[Announcements] Sakai Newsletter October 15, 2009
Margaret Wagner
mwagner at umich.edu
Mon Oct 19 18:48:25 PDT 2009
Sakai Newsletter
October 15, 2009
1. From the Executive Director
2. Sakai 2.6.1 Released
3. Fluid Infusion 1.1.2 Released
4. Josh Baron's Article "Innovating Teaching and Learning with Sakai"
Now Online
5. Thanks to the TWSIA Committee!
6. eLearning Africa 2010 -- The Call for Papers is Now Open!
7. Moving Along -- Antranig Basman
8. Students Who Worked on the Sakai 2.6.1 - IBM's Websphere and DB2
Project in IBM Poster Competition
9. Do You Have a LinkedIn Account? -- Join the Sakai Community Group
There
10. Information Regarding Deprecating Foundation Support for Older
Sakai Versions
11. Unicon to Address Technology Challenges of Exploding Enrollments
in Community Colleges
12. Recent Email Group Discussions
13. Events
--------------------------------------------
1. From the Executive Director
I'm writing to let you know that as of December 18, Pete Peterson,
currently Sakai QA Director, will be returning to his duties at UC
Davis.
This will leave a vacancy on the Sakai staff. I'm using this moment to
rethink the role to some degree at least. The QA process has typically
benefitted from an individual paying close attention to the details of
the many Jira issues and svn commits that make up the release. The
volume of issues and attention to detail required are both relatively
high. At the same time I also believe that we are ripe for a strategic
rethinking of how we manage QA in Sakai and to help the community
institute new processes and, especially, to implement a variety of
test automation tools and techniques. I'm not optimistic I can fill
both of these needs with one person, which, as you might expect, is
all I currently have in the budget. I'm open to feedback and advice on
this matter so please get in touch if you have something you'd like to
share.
I want to thank Pete for his contributions to the Sakai QA efforts
over the past year. We wish him well at UC Davis and we're sure we
will continue to hear from him in the community. At least I hope we
will!
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best regards,
Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska at sakaifoundation.org
phone: +1 510-859-4247 (google voice)
skype: mkorcuska
--------------------------------------------
2. Sakai 2.6.1 Released
Release Date: 15 October 2009
The Sakai 2.6.1 maintenance release provides a set of bug fixes,
language/locale updates and performance enhancements that improve upon
the Sakai 2.6.0 release. Over 200 issues have been addressed by 2.6.1.
Roughly half involve bug fixes while the remainder involve textual
updates to language translation property bundles. In particular,
important fixes have been applied to the assignment, chat, portfolio,
Tests & Quizzes and site-manage modules while updates for Catalan,
French, Russian, Spanish and Swedish translations have also been
provided.
Sakai 2.6.1 utilizes core service updates provided in the recent Sakai
kernel (K1) 1.0.12 maintenance release. Portfolio users will
appreciate a performance enhancement made to the kernel's
ContentHostingService that reduces portfolio assembly times (see http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-14165)
.
For all the changes in (K1) 1.0.12 see: http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/KNL/fixforversion/11551
Documentation and Overview:
Sakai 2.6.1 Documentation (Overview, Installation, Configuration,
etc.) is available at: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/Sakai+2.6
Source:
The source Tag for 2.6.1 is available from Subversion at: https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/sakai/tags/sakai-2.6.1/
Demo, binary, source artifacts:
Links for these are available in the Downloads section at: http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/2.6.1/
Older versions of Sakai:
Users of pre-2.5 versions of Sakai are strongly encouraged to update
to the Sakai Community-supported Sakai 2.6.1 or Sakai 2.5.5 releases*
in order to take advantage of the feature, performance and security
enhancements provided by the Sakai 2.5 and Sakai 2.6 series.
The Sakai open source community develops, tests, and maintains the
code for all Sakai releases. For the most current release and the
immediate prior release, the Sakai Foundation uses its resources to
oversee and manage the development, QA testing, patching, and
releasing of incremental numbered versions.
