[Announcements] Sakai Newsletter December 17, 2009
Margaret Wagner
mwagner at umich.edu
Sun Dec 20 10:43:04 PST 2009
Sakai Newsletter
December 17, 2009
1. From the Executive Director
2. Call for Participation: 2010 Multi-Institutional Survey Initiative
(MISI)
3. Forming the Sakai Maintenance Team
4. Invitation: Sakai Learning Capabilities Virtual Meeting
5. Longsight Welcomes Wellesley College to the Sakai Community
6. Register Now for Jasig Spring 2010
7. Sakai Mentioned in Committee for Economic Development Report
8. Recent Email Discussion Groups
9. Events
---------------------------------------------------
1. From the Executive Director
The Sakai Board has recently discussed the idea of creating a larger
structure that would include Sakai and other related projects. We've
seen this happen with DuraSpace (Fedora and DSpace) recently, Kuali
has had this structure from the beginning (with Student, Rice,
Financials, Coeus and now OLE and Ready all being separate projects
under the same umbrella), and Jasig has recently added Bedework to
uPortal and CAS. Sakai did a similar thing with OSP although, unlike
the previous examples, the OSP code and community were brought
directly into the Sakai CLE project rather than being placed as
separate projects under the same non-profit "umbrella." Of course it
isn't surprising that our very own Brad Wheeler previewed this issue
in his "Open Source 2010: Reflections on 2007" EDUCAUSE paper (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0712.pdf
) where he said:
"... the software foundations--such as Sakai, Kuali, and others--will
emerge as hubs of activity for coordinating institutional investments.
They will grow in their competencies for managing all parts of the
software life cycle and serving the needs of their members, and this
will provide ready-made infrastructure for new projects... I believe
that higher education would likely benefit from about four
foundations, which could be umbrella organizations for projects to
distinct communities:
Teaching and Research: Sakai
Administrative Systems: Kuali
Infrastructure: Jasig
Scholarly Repositories/Libraries: ??"
I believe Brad would put DuraSpace into the question marks at this
point in time. Of course it also begs the question of what other
projects might be good candidates to work with Sakai. I'll leave it to
others to offer suggestions. In any case, I'm launching this
conversation on behalf of the Sakai Foundation Board to get your input
on whether a strategy like this would make sense. There are a number
of good reasons to consider this and a number of criteria we would
want to evaluate before taking concrete steps with a particular
project/organization. I've captured some of this thinking on a wiki
page (http://confluence.sakaiproject.org//x/bxAAB) for your input.
Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska at sakaifoundation.org
phone: +1 510-859-4247 (google voice)
---------------------------------------------------
2. Call for Participation: 2010 Multi-Institutional Survey Initiative
(MISI)
To All Sakai-Using Institutions:
The Sakai Community is once again joining together to conduct a multi-
institutional survey of instructors and students in order to assess
how Sakai is being used, what activities and tools users value, and
how best to inform development of Sakai for the future.
In 2009, fourteen institutions participated in this initiative,
surveying over 10,000 instructors and students. We hope to expand this
effort to include even more participating institutions in 2010.
To indicate your interest, please add your information on this
Confluence page: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org//x/ew8AB (If you
are having problems with Confluence, please contact the administrators.)
Here's is a quick Q & A about MISI:
Q: Who Can Participate in MISI? A: Any institution running Sakai
2.4 or higher in pilot or production. All levels, languages, and
locations are invited to participate.
Q: Who Conducts the Survey? A: Your institution will run its own
online survey. In the past, institutions have used commercial
applications (e.g., SurveyMonkey), homegrown systems, and self-coded
surveys.
Q: Who Decides What Items Are On the Survey? A: The collective
group of participating institutions will decide on the items via
email, conference calls, and the Confluence wiki. Ultimately, each
institution can decide to opt in/out of each "core" survey item, but
are strongly encouraged to participate in order to maximize data
collection.
