[Announcements] Sakai Newsletter March 5, 2009
Margaret Wagner
mwagner at umich.edu
Sat Mar 7 10:13:49 PST 2009
Sakai Newsletter
March 5, 2009
1. From the Executive Director
2. The Second Rhode Island Sakai Conference
3. rSmart Welcomes Radford University to the Sakai Community
4. Johns Hopkins University Expands Sakai Pilot
5. Sakai Now in Production at Umeå University
6. Marist College Has Made 3 New QA Servers Available to the Sakai
Community
7. Assignments 2 and Gradebook Updates
8. Sakai Activities Organized into Four Categories
9. Sakai and Google Summer of Code
10. New Portlet Development Services Now Available from Unicon
11. Unicon Announces Open Source Cooperative Support for Jasig's CAS
12. rSmart Webinar: Sakai -- More Than an LMS at Half the Cost
13. Email Group Discussions
14. Events
--------------------------------------
1. From the Executive Director
I'm happy to report that registration is now open for both the 10th
International Sakai Conference in Boston in July and the European
Regional Sakai Conference in Stockholm in May.
I excited about the Boston conference (July 7-10), in part because I
love the Boston area. The location will actually be Cambridge, where I
used to live. The Hyatt hotel there is right on the Charles River and
the conference receptions will benefit from truly excellent settings.
The room rate is $199/night and includes internet access.
For the Boston conference there will be a food and beverage fee of
$195 for Sakai Foundation members. The total fee for non-members is
$495. These prices are good for registrations that are paid for
before June 5. After that date prices go up by $50 so please don't
wait until the last minute. We're also working on a nice incentive for
the first 100 registrants, so you might want to register right now.
The 2nd European Sakai Conference promises to be another great event.
It will be a half-day on May 5 and a full day on May 6 at Stockholm
University in Sweden. There is no registration fee for this
conference, so sign up now if you're planning to go. It will help the
organizers if they know in advance how many people to expect.
Here are the relevant links:
Boston Conference Home Page: https://educonference.com/sakai/boston/index.php
Boston Hotel Home Page: http://cambridge.hyatt.com/
European Conference Home Page: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/eAN1Ag
Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska at sakaifoundation.org
phone: +1 510-931-6559
mobile (US): +1 510-599-2586 mobile (FR): +33 (0)6 31 11 58 97
skype: mkorcuska
--------------------------------------
2. The Second Rhode Island Sakai Conference
It is with great pleasure that we formally announce the Second RI
Sakai Conference on March 31st and April 1st at the Providence
Biltmore in Providence, RI. This year's conference with two full days
of sessions shapes up to be even better than last year.
Our keynotes will be:
Sakai 3 -- Michael Korcuska (http://sakaiblog.korcuska.net) ,
Executive Director, Sakai Project.
Michael will be demonstrating Sakai 3, a worldwide project to update
Sakai with the latest Web 2.0 technologies. Sakai 3 will be piloted at
Cambridge University and Georgia Tech this fall, and be ready for
general release the following year. I think you will agree that the
work completed to date is already amazing.
Creating Environments that Engage Students -- Heidi Hayes Jacobs (http://www.curriculumdesigners.com
), President, Curriculum Designers, Inc.
Heidi's work in the area of curriculum integration and rigorous
discipline-based and interdisciplinary studies was the basis for
Curriculum Designers first wave work. When Heidi introduced modern
Curriculum Mapping with the publication of her second book, Mapping
the Big Picture: Integrating Curriculum and Assessment K-12, (ASCD,
1997), the field expanded.
Balancing The Two Faces of Portfolio -- Dr. Helen Barrett (http://electronicportfolios.org
).
Helen is sometimes referred to as the Grandmother of Portfolio. Her
work with portfolios in education is world renown. Helen's
presentation will help us understand the tension between portfolios
for assessment and those for personal expression, both exceedingly
important and neither to be ignored.
At the RI Sakai Conference you will:
- Learn how Sakai's Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE),
including shared resources and calendars, chat rooms, discussion
forums, glossaries, wikis, assignment and portfolio tools, drop boxes
and more can be used to support classroom activities and engage
students.