For earlier versions, the Foundation no longer provides this oversight
and coordination of the community contribution to the codebase. This
does not mean that these earlier versions are not used and maintained
by some institutions in the community, they are. Institutions running
an older version may of course continue to do so, applying patches,
bug fixes, and enhancements as they wish. These modifications are
committed to the Sakai SVN code repository and are available for
others to use if they wish. But the Foundation does not coordinate
testing or validation of the code changes, and does not create a
concomitant roll-up into an incremental release.
Pieter Hartsook
Communications Manager, Sakai Foundation
voice & SMS: 510-842-7438
Skype & AIM: hartsook |
hartsook at sakaifoundation.org
*See the previous announcements about the 2.6.0 and 2.5.5 releases in
the July 23, 2009 Sakai Newsletter: http://www.sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-news/page/ff27f160-ca13-43dc-b778-84791fb67cb2
--------------------------------------------
3. The Fluid Project is Pleased to Announce the Release of Fluid
Infusion 1.1.2
This release is a combination of bug fixes to existing code plus new
features aimed at giving Infusion users a better experience. Infusion
1.1.2 is an incremental upgrade and preserves backwards compatibility
for all production-grade components.
This release addresses some pesky bugs in Uploader, provides a sneak
peak at the Mobile Fluid Skinning System, and showcases a new demo
portal for easier interaction.
Infusion 1.1.2 is available for download at:
http://fluidproject.org/index.php/download-infusion
What's new in this release?
- New Demo Portal with improved component demos
- Sneak Peak for Mobile FSS iPhone theme
- Improved and simplified Image Reorderer examples and documentation
- Uploader support for Firefox 3.5 and improved experience for
Internet Explorer users
- Other bug fixes, such as more class name normalization and
InlineEdit fixes
For the complete bug list go to: http://issues.fluidproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=10272&tempMax=1000
If you're upgrading from Infusion 1.0, please see:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Upgrading+to+Infusion+1.1
If upgrading from an earlier version of Infusion you may want to refer
to the following Upgrade guides:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Upgrading+to+Infusion+1.0
What is Fluid Infusion?
Fluid Infusion is a JavaScript application framework for building
rich, reusable, and accessible user interfaces on the Web. It includes
all the tools you need for building complex interactions, including
support for models and views, data binding, and unobtrusive markup
rendering. Infusion also includes a growing collection of components
that have been designed by a cross-disciplinary team and thoroughly
tested for usability and accessibility. By incorporating the Infusion
framework and components into your web application's user interface,
you will make your application easier to use by more people. Easier to
use means happier users.
Known Issues
An up-to-date listing of known issues with this release is available at:
http://issues.fluidproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=10272&tempMax=1000
Help us Build a Usable Web For Everyone
The Fluid Project is an open, collaborative community. Our goal is to
improve the user experience of open source web applications, so if you
are a designer or developer and want to help change the world,
consider getting involved! Fluid Infusion includes not only full
source code but also a design handbook that offers useful design,
accessibility, and usability strategies and documentation, all backed
by a growing community of interaction designers, user interface
experts, and software developers contributing a wealth of expertise in
usability and accessibility.
Many thanks to everyone in the community for their hard work and
support for this release!
Jess Mitchell
Project Manager / Fluid Project
jess at jessmitchell.com
http://www.fluidproject.org
--------------------------------------------
4. Josh Baron's Article "Innovating Teaching and Learning with Sakai"
Now Online
Here is an excerpt published in Campus Technology Magazine from
"Courseware Management: The Official Guide," by Josh Baron.
"...It was from a desire among the Sakai Teaching and Learning
interest group to highlight and share these more inventive
applications that the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award Program,
initially sponsored by IBM and the Sakai Foundation, was born. The
program is not aimed at identifying technically complex uses of Sakai
but rather to find those uses of the technology, even very simple
ones, which are driving true innovation in how instructors are
teaching and students are learning. The following is a discussion of
the award process itself and highlights the winners of the 2008
Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award as a means to provide concrete
examples of how Sakai is facilitating truly inventive instruction..."
