable mention for the W. Ross Winterowd Award for best book in composition theory in 2007. He has co-edited an essay collection, Design Discourse: Composing and Revising Professional Writing Programs, which is forthcoming from WAC Clearinghouse. His research also appears in journals such as Computers and Composition, Theory & Event, and Culture Machine. He is an editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Pedagogy, and Technology. His blog, Digital Digs (alexreid.typepad.com), received the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog award in 2007 for its scholarly contributions to the field of rhetoric and composition.

In the conversation over distributed learning environments, it is important to begin by recognizing that the question is not IF our learning environments can be or should be distributed but rather HOW. A professor teaching in a lecture hall back in the halcyon days before wireless connections or mobile phones still taught in a distributed learning environment. That professor stood connected to an elaborate, non-local, distributed network of knowledge, materials, laborers, institutional polices, and social contracts that governed the relationship between professor and students and provided authority, context, and cultural value to what s/he said. Certainly a course operating in an institutional CMS is connected to a distributed network of technologies, standards, and protocols, as well as institutional budgets, bureaucracies, and practices. Students’ learning experiences are shaped by these distributed networks, and our pedagogies circulate through these networks. This may seem self-evident, but our discourse on emerging technologies in teaching regularly makes the error of situating the choice between a new “distributed” environment and an existing cohesive one (and in the case of face-to-face teaching, even an imagined “immediate” environment). These are intellectual errors we simply cannot afford to make.

My article stems from my experiences teaching in publicly-accessible online spaces: blogs, wikis, YouTube, Second Life, etc. As a professor who researches and teaches communication in emerging media networks, I have particular disciplinary reasons for teaching in web 2.0 spaces. However, my decision to use these applications is not solely about disciplinary interest; it is also a pedagogical choice. My teaching hinges on experimentation and risk. Of course we aren’t eating random wild mushrooms or jumping from planes, so obviously experimentation and risk are relative terms here. Nor do I wish to romanticize my classroom; to the contrary, I find my classroom quite mundane. For me, it is an everyday notion to view the mind’s work as making experimental, temporary connections and taking calculated risks. Working across these applications with their classmates and other “real-world” collaborators, my students are faced with daily decisions of how to communicate what and where.

(...)
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Sakai Reports Tool / Data Warehouse Documentation Interest

2008-06-25T01:38:43+00:00

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was interested in doing a bit of freelance consulting for OSP. A couple people asked me if I was available/interested in doing work outside of OSP for Sakai in general. Of course, I am. The Reports tool (now core, like the rest of the OSP tools suite) seems to blur the boundaries between OSP and Sakai. In a nutshell, the reports tool allows someone to define SQL based reports that can be run against the live database or a set of data warehouse tables (you may have noticed a bunch of tables named "dw_xxxxx" in your instance). To complicate matters, much of the data related to portfolios are stored in XML on the file system and are therefore unavailable to the reports tool unless converted. The system is powerful, but poorly understood by the community and sparsely documented.

I have set up an account and a project at fundable.com to see what sort of interest the community has for this effort.

The Sakai Reports tool documentation needs improvement.

Many schools deploying OSP as a portfolio system want to use custom reports to aggregate data for institutional purposes. The reports that the community has included in the OOTB experience have little to do with the type of data that schools would actually want to report about. Building custom reports for your institution makes a lot of sense, but very few schools have been successful at it because they just don't know how.

I would be interested in investigating and writing related community documentation in Sakai confluence if anyone is interested in funding my independent effort to do so. My initial guess is that I will probably need to also document the job scheduler and the data warehouse in order to successfully move the documentation forward. While it is difficult to promise a "complete package" will result from my effort I feel that a few good interviews and some time devoted to understanding and disseminating the capabilities (and limitations) of the report tool functionality would benefit the entire Sakai community.

Pulling SVN with Git on OSX

2008-06-24T20:46:01+00:00

I meant to do this a while back, document git setup on OSX.