Q: When Will Meetings Begin? A: In mid-January 2010
Q: How is Survey Data Shared? A: Anonymized data (not aggregated)
is uploaded to a shared Sakai site. The University of Michigan has
volunteered to combine the data into one big spreadsheet and run an
initial summary. Each participating institution may use the combined
dataset to run their own analyses.
Q: When Should the Survey Be Administered? A: In order to minimize
variability, each participating institution is asked to administer
their survey for 2-4 weeks in March, April, or May 2010.
Q: Where Can I Find Information About the 2009 MISI? A: On this
Confluence page: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org//x/NxDtAw
Please let us know if you have any other questions/comments.
Thank you,
Steven Lonn, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Usability, Support, and Evaluation (USE) Lab, Part of the CTools/Sakai
Team
Web: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~slonn/Steve Lonn
slonn at umich.edu
Stephanie D. Teasley, Ph.D.
Research Associate Professor Director, Doctoral Program School of
Information University of Michigan
steasley at umich.edu
---------------------------------------------------
3. Forming the Sakai Maintenance Team
A number of Sakai Community members are participating in the formation
of a Sakai maintenance team in order to better address issues in the
Sakai code base, as well as provide a mechanism by which institutions
can reclaim a portion of their development resources after the
delivery of production-ready code. Insitutional contributions involve
pledging a named contributor or a set of hours for a specified period
of time. For instance, the University of Capetown has contributed a
portion of David Horwitz's work week to the team, while the University
of Michigan plans to contribute up to .5 FTE/week spread across
several developers.
The maintenance team will focus its energies on addressing quality
issues in existing code. The team will likely assume responsibility
for specific projects no longer maintained by individual institutions
and will consider taking on maintenance duties for new projects that
are added to a Sakai release. The maintenance team will respect
project boundaries and will seek prior permission before addressing
issues involving projects with active and stable teams such as
Portfolios (OSP) and Test & Quizzes (Samigo).
The maintenance team will use the sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org
list for communications among members. If you want to communicate
with the maintenance team, please use the dev list.
In Jira, there now exists a default "Maintenance Team" account that
can be assigned issues. In the coming days a number of Jira Sakai
project component leads will be reassigned to the maintenance team.
Maintenance team membership need not be limited to developers but can
(and should) include others who can contribute positively to team
activities. For developers, Java experience together with a
familiarity of supporting technologies such as Subversion and Apache
Maven will be expected. Developers new to Sakai are also encouraged to
participate although they should expect that their patches will
receive careful review from their more experienced colleagues.
If you are interested in participating in maintenance team activities
please contact me at arwhyte at sakaifoundation.org.
For a more complete outline of maintenance team goals, scope of
activities and governance, please read the Maintenance Team Proposal:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhprnqfz_3dgffm9g6
Named contributors (to date):
Matthew Buckett, Oxford University (5 hrs/week)
Nuno Fernandes, University Fernando Pessoa (5 hrs/week)
David Horwitz, University of Cape Town (5 hrs/week)
Tony Stevenson, University of Cambridge (3-5 hrs/week)
Seth Theriault, Columbia University (3 hrs/week)
Steve Swinsburg, Australian National University (4 hrs/week)
Anthony Whyte, Sakai Foundation (5 hrs/week)
Aaron Zeckoski, University of Cambridge (5 hrs/week)
Other Contributors (to date):
University of Michigan, up to .5 FTE/week
Unicon Cooperative Support
We hope to begin addressing issues as a team within the next week or so.
Cheers,
Anthony Whyte
arwhyte at umich.edu
---------------------------------------------------
4. Invitation: Sakai Learning Capabilities Virtual Meeting
As some of you may know, the Sakai Teaching and Learning Group (which
now has strong representation from the UX and Portfolio groups as
well), has been engaged in an "instructional visioning" exercise
focused on Sakai 3 for the past several months. Much of our recent
work has involved the generation of a Learning Capabilities Google
spreadsheet, which now consists of over 150 rows of user-centric goals
expressed in simple terms. Some of this work has already begun to be
used by Clay Fenlason, Sakai Product Manager, in the current design
work taking place for Sakai 3 (more on this at Clay's blog at http://sakaipm.wordpress.com/)
.