You can read the full article at: http://bit.ly/2mdoL2
--------------------------------------------
5. Thanks to the TWSIA Committee!
I would like to thank everyone from within the community who has
worked so hard over the past two years on the Teaching with Sakai
Innovation Award program (whose 2008 winners are the focus of the book
chapter and article noted in the newsletter item above). I would
especially like to highlight those who served on the past Award
Committees:
- Sue Roig, Director Academic Computing, Claremont Colleges (Claremont
Graduate University) (Committee Chair)
- Janet de Vry, Manager, Instructional Services, IT-User Services
University of Delaware (Committee chair)
- Maggie McVay Lynch, Dean, Distance Learning College of the Redwoods
- Mathieu Plourde, Instructional Designer, IT-User Services,
University of Delaware
- Kate Ellis, Instructional Technology Consultant & Designer, Indiana
University
- Nate Angell, Director of Special Projects, rSmart
- Salwa Khan, Media Consultant, Instructional Technologies Support,
Texas State University
- Eddie Watson, Assistant Director, Strategy & Planning, Learning
Technologies Virginia Tech
(My apologies if I have outdated titles or institutions listed for
folks.)
Joshua Baron
Director, Academic Technology and eLearning
Marist College
(845) 575-3623 (work)
Twitter: JoshBaron
Josh.Baron at marist.edu
P.S. My thanks to Mary Miles as well for all of her logistical
support on the conference-related award activities.
--------------------------------------------
6. eLearning Africa 2010 -- The Call for Papers is Now Open!
eLearning Africa is delighted to announce that next year's conference,
the fifth in the highly successful series of pan-African gatherings,
will take place from May 26th - 28th, 2010 in Lusaka, Zambia.
For further information, please visit the eLearning Africa website,
which will keep you up-to-date with the latest developments and
details about the conference venue, conference highlights,
registration and other components of the event.
http://www.elearning-africa.com/
--------------------------------------------
7. Moving Along -- Antranig Basman
Hello there fellows all,
As some of you may know, I am moving on from CARET and so my current
email address will not be working much longer. I will, however, still
be in existence, and doing much the same sort of thing -- as part of
the Fluid Project, I have relocated from one partner to another, and
as of yesterday am working at the University of Colorado, Boulder,
together with the illustrious Clayton Lewis. I am excited at the
opportunity to be troublesome in an entirely new community. As you
know, although the formal partners on the Fluid Engage project are
cultural institutions rather than higher education, Fluid Infusion,
our base framework, is still an extremely active project and we are
excited to continue working with the partners we built up with it,
including uPortal, Sakai and others. So you haven't quite got rid of
me yet. I will of course continue to support users of the RSF
framework, which will probably be moving to have its infrastructure to
be consolidated with Fluid over the next few months. For those of you
hanging round Denver next summer, we stand to buy each other a beer,
or something harder, depending on the sign and magnitude of
accumulated obligation :P My new email for work purposes will be Antranig.Basman at colorado.edu
-- I will try to gradually phase out refs to the old one though this
may take some time. Look forward to working with you in another life,
brother :P (Just to clear the decks from any charges of sexism, I do
want to make it clear that women are just fine to be fellows and
brothers, just in the same way that they can be gentlemen :P) (except
for an aunt, that is -- http://www.amazon.com/Aunts-arent-Gentlemen-P-G-Wodehouse/dp/0140041923)
Cheers, Antranig
New email address: Antranig.Basman at colorado.edu
--------------------------------------------
8. Three Students Who Worked to Enabled Sakai 2.6.1 on IBM's Websphere
and DB2 Recently Participated in an IBM Poster Competition
Three student members of the Marist/IBM Joint Study team that recently
completed the work to enable Sakai 2.6.1 on IBM's Websphere and DB2
products participated in an IBM sponsored poster competition event
called TechConnect 2009. The event was held at IBM's Development Lab
in Poughkeepise, New York and 24 posters were entered in the contest.
Their poster submission was entitled "Project Cloud9". Project Cloud9
is the culmination of our work to port Sakai to IBM's Websphere/DB2/z
platform -- tune it on the mainframe, and create a production
environment at Marist College that provides access to this version of
Sakai to local school districts. It went into production at the
beginning of this fall semester.