- Meet Rhode Island teachers and students and learn how they use Sakai
to provide evidence of proficiency through portfolios and senior
projects to meet Rhode Island's Proficiency Based Graduation
Requirements.
- Learn how to set up and use Sakai's tools for your classroom.
- Learn how the Sakai CLE is used to provide extended learning
opportunities including hybrid classes, distance learning, and credit
recovery classes.
- Learn how Sakai's tools are used to support Professional
Development, Curriculum Development, and engage teachers.
- Learn about Sakai, the future of K-20 Collaborations, and new tools
that will soon be available in Sakai to support classroom instruction.
Please visit http://www.ri.net/RINET/events/09sakai_conf/09sakaiconference.html
for more information and to register for the Second RI Sakai
Conference.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Steve Foehr
steve at staff.ri.net
--------------------------------------
3. rSmart Welcomes Radford University to the Sakai Community
rSmart would like to welcome Radford University to the Sakai community
as one of the most recent rSmart Sakai CLE support customers. Radford
University, located in Virginia, is a public, 4-year institution with
nearly 9,200 students. Radford is rated a Top 20 Public Master's
University in the South by the U.S. News & World Report and is
identified as a 2009 "Best College in the Southeast" by Princeton
Review.
Initially Radford plans on using Sakai to power eportfolios. The
portfolio project is coupled with a re-design of their general
education program to include a "core curriculum". The first part of
Radford's new core curriculum (aptly titled Core A) is comprised of
four classes that emphasize development in written communications,
oral communication, critical thinking, and technology/information
literacy. The school decided to require all students completing Core
A to create a portfolio of evidence to demonstrate success in these
four classes. As conversations around the new core continued, it was
further decided that the portfolio would be electronically maintained
and should dovetail with the learning management system. After better
understanding Sakai through rSmart's configuration and implementation
process, the school may also consider Sakai for broader usage on
campus. "The rSmart Sakai/OSP bundle fit nicely with our needs and was
the choice of the Core A steering committee," says Charley Cosmato,
Assistant Director, Technology in Learning Center. "The Sakai
community has produced a great product and the one week 'coffee &
donut' session with rSmart here on campus to get Sakai running was
heaven." rSmart would also like to acknowledge Serensoft's important
role in this exciting new project.
Mike Zackrison
mike.zackrison at rsmart.com
--------------------------------------
4. Johns Hopkins University Expands Sakai Pilot
JHU's Sakai pilot is significantly expanded for the spring 2009
semester, hosting 113 sites (some for fully online courses, others as
course supplements) and serving nearly 1500 students. We recently
completed integration with our SIS, including custom work in Sakai to
require certain students to pass an orientation course before they can
access other course sites. We are running version 2.5.2 in a
clustered environment.
Steve Hellen
steve.hellen at jhu.edu
--------------------------------------
5. Sakai Now in Production at Umeå University
Umeå University in the north of Sweden now has Sakai in production.
Umeå has more than 29 000 student and 2000 courses. Even though we
have had a central LMS -- PingPong -- the departments here have been
using several different collaboration and course management systems
over the years. Since December 2008, the centrally-supported system at
the university is Sakai. We now call the system Cambro, which stands
for "room" in Esperanto, and it is an adoption of Sakai version 2.5.3.
With great help -- and code -- from Stockholm University we managed to
implement a Swedish translation and integrate the federated Single
Sign-On based on SAML2 in just a couple of months. As many of our
lecturers are familiar with learning management systems, the
utilization of Cambro will probably grow quite rapidly. Within the
first year in production, the number of courses to be held with the
help of Cambro may be as high as 1000.
My colleagues and I will of course be represented at the 2nd European
Sakai Conference in Stockholm, May 5-6, and hope to see you there.
Cambro can be found at http://www.cambro.umu.se.