We have reach a point in this process where we feel we need have a
sustained and focused effort in order to organize and refine this
document and "take it to the next level". This work will involve
determining "themes" under which we can group Learning Capabilities,
as well as "activity workflows" that will describe how users might
progress through the learning capabilities. We will also be looking
to identify gaps in the already documented learning capabilities and
will work to fill in those gaps.
Our plan is to convene a "virtual working session" sometime towards
the end of January or early February in which we hope to get as many
community members as we can to work over a two-day period on this
effort. We also plan to have some "pre-event" activities to provide
background for those who have not been engaged to date to help prepare
for the work. We are also hoping to make this a global effort so we
are actively encouraging groups outside the USA to participate, and
will work to accommodate time zones, etc., in our planning.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED
If you are interested (or just think you might be), please visit the
Teaching and Learning Confluence page at http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/PED
and follow the link from the notice at the top of the page to our
Virtual Working Session Planning page. There you will find additional
information and a place to sign up.
Thanks!
Joshua Baron
Director, Academic Technology and eLearning
Marist College
josh.baron at marist.edu
---------------------------------------------------
5. Longsight Welcomes Wellesley College to the Sakai Community
The Longsight Group has announced that Wellesley College has selected
Longsight to host and support Sakai for the College's collaboration
and learning management system.
In announcing the selection of Sakai and Longsight to the campus,
Wellesley's Vice President for Information Services and College
Librarian, Micheline Jedrey, noted that Sakai "...has many plusses: a
strong set of tools and a strong vendor."
Wellesley College staff consulted with the campus community throughout
their investigation and selection process that included a Request for
Information and Request for Proposals process. A variety of products
and vendors were considered. Wellesley has been using Open Text's
FirstClass suite.
Veronica Branstrader, the College's director of planning and
communication, reports that "Wellesley is excited to roll out Sakai
with Longsight's support, especially given the confidence and
enthusiasm shown by their current clients, who voiced their eagerness
to welcome us into the "Longsight family."
Sakai will be hosted in a highly-redundant, load-balanced and failover
configuration at Longsight's two data centers in Ohio. Longsight's
comprehensive support includes authentication and student information
integration, a "five-nines" service level agreement (99.999% uptime)
at the application level, proactive monthly support calls,
customization, onsite and online training and 24x7 support.
Sakai is one component in Wellesley's Unified Communications (UC)
Project, a highly integrated effort to enable all members of the
College community to work productively now and in the future. Other
elements of the UC Project include Zimbra for email and calendaring,
AVST CallXpress for voice mail and messaging and Luminis for the
campus portal.
About Wellesley College
Founded in 1870, Wellesley has a global reputation for providing an
excellent liberal arts education for women. Within this traditional
liberal arts framework, the Wellesley curriculum is dynamic and
responsive to social change and new fields of study. One of the first
liberal arts colleges to establish a separate computer science
department and computer science major, Wellesley remains at the
forefront of technological development.
About The Longsight Group
Longsight is a leading provider of hosting and support services for
open source software. The company delivers exceptionally reliable
hosting services and high quality, comprehensive support for Sakai
(learning management), Drupal (portals and content management) and
DSpace (institutional repositories). Longsight enjoys a national
reputation for understanding the business of education based on
decades of experience in higher education IT management. For more
information, please visithttp://longsight.com.
Scott E. Siddall, Ph.D.