The students won a first prize in the "early tenure/ solutions"
category from the IBM judging team, and a first prize from "the
people" (IBMers and IBM execs from the lab who visited the session
after the official judging was over). Judging was based on:
Clarity of Communication
Focus on communicating the key concepts of the project/work
1. Technical Achievement, Breakthrough thinking -- describe it along
the following scale
Following current trends -------------> redefines the paradigm
2. Your contribution to solution
General team member, performing tasks expected -------------> strong
leadership role
3. Business Value of the overall project
Solving daily requirements -------------> new customer offerings with
competitive advantage
The students who participated in the contest were Sean Goldsmith,
Deyaa Abuelsaad, and Michael Lavacca. Sean and Deyaa are senior CS
majors, and Michael is a junior in the Marist CS program. They are
also currently employed as IBM interns -- which enabled them to
compete in the IBM event. Other members of the team who made
significant contributions to this project were: John Bush from rSmart,
John Digilio, Martha McConaghy, Adam Hocek, Earle Nietzel and David
Brangaitis from Marist College's IT department, Kashife Smith --
Marist College sophomore/CS major, and Marty Banting and Austin
Schilling from IBM.
Howard Baker PMP®
IBM Certified Executive Project Manager
Marist College Joint Studies
Marist Office: 845-575-3101
hcbaker at us.ibm.com
--------------------------------------------
9. Do you have a LinkedIn Account? -- Join the Sakai Community Group
There
If you are active on LinkedIn you can join the Sakai Community group (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3122
). I have started posting references to Sakai in the news and job
postings there in addition to the mail lists.
The LinkedIn group is NOT a replacement for the Sakai-hosted mail
lists, wiki, or blogs as collaboration and communication tools, but
rather it's an additional communications channel for those of you who
are active on LinkedIn.
Pieter Hartsook
Sakai Foundation Communications Manager
hartsook at sakaifoundation.org
--------------------------------------------
10. Information Regarding Deprecating Foundation Support for Older
Sakai Versions
The following is a summary of the Sakai Foundation policy and practice
regarding support for older versions:
The Sakai open source community develops, tests, and maintains the
code for all Sakai releases. For the most current release and the
immediate prior release, the Sakai Foundation uses its resources to
oversee and manage the development, QA testing, patching, and release
of incremental numbered versions.
For earlier versions, the Foundation no longer provides this oversight
and coordination of the community contribution to the codebase. This
does not mean that these earlier versions are not used and maintained
by some institutions in the community, they are. Institutions running
an older version may of course continue to do so, applying patches,
bug fixes, and enhancements as they wish. These modifications are
committed to the Sakai SVN code repository and are available for
others to use if they wish. But the Foundation does not coordinate
testing or validation of the code changes, and does not create a
concomitant roll-up into an incremental release.
The Foundation and most of the community are focused on maintaining
the current versions and development toward future versions since this
provides maximum benefit to the community at large and is the best use
of our aggregate resources. When possible we recommend upgrading your
deployment to currently supported versions.
In July 2009, Sakai version 2.6.0 was released. Thus, any subsequent
changes to Sakai 2.4.x code are no longer managed by the Foundation
and became the sole responsibility of the individual institutions. No
new versions of 2.4 will be released. When version Sakai 2.7.0 is
released, the same change will happen to the currently supported
version 2.5.x.
A wiki page describing the development life cycle process is located
at: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SAKDEV/Sakai+Developer+Practices
Pieter Hartsook
Communications Manager, Sakai Foundation
hartsook at sakaifoundation.org
--------------------------------------------
11. Unicon to Address Technology Challenges of Exploding Enrollments
Within Community Colleges
Unicon, Inc. has announced that its Senior Sales Consultant Keegan
Cherry will be delivering a presentation that examines how learning
management systems can be a viable solution to the intersection of
exploding enrollments, increasing needs for scalable technology, and
reduced budget challenges at community colleges. The Conference on
Information Technology 2009 is being held October 11-14, 2009 at the
Cobo Center in Detroit, Michigan.