Install SVN 1.4.3 from the DMG at Tigris http://www.collab.net/downloads/community/
Make certain you have a gcc compiler, probably from xcode on the OSX install disks
Build Git 1.5.5 form source with a ./configure; sudo make install
Symbolic link the subersion perl libraries into the perl build library
eg ln -s /opt/subversion/lib/svn-perl/SVN /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.8.6/SVN ln -s /opt/subversion/lib/svn-perl/auto/SVN /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.8.6/auto/SVN

Thats Git installed, now to sync the repo you are after using git-svn, now go an read Git for SVN Users

Having done that to mirror an SVN repo do

git-svn clone http://svn.foo.org/project/trunk cd trunk

And start working. git commit . will commit locally, git svn dcommit will commit all changes to the remote SVN and rebase your local gir repo to the remote svn

There are man pages on all of this and more … worth reading

Two new legal tools that enable openness

2008-06-24T19:13:52+00:00

Late last year I bookmarked the Creative Commons Launches CC0 and CC+ Programs press release to look into at some point. I finally got around to it this week and I'm sure I'll take advantage of these great new tools to help balance the spirit of open sharing of IP with the need to grow a profitable business around open source software.

The new protocols (they are not actually new licenses) are very straightforward and easy to use. This is something CC has always done very well IMHO. So what are they for?

CC0 - CC Zero is a simple protocol to waive all rights to a work. It's like putting a work in the public domain but CC Zero appears to be better because it's more explicit and works better internationally.

CC+ - CC Plus is an addition to the CC licensing architecture that enables the cross-over between the "sharing economy" and the "commercial economy." It makes it very straightforward to offer additional permissions to CC licensed content. The most obvious use case is to profit commercially from CC licensed content by starting with a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license and using the CC Plus protocol to permit commercial use for a fee. It would look something like this:

In the open source software licensing world there's a concept called "dual licensing" that has been used to accomplish a similar objective. The CC+ literature does a great job describing the concept and making it easy to implement.

We hear a lot about open everything in the media today. Open source software, open content, open innovation, even open source beer. :-) The big consultants and analysts are catching up with what's happening and making predictions about mainstream implications of the trends toward openness.

We don't hear a lot about the legal underpinnings that are enabling these trends. In fact, the legal infrastructure is one of a few key enableers along with the ubiquity of web-based collaboration and workflow software that connects people to get things done. Without these two things I don't think the two efforts I'm most involved in (Sakai and Kuali) would be possible.

It's interesting that the CC+ literature talks about bridging the "sharing economy" and the "commercial economy." One of the core values and a key to sustainability of the Sakai and Kuali communities is commercial involvement. From the beginning these communities have been architected to evolve the software ecosystem in education and enable a new commercial model that fits with the institutions' abilities to lead the development of their key business systems. It's one of the things that sets Sakai and Kuali apart from similar initiatives that have come and gone in education. It'll be interesting to see how/if the CC+ license plays a role in enabling our goals.

The most important activity in higher education today

2008-06-24T15:01:26+00:00

If you've been waiting for a convenient way to keep up with the Kuali community check out the shiny new monthly newsletter. Subscribe by emailing Jennifer Foutty.

What's Kuali? Well it's "the most important activity in higher education today" according to Dennis Dougherty, SVP for Finance and CFO at University of Southern California. This was from his Keynote at Kuali Days VI in Chicago last month where nearly 450 people participated in Kuali's semi-annual meeting. The venue for Kuali Days VII has just been finalized so mark your calendar and join us in Newport Beach.

iPhone Picture Woes - Blank Pictures

2008-06-24T14:25:24+00:00

My iPhone has become increasingly less stable when it comes to taking pictures - I found an Apple discussion a while back that suggested a reset to factory settings and then taking one picture before doing the restore - that...

Bought a Motorcycle - Honda CB450E - 1983

2008-06-23T14:06:15+00:00

Update: Photo added and Driver's license obtained. With the rising prices of gas - and because I hang out with John King and John Merlin-Williams a lot - and because I have a credit for some riding gear at www.ridersdiscount.com...

At EUNIS and Sakai the Next Two Weeks

2008-06-21T17:19:08+00:00

I’ll be at the EUNIS conference this coming week (arriving Monday morning on the red eye) and the Sakai conference the next week (arriving in Paris on the night of Friday, 6/27 and leaving on Friday, 7/4). Feel free to track me down if you’re at either event and want to chat.

If you do track me down and we have met before, you should know that I’m really bad at remembering names and faces. There’s a good chance that I will remember our prior conversation once reminded of it. I just may not remember its sensory connections to the physical world. It’s the way my brain works. (Which is why I tend to walk—and drive—into things.) Please don’t be offended if I need a little help making the connection. It doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy our last conversation.

EUNIS, Sakai

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Should a new Project use Ajax?