Kind regards,
Daniel Lind
UMDAC, Umeå University SE-901 87
Umeå
Sweden Phone: +46 90 786 53 12
Daniel.Lind at umdac.umu.se
http://www.umu.se
--------------------------------------
6. Marist College Has Made 3 New QA Servers Available to the Sakai
Community
Marist College is pleased to announce the availability of three new QA
servers: QA7-US, QA8-US, and QA9-US. As part of Marist College's joint
activities with IBM, rSmart, and the Sakai community to enable Sakai
on Websphere and DB2, they have established these three servers for
use by the community. QA7 provides a Tomcat/DB2 environment, QA8 a
Websphere/mySQL environment, and QA9 a Websphere/DB2 environment. For
any question concerning these test instances please contact Adam Hocek
at Marist College (Adam.Hocek at marist.edu).
Howard Baker,
Marist College Joint Studies
hcbaker at us.ibm.com
--------------------------------------
7. Assignments 2 and Gradebook Updates
Colleagues,
As you probably know from the commit activity, a lot of development
work has been occurring here at Indiana University and we'd like to
take a moment to share an update on our progress with the community.
Assignments2
Assignments2, a second generation of the assignments tool, continues
to be a top priority locally. The initial phases involved conversion
to RSF, better gradebook integration, and a redesign for an improved
user experience. Iteration 3, the first 'user-ready' version, was
completed at the end of December and is now available to a small pilot
group at Indiana University. For your demoing convenience,
Assignments2 has been added to the nightly contrib build: http://nightly2.sakaiproject.org:8085/portal
In addition, the Assignments2 Confluence space has a lot of additional
information including design, links to the source code, roadmap, etc.
A screen cast will also be posted! The link to the space is: http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/ASNN/Home
-----
Gradebook
Work is ongoing to support non-calculating gradebook items as well as
support for an entire non-calculating gradebook type. The source code
and design can be found at Design: Attached tohttp://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-14551
(a revised version will be forthcoming) Source:https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/gradebook/branches/non-cal
In addition, work allowing entry of institution-specific grades in
course grade override field has been completed (SAK-13934) and is
something for inclusion this in the next major release of Sakai
(2.7). This work is compatible with the Gradebook2 work being done at
University of California-Davis. Lastly, support for extra credit,
drop high and low, and functionality to add items in bulk is in the
planning stages in the original version of the Gradebook. Once more
when information on those is available, we will share it.
Prior to merging any of this work into trunk, we'll follow the
standard process of posting to the dev list for comment and review by
the community.
Thanks!
May, Megan Marie
mmmay at indiana.edu
--------------------------------------
8. Sakai Activities Organized into Four Categories
In order to make it easier to find relevant information about Sakai,
particularly for new-comers, we are in the process of re-organizing
many of the ongoing Sakai activities into four broad categories:
General Information, Building Sakai, Deploying Sakai, and Using
Sakai. These categories are based on the Sakai Conference session
tracks, which have worked well in grouping related topics into
categories of broad interest and collaboration.
Below are general descriptions of these four groups. Soon you will
see this grouping reflected elsewhere as well.
General Information -- General information covers conferences and
meetings, partners program, commercial affiliates problem, demos, and
more. Topics in General Information are of interest to all members of
the Sakai Community.
Building Sakai (The sakai-dev email group.) -- This category is for
information and discussions relating to designing, developing, testing
and documenting. Sakai members can learn about the technical details
of building tools or integrating services; find guidelines for design
and development of tools and services; locate technical
specifications; learn about plans for future releases, and more.
Designers, programmers, developers, and quality assurance staff will
find relevant information in the Building Sakai category.
Deploying Sakai (sakai-prod) -- Deploying Sakai includes information
about installing, implementing, configuring, and supporting. Those
interested will find release documentation; learn about performance
tuning; browse suggested hardware and software configurations; and
share examples of training, tutorial and support documentation. The
Deploying Sakai category will be of special interest to sysadmins,
DBAs, and technical support staff. http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/Si4
Using Sakai (sakai-user) -- Using Sakai is about collaborating,
teaching and learning, and more. Users can learn about best
practices; share experiences; connect with user communities with
similar interests, K- 12, Higher-Ed, Portfolios and more. Using Sakai
provides important information for teachers, researchers,
instructional designers, and end-user support staff.http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/agCeAg
Peter Knoop
knoop at umich.edu
--------------------------------------
9. Sakai and Google Summer of Code
Last year Chuck Severance mentored a couple of students in Google
Summer of Code (SoC). He won't be able to do that this year. Is
anyone interested in putting together a proposal and mentoring
students for the summer? It does take some work and won't necessarily
produce work that ends up in a Sakai release, but can be a rewarding
experience and a way to get students on campus involved in Sakai. The
fact that Chuck did it last year and the students had some success
means it is highly likely we would get approved for 1 or 2 students
this year.