Partner -- The Longsight Group LLC
siddall at longsight.com
---------------------------------------------------
6. Register Now for Jasig Spring 2010: "Ten Years of Open Source
Innovation"
When: March 8 - 10, 2010
Supplementary Seminars: March 7th and 10th
Developer Days: March 11 - 12
Town and Country Resort
500 Hotel Circle North
San Diego, CA 92108 USA
Hotel Front Desk: +1-619-291-7131
Toll Free, Reservations only: 1-800-772-8527
http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html
Help us celebrate Jasig's 10th anniversary in San Diego with
outstanding speakers and special events! The focus is on innovation
this year. We'll be highlighting new and established work from higher
education institutions: Projects you should know about; local
projects in search of community; creative work by established
communities of practice; projects that exist only as a gleam in the
eye of a creative developer.
Come listen to...
Gregory A. Jackson, Vice President for Policy and Analysis at EDUCAUSE
Justin Erenkrantz, President of the Apache Software Foundation
Rod Johnson, Founder of the Spring Framework Project
See presentations and seminars on new technologies soon to impact
higher education. You'll be hearing about Spring 3, Amazon EC2,
Groovy, REST, mobile applications, etc. Spend seminar time
implementing and upgrading uPortal, deploying CAS, and customizing
Bedework; configure the new enterprise HelpDesk application; learn how
to use uPortal's new mobile theme; build dynamic JavaScript user
interfaces using the jQuery toolkit. Learn how to develop next
generation portlets, lay the foundation for an enterprise identity
management architecture; learn how to submit a project to the Jasig
Incubator.
Attend sessions on Identity & Access Management, the Fluid Project,
OpenRegistry, Kuali Workflow, Internet2 Middleware Solutions,
OpenCast, OWASP, and much more... Register now! For more information,
check out our website or Facebook Event.
See you in San Diego!
-The Jasig Spring 2010 Program Committee
---------------------------------------------------
7. Sakai Mentioned in Committee for Economic Development Report
From the Committee for Economic Development (CED) report "Harnessing
Openness to Improve Research, Teaching and Learning in Higher
Education": "Institutions of higher education, particularly those
with substantial expertise in information technology (whether via
faculty, staff, or students) have led the way in creating open source
"community-source software," such as Sakai's open-source course
management system or Kuali's financial management systems. (Sakai's
system has been successful enough that Blackboard, the leading
proprietary course management system, as chosen to make its software
interoperable with it.)"
Citing a July 15, 2008 Inside Higher Education article by Andy Guess
"A Bridge Between Blackboard and Open Source?" the CED recommended
"College and Universities should: Establish rules requiring, to the
extent practicable, the procurement of software and hardware devices
that comply with open standards and promote interoperability." The CED
report continued: "Consider support for, or participation in, the
development of community-source software for institutional purposes
where existing software does not meet critical needs or where there
are substantial gains in cost and customer control that can be
practically achieved."
This report was released November 5, 2009 and can be viewed on the
Committee's website: http://www.ced.org/. CED is non-profit, non-
partisan business led public policy organization. CED is dedicated to
policy research on the major economic and social issues of our time
and the implementation of its recommendations by the public and
private sectors. Membership is made up of some 200 senior corporate
executives and university leaders who lead CED's research and outreach
efforts.
---------------------------------------------------
8. Recent Email Group Discussions
[Building Sakai] FW: [Using Sakai] Link between releasing GB item and
including it in the course grade calculation
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-FW-Using-Sakai-Link-between-releasing-GB-item-and-including-it-in-the-course-grade-can-td4172025.html#a4176190
[Building Sakai] QA10-us going down for upgrade 2.6.x-qa r69616
http://n2.nabble.com/WG-Sakai-QA-QA10-us-going-down-for-upgrade-2-6-x-qa-r69616-td4176666.html#a4176666
[Building Sakai] QA9-us going down for 2.6.x update
http://n2.nabble.com/WG-Sakai-QA-QA9-us-going-down-for-2-6-x-update-td4176578.html#a4176578
[Building Sakai] Unavailability of Oracle nightly and qa3-us on 12/29
and 12/30
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Unavailability-of-Oracle-nightly-and-qa3-us-on-12-29-and-12-30-td4176016.html#a4176016
[Building Sakai] Concurrent Editing for Sakai 3
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Concurrent-Editing-for-Sakai-3-td4173842.htm
[Building Sakai] 2.6.1 problem with EntityProviderAutoRegistrar
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-2-6-1-problem-with-EntityProviderAutoRegistrar-td4172110.html#a4172110
[Building Sakai] Sakai email notifications
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Sakai-email-notifications-td4172006.html#a4172006
[Building Sakai] How does Sakai respond to an overloaded database?