2008-06-21T12:37:58+00:00

I got a question about whether or not to use Ajax in a new project from a former student. Here is my answer....

Fearless JavaScript 2.0

2008-06-20T21:44:55+00:00

Back in April, Eli Cochran and I organized a half-day workshop on JavaScript development techniques at the JA-SIG Spring conference in St. Paul, MN. Writing Fearless Javascript for Portlets, Widgets, and Portals was designed to give attendees a primer on various aspects of client-side user interface development, including JavaScript fundamentals, the use of toolkits such as jQuery, and DHTML accessibility.

The workshop explores what I’ve been referring to as “modern” JavaScript programming, for lack of a better term. In contrast to the previous generation of JavaScript programs, where small bits of interactivity were sprinkled on top of a largely static document, modern JavaScript involves the creation of richly interactive applications and components. These days, your code probably shares the page and Javascript’s notorious global namespace with other libraries and widgets. As a result, you need to do things a bit differently to ensure your code is self-contained and won’t conflict with other libraries. Fearless JavaScript gives you the techniques needed to thrive in the world of portals, plugins, and mash-ups.

We’ll be presenting a new edition of Fearless JavaScript at the Sakai Summer 2008 conference in Paris, France. The material has been significantly refined, and we’ve added another co-presenter: Nicolaas Matthijs from CARET at the University of Cambridge. Nico will be talking about how to create gadgets for Sakai using JSON-based data feeds. We’re working on some tutorial code that walks you through using Fluid components within a Sakai gadget. Cool stuff.

Nico attended the original Fearless JavaScript workshop in St. Paul, and had lots of interesting questions and suggestions for us. Afterwards, Nico and I spent an enjoyable couple of hours working together on some of his gadgets, tweaking their accessibility and talking about his designs. He’s doing some great work on MyCamTools, and I’m looking forward to sharing the stage with him and Eli for Fearless JavaScript 2.0.

If you’re in Paris for the Sakai conference, we’d love to see you at the workshop. If you can’t make it, we’re hoping to create a podcast of the event. Here are the details:

Fearless JavaScript
Presented by Colin Clark, Eli Cochran, and Nicolaas Matthijs
Monday, June 30
1:30 - 4:30 pm in Amphi 55A

Topics will include:

* Why JavaScript?
* Fundamentals of JavaScript
* Using jQuery
* JavaScript in Sakai
* Portal and mash-up friendliness
* Accessibility

Everyone is welcome to attend the workshop. It’s assumed that you have some understanding of at least one programming language, and that you’ll bring a laptop to follow along with the hands-on exercises.

See you there!

Perspectives from a Geek with a Startup

2008-06-20T14:21:56+00:00

This is a guest post by Michael Staton for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Michael studied poverty alleviation for his BA and MA at Clark University, where he developed a lifelong commitment to education and entrepreneurship. He then spent 3 years as a high school educator and was thrust into internet start ups in the education space. Seeing Facebook Platform as a disruptive opportunity, he co-founded Inigral, Inc as a consumer internet company set out accelerate real world relationships in an academic context using the product “Courses on Facebook.” Courses quickly gained traction in the Fall of 2007 and Founders’ Fund, an investor in Facebook, made a Series A investment. Inigral is also about to release a product to help K-12 educators cope with the pressures of the accountability movement. Michael is also the author of the Edumorphology and College Readiness for the 21st Century weblogs.

I spend most of my time in the midst of internet entrepreneurs. I work in an office with four other internet companies, go to beta launches in San Francisco, and attend panel discussions in Silicon Valley. Something that is conspicuously evident is that I’m one of the few entrepreneurs trying to solve problems in education. Another thing that’s evident, as ironic as it sounds, is that many internet entrepreneurs have given the problems in education considerable thought, many have even tried to contribute to or build a product to address needs in education at some point.

Start-ups in education are rare, but it’s not for lack of desire to work in the space. Venture Capital appreciates the education market size: it’s huge. Everyone gets an education, and mind-numbing amounts of money are spent to that end. Entrepreneurs tend to be young risk takers, and their first-hand knowledge of problems in the education sector is ripe. However, very few go-getters can convince an Angel Investor or VC that their product for the education market is worth an investment. To boot, older entrepreneurs advise young ones to stay away from the space. Why the reluctance? The market barriers.