Anyone interested?
Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska at sakaifoundation.org
--------------------------------------
10. New Portlet Development Services Available from Unicon
Unicon, Inc. has announced its new portlet development services.
These services are designed to help academic institutions improve
online accessibility and increase user adoption of their campus
portals. Utilizing standards-compliant portlets or platform-specific
portlets, Unicon's experienced team offers full life-cycle portlet
development services to help institutions quickly achieve goals while
minimizing risk. Portlets effectively integrate and display diverse
content, applications, and services throughout the enterprise campus
portal.
Comprehensive Portlet Development Approach
Unicon has years of proven experience and skills developing standards-
compliant portlets or platform-specific portlets. Utilizing Unicon's
full life-cycle portlet development services, clients can quickly
achieve goals through a wide array of methodologies, tools, and web
development frameworks. Unicon offers institutions the following
portlet development services: analysis, requirements definition,
usability, design, portlet development, systems integration,
mentoring, training and knowledge transfer.
Since 1999, Unicon's consulting group has provided over 175 colleges
and universities with software consulting, support, and related
services for their online campus deployments. Unicon has also made
significant development, technology, and feature contributions to open
source platforms and communities.
Portlets created by Unicon include:
- Announcements Portlet
- Budget Portlet
- Calendar Portlet
- Campus Map Portlet
- Facebook Portlet
- Featured Story Portlet
- Learning Management System Integration
- Mail Portlet
- RSS Portlet
- Student Information System Integration
- Tabbed Search Portlet
- Weather Portlet
Joe Waldygo
joe at topspinpr.com
--------------------------------------
11. Unicon Announces New Open Source Cooperative Support Program for
Jasig's CAS (Central Authentication Service)
Unicon, Inc. has announced a new Open Source Cooperative Support
Program for the Jasig Central Authentication Service (CAS). CAS is a
secure authentication system and single sign-on service for enterprise
applications and platforms and provides a trusted way for an
application to authenticate a user. Unicon's Cooperative Support
Program provides member institutions with a predictable cost support
solution for their open source solutions for uPortal, Sakai, and now
CAS. The company provides a dedicated team of expert development and
technical support specialists for direct technical support and
assistance. All development work and fixes performed by the team are
contributed back to the CAS community.
Unicon offers a full range of service offerings for institutions
wishing to deploy Jasig's CAS including: planning, installation,
configuration, implementation, custom development, application and
system integration, branding, and training. Unicon can implement and
customize CAS for uPortal, Sakai, and other enterprise applications.
For more information on Unicon's complete service for CAS, visit:http://www.unicon.net/services/cas
.
"Jasig is very pleased to see a Unicon service offering for CAS," said
Jonathan Markow, Executive Director of Jasig. "Unicon has been a
contributor to the CAS project for a number of years, and they have
broad experience implementing CAS at higher education institutions.
The Unicon Cooperative Support Program has been important to many
uPortal institutions. The availability of a similar, high quality,
commercial service for CAS should be just as well received."
"We added CAS to our cooperative support program as a response to the
increased demand for CAS at higher ed institutions and strong
acceptance of our innovative support model for open source projects,"
said John C. Blakley, CEO of Unicon, Inc. "Unicon's professional
services team has successfully deployed and integrated CAS with
numerous enterprise applications over the past few years and we're
excited to begin offering it as part of our support program."
Partial List of Unicon's Cooperative Support Program Members
uPortal: Brooklyn College- City University of New York, South Dakota
State University, and University of Georgia
Sakai: New Teacher Center, University of Virginia, and University of
the Arts
About CAS
The Jasig Central Authentication Service, originally developed by Yale
University, provides secure user authentication and single sign-on for
many client programs that have been "CASified" since CAS became
available. Single sign-on is a session/user authentication process
that allows a user to provide his or her credentials once in order to
access multiple applications. The single sign-on authenticates the
user to access all the applications he or she has been authorized to
access. It eliminates future authentication requests when the user
switches applications during that particular session. Web Single sign-
on works strictly with applications accessed with a web browser. The
request to access a web resource is intercepted either by a component
in the web server, or by the application itself. Unauthenticated users
are diverted to an authentication service and returned only after a
successful authentication. More information about CAS is available
at: http://www.jasig.org/cas.