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-How-does-Sakai-respond-to-an-overloaded-database-td4141870.html#a4141870
[Building Sakai] Trunk Builds Again
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Trunk-Builds-Again-td4169077.html#a4169077
[Building Sakai] 2.7.0: Profile2 v Profile
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-2-7-0-Profile2-v-Profile-td4154429.html#a4154429
[Building Sakai] Feed Tool
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Feed-Tool-td4164474.html#a4164474
[Building Sakai] Dutch translation for Mneme
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Dutch-translation-for-Mneme-td4163740.html#a4163740
[Building Sakai] Issue with ScheduleInvocationManager
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Issue-with-ScheduleInvocationManager-td4162679.html#a4162679
[DG: Teaching & Learning] Review of Learning Capabilities spreadsheet
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-Learning-Capabilities-spreadsheet-td4058612.html#a4058612
[DG: Teaching & Learning] Call for Participation: 2010 Multi-
Institutional Survey Initiative (MISI)
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Call-for-Participation-2010-Multi-Institutional-Survey-Initiative-MISI-td4151787.html#a4151787
[Using Sakai] Report Out > Sakai Teaching and Learning Group Update
http://n2.nabble.com/Report-Out-Sakai-Teaching-and-Learning-Group-Update-td4134345.html#a4134345
[Portfolio] OSP 2.6.x: General Feedback invisible to CIG Participants
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-OSP-2-6-x-General-Feedback-invisible-to-CIG-Participants-td4174281.html#a4174281
[Portfolio] SAK-17587 - Can't get past step 2 when creating a
portfolio template
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-SAK-17587-Can-t-get-past-step-2-when-creating-a-portfolio-template-td4172008.html#a4172008
[Portfolio] Sharing portfolios with the .anon role in a "public" Sakai
site
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-Sharing-portfolios-with-the-anon-role-in-a-public-Sakai-site-td4156740.html#a4164112
[Portfolio] Sakai strategic directions
http://n2.nabble.com/Sakai-Strategic-Directions-td4153085.html#a4153085
[Using Sakai] Adding a Page to the Wiki
http://n2.nabble.com/Using-Sakai-Adding-a-Page-to-the-Wiki-td4177414.html#a4177414
[Building Sakai] Sakai email notifications
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Sakai-email-notifications-td4172006.html#a4172006
[Using Sakai] Releasing Student Grades individually
http://n2.nabble.com/Using-Sakai-Releasing-Student-Grades-individually-td4146846.html#a4146846
[Using Sakai] Mini tool icons
http://n2.nabble.com/Using-Sakai-Mini-tool-icons-td4146354.html#a4146354
---------------------------------------------------
8. Events
Connexions Conference 2010
February 2, 2010
Houston, Texas
http://cnxconference.rice.edu/
Jasig 2010 Ten Years of Open Source Innovation
March 8-10, 2010
The Town and Country Resort
San Diego, California
http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html
11th Sakai Annual Conference
Date and Time:
Tuesday - Thursday, June 15-17, 2010
Pre-conference sessions: Monday, June 14, 2010
Hyatt Regency Tech Center
Denver, Colorado
http://sakaiproject.org/annual-conference
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/announcements/attachments/20091220/3c95bdd1/attachment-0002.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Sakai.Newsletter.December.17.2009.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 147719 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/announcements/attachments/20091220/3c95bdd1/attachment-0001.pdf
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/announcements/attachments/20091220/3c95bdd1/attachment-0003.html
More information about the announcements
mailing list