In my paper, I comprehensively address barriers to market entry into the education market and propose some easy solutions. I focus on a set of interdependent forces particularly destructive to outside innovation; there is a causal relationship between public rhetoric and legal protections based on misunderstandings of internet use and political decision making, creating a risk-averse, zero sum purchasing process that requires an abnormally large and unhealthy investment in sales and support efforts.

(...)
Read the rest of Perspectives from a Geek with a Startup (407 words)

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Presentaties bij de VU

2008-06-19T08:54:03+00:00

Rob van Leeuwen van het Onderwijscentrum van de Vrije Universiteit (VU) had ondergetekende en Frank Benneker vandaag uitgenodigd om iets te komen vertellen over Sakai voor hem en zijn collega's van de VU. Zo zaten we dus vanochtend rond 10.00 uur in een zaaltje met een tiental collega's van de Vrije Universiteit.

Sakai presentatie Onderwijscentrum VU - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Sakai presentatie Onderwijscentrum VU

Ik heb een een algemene presentatie (zie hierboven) gegeven over Sakai: over het Sakai Project, de community, en wie er in Nederland met Sakai bezig is. Maar vooral ben ik ingegaan op de huidige status van Sakai, dat nog maar goed vier jaar bestaat. Die huidige status zou ik willen omschrijven als een volwassen produkt met een serieuze samenwerkingsstructuur erom heen (de community), gefaciliteerd door de Sakai Foundation en haar medewerkers.

| View | Upload your own

Frank ging in zijn presentatie (zie hierboven) in op de manieren waarop de Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) Sakai inzet en op de beweegredenen om Sakai in te zetten bij de Uva.
Ik geloof dat we de aanwezigen van veel nieuwe informatie hebben voorzien, waar ze zeer content mee waren.
Nog een laatste opmerking: de presentatie van mij staat bij www.scribd.com. De presentatie van Frank heb ik bij www.slideshare.net geplaatst (mijn presentatie wilde daar niet converteren). Bij beide sites kun je ook, indien gewenst, een Powerpoint versie van de presentaties downloaden.

Hiredgoons

2008-06-19T08:37:42+00:00

I was directed recently to this amazing exchange captured by Mike Solomon with some random on an IM channel. You have to read it to believe it. There are some truly amazing, incredible people out there. My words can add nothing more to this exchange. rofl. convert this post to pdf.

Opencast Open House

2008-06-18T22:07:35+00:00

Great presentation on Opencast, an open-source project aimed at building a technology infrastructure and community sharing best practices around lecture/event capture, processing, archiving, distribution, and effective use of podcasting for teaching and learning. Mara Hancock talks about the importance of Opencast in a post about the planning grant.

The Opencast community appears to be organized around many of the same community values as the Sakai and Fluid communities. In fact the Opencast software is being developed to work with Sakai and to use Fluid. In the presentation they talk about how the application is architected so that it could also be run standalone or integrated in other eLearning environments like Moodle.

Reply to Michael Feldstein's Blog

2008-06-18T21:03:58+00:00

Michael made a nice post about my SimpleLTI effort - here are some of my clarifications as well as comments on one of his previous posts. Michael's post about SimpleLTI: http://mfeldstein.com/secret-society-maybe-not-so-secret/ Michael's earlier post about IMS needing to open up:...

Secret Society Maybe Not So Secret

2008-06-18T13:24:31+00:00

Since I complained recently about the IMS needing to open up more, it’s only fair that I should give credit when they actually do it. Chuck Severence, who now works part-time for the IMS, has a public test site up for people who want to test against a subset of the forthcoming Learning Tool Interoperability specification. Now, the full specification drafts are still non-public (to the extent that they even exist—LTI is still under active development) but, to be honest, hardly anybody reads the full spec anyway. What Chuck has done is much more useful because he’s providing sufficient documentation and tools for people to actually start building and testing LTI-compliant tools without a lot of extraneous gobbledygook. All it needs now is a feedback forum, and the IMS will suddenly have a very open and results-oriented (though perhaps not yet comprehensive) process for non-IMS members to provide feedback on specs in development.

Brilliant work. Really, a very big step forward.

On a side note, Chuck mentions the use of REST in the documentation. Thus far, the IMS has been pretty SOAP-heavy in its approach to web services. If the LTI group is indeed making judicious use of REST (which would make particular sense given the nature of what they’re trying to do) then that also is a Very Good Thing.