Joe Waldygo
joe at topspinpr.com
--------------------------------------
12. rSmart Webinar: Sakai -- More Than a Learning Management System
at Half the Cost
Join us March 26 at 11:00 AM PST for our next webinar as we explore
the rSmart Sakai CLE and discuss how Sakai, along with rSmart's
support and service packages, are saving campuses thousands of dollars
each year.
Topics to be discussed:
- Brief introduction to the Sakai community and software
- Short demonstration of the software
- Reasons why Sakai saves campuses thousands of dollars
- Best practices for a successful implementation of Sakai
Date: March 26, 2009
Time: 11:00 AM PST
To register:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/165216289
Megan Perrone
megan.perrone at rsmart.com
--------------------------------------
13. Recent Email Group Discussions
Melete for Sakai 2.6.x (Building Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai---Melete-for-Sakai-2.6.x-tt2437668.html#a2437668
Oracle + 2.4.x? (Building Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--Oracle-%2B-2.4.x--tt2437983.html#a2437983
sakai registry / unicon (Building Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--sakai-registry---unicon-tt2436637.html#a2436637
Work flow of Announcement (Building Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--Work-flow-of-Announcement-tt2435537.html#a2435537
"images don't show" (Building Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--%22images-don%27t-show%22-tt2435350.html#a2435350
manifest xml file? (Building Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--manifest-xml-file--tt2435136.html#a2435136
Resources root folder's name (Building Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/Resources-root-folder%27s-name-tt2422704.html#a2422704
QA issues (Using Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/-Portfolio--QA-issues-tt2440080.html#a2440080
Custom renderer (Using Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/-Portfolio--Custom-renderer-tt2430932.html#a2430932
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-15540 (Using Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/http%3A--bugs.sakaiproject.org-jira-browse-SAK-15540-tt2425407.html#a2425407
view as student link in xsl portal (Using Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/view-as-student-link-in-xsl-portal-tt2418281.html#a2418281
question about "My sites" (Building Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/Re%3A-question-about-%22My-sites%22-tt2390755.html#a2391018
Community Feedback RE: Status column on Total Scores page (Building
Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/Community-Feedback-RE%3A-Status-column-on-Total-Scores-page-tt2376441.html#a2376441
My Profile, draft 3 (Building Sakai)
http://n2.nabble.com/Re%3A-My-Profile%2C-draft-3-tt2360630.html#a2360630
--------------------------------------
14. Events
Second Rhode Island Sakai Conference
March 31-April 1, 2009
Providence Biltmore Hotel
Providence, Rhode Island
www.ri.net
2nd European Sakai Conference
May (4)-5-6, 2009
Stockholm University
Stockholm, Sweden
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/CNF/European+Regional+Conference+in+Stockholm+2009
eLearning Africa 09
May 27- 29, 2009
Le Meridien President
Dakar, Senegal
www.elearning-africa.com.
First Annual Etudes Users Summit!
April 23-24, 2009
Los Angeles, California
Radisson Hotel, Los Angeles Airport
http://etudes.org/summit.htm
2009 MoodleMoot San Francisco and
2nd Sloan-C Symposium on Emerging Technology in Online Learning
June 17-19, 2009
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
San Francisco, California
http://moodlemoot.org/course/view.php?id=9 http://www.emergingonlinelearningtechnology.org/
10th Sakai Conference: Boston
July 8-10, 2009
Cambridge Hyatt
Cambridge, Massachusetts
http://www.sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-news/page/04ed2fa2-77e2-40da-8100-e0a08b9fea15
-------------------------------------
Here are email addresses to contact if you encounter problems with
various Sakai Community systems:
Collab -- collab-admins at umich.edu
Confluence -- confluence-admins at collab.sakaiproject.org
Jira -- jira-admins at collab.sakaiproject.org
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