Chuck Severence, IMS

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Blackboard Inc. Shows Deep Compassion for Desire2Learn Customers

2008-06-18T12:16:07+00:00

As expected, Blackboard has taken Desire2Learn back to court, claiming that 8.3 still infringes and charging them with contempt. Interestingly, the news of this showed up simultaneously in Inside Higher Education, THE Journal, and The Chronicle. It looks like Blackboard may have something to say that they want to make sure we all hear.

What could it be?

Here’s one candidate, said by Matt Small to Inside Higher Education:

“We have all along said and continue to say, and mean, that we don’t want to do anything that will disrupt D2L’s clients, so if D2L should be held in contempt or sanctioned or if it should go bankrupt … we would hate to see a D2L school inadvertently shut down unexpectedly because D2L does not survive, and we’re committed to working with the schools to help them find a non-infringing alternative that is on their budget and on their time frame and of their choice,” he said. [emphasis added]

How sweet. In a Tony Soprano sort of way, that is.

Blackboard Inc., Desire2Learn, edupatents

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Repositioning institutional approaches to technology in the context of Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments and Utility Computing: A cybernetic approach

2008-06-18T12:07:34+00:00

This is a guest post by Scott Wilson and Kamala Velayutham for On the Horizon series on distributed learning. Scott is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at the University of Bolton, and author of various publications on the topic of personal learning environments. He is also Assistant Director of the JISC CETIS service, which he joined in 2001. Before joining CETIS, Scott worked in the commercial software industry as a solution architect in CRM, business intelligence, as well as working in other sectors including criminal intelligence analysis. Kamala is a Researcher at the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at the University of Bolton, and a Learning Technology Advisor for JISC CETIS. Prior to joining IEC, Kamala worked as a lecturer in India involved in various research projects.

This all started with an email from Michael about a blog post that Scott wrote late in 2007. In that post he presented a model for how institutional systems engage with personal technologies with what I termed a “coordination space” inbetween. Michael wanted to know what prompted him to state in that post:

Originally I thought that a personal system could manage all the variety of all connected institutions, but more realistically there does seem to be a real need for a more concrete coordination system sitting between the personal system and the enterprise.

This reflects something we’ve been thinking about for some time at IEC; the focus of the PLE debate has been mostly on the individual learners and educators, rebalancing a discourse that was for some time dominated by “enterprise” concerns. However, we’ve been concentrating on institutions – their identity, and viability in a technology-rich world where users are frustrated by the shortcomings of behind-the-curve corporate or institutional provision and are circumventing central systems that are perceived as barriers and not enablers. (Its interesting to note that accenture identified the same trend in corporate IT users that the PLE discourse identified among learners and educators.)

(...)
Read the rest of Repositioning institutional approaches to technology in the context of Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments and Utility Computing: A cybernetic approach (308 words)

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Simple Tool Interoperability - Launch

2008-06-18T04:59:59+00:00

It is late so I will keep it short. I just launched my Simple Learning Tool Interoperability stuff. It is all up on the Google App Engine at: http://simplelti.appspot.com/ It includes a test harness, developer documentation, and sample code in...

Sakai Realm Relationships

2008-06-17T11:44:12+00:00

While writing some new queries I once again found myself looking for an entity diagram of the core relationships in Sakai Realm. I couldn’t find one, so I did a quick sketch, here for reference.

SVN: updating log entries

2008-06-17T07:59:21+00:00

When commiting code changes to the Sakai SVN repository I forget occasionally to include the relevant Jira "SAK" issue number in the log entry. We use the Jira Subversion plugin and neglecting to include the Jira reference in the commit log message prevents the commit info from being picked up by Jira.

Good

svn commit -m "SAK-13784 update Tomcat version to 5.5.26"

Bad

svn commit -m "update Tomcat version to 5.5.26"

So if you are bad like I am sometimes, issue the following svn command to correct the log, including the original commit's revision number and the updated log entry:

svn propset -r 47559 --revprop svn:log "SAK-13784 update Tomcat version to 5.5.26"

and you will revert to good.

Moodle Conference

2008-06-17T04:24:32+00:00

Last week, by invitation of Jason Cole (author of Using Moodle), I attended the Moodle Moot in South San Francisco. The highlight was Martin Dougiamas’ keynote on Tuesday morning. He led the audience (around 225, I think) back to the origins of Moodle in 2001 (Moodle is a few years older than Sakai) and his [...]