Unicon will be exhibiting in booth #503 at the conference, and
available for meetings and demonstrations regarding its open source
solutions for enterprise portals, learning management systems,
identity management, calendaring, email, and collaboration platforms.
Unicon Presentation
Title -- Reducing TCO with Hosted, Open Source Learning Management
Systems
When -- Monday, October 12, 2009, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Where -- Cobo Center D2-13, Level 2
Presenter -- Keegan Cherry, Senior Sales Consultant, Unicon, Inc.
Abstract -- Learn how to maintain high service levels for online
campuses, improve productivity of IT staffs, and reduce TCO through
the implementation of hosted open source learning management systems.
Hosted learning management systems offer scalability, flexibility, and
strong functionality to budget conscious institutions in this tough
economy. Open source learning management systems include Sakai,
Moodle, and others. Attendees will also learn what technology and
hosting platforms were selected by the Workforce Retraining Initiative
created by Cisco Networking Academy, in collaboration with colleges
and universities across the state of Michigan. Workforce Retraining
brings workers from Michigan new educational opportunities for job
retraining in high-demand, high-paying IT careers.
--------------------------------------------
12. Recent Email Group Discussions
[Building Sakai] Search 1.2 beta01 released
http://n2.nabble.com/Search-1-2-beta01-released-td3844735.html#a3844735
[Building Sakai] Sakai as a large file dropbox
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Sakai-as-a-large-file-dropbox-td3783433.html#a3783612
[Building Sakai] Cafe trunk status
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Cafe-trunk-status-td3840269.html#a3840269
[Building Sakai] Web DAV under Snowleopard does not work
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Web-DAV-under-Snowleopard-does-not-work-td3835886.html#a3835886
[Building Sakai] ResourcesToolActionPipe: When does it "stream" ?
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-ResourcesToolActionPipe-When-does-it-stream-td3818263.html#a3818263
[Building Sakai] java support
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-java-support-td3837415.html#a3837415
[Building Sakai] Sakai Out of memory perm gen error
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Sakai-Out-of-memory-perm-gen-error-td3836171.html#a3836171
[Building Sakai] scorm player problem
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-scorm-player-problem-td3835918.html#a3835918
[Building Sakai] scorm player modules
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-scorm-player-modules-td3833754.html#a3833754
[Building Sakai] why i can't use sakai service in my app :( ?
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-why-i-can-t-use-sakai-service-in-my-app-td3833650.html#a3833729
[Building Sakai] ResourcesToolActionPipe: When does it "stream" ?
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-ResourcesToolActionPipe-When-does-it-stream-td3818263.html#a3818263
[Building Sakai] Writing an EntityProvider
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Writing-an-EntityProvider-td3830562.html#a3830562
[Building Sakai] trunk/trunk-experimental update: contrib IMS basiclti
available via -Pexperimental profile
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-trunk-trunk-experimental-update-contrib-IMS-basiclti-available-via-Pexperimental-profe-td3831355.html#a3831355
[Building Sakai] Tests and Quizzes Copy Shared Pool
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Tests-and-Quizzes-Copy-Shared-Pool-td3830255.html#a3830255
[DG: Teaching & Learning] [Management] [Portfolio] A manifesto for
Grading and Rating in Sakai
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-A-manifesto-for-Grading-and-Rating-in-Sakai-td3834665.html#a3834665
[Portfolio] Documentation
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-Documentation-td3824831.html#a3824831
[Portfolio] [Management] A manifesto for Grading and Rating in Sakai
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-A-manifesto-for-Grading-and-Rating-in-Sakai-td3834665.html#a3834665
[Portfolio] Collaborative Portfolio Contributions
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-Collaborative-Portfolio-Contributions-td3810095.html#a3810095
[Portfolio] How to get data form gradebook to my portfolios ?
[DG: User Experience] Fluid announces Infusion 1.1.2 Release
[DG: User Experience] Discussions Widget Patch
http://n2.nabble.com/DG-User-Experience-Discussions-Widget-Patch-td3807942.html#a3808615
--------------------------------------------
13. Events
Assessment Institute in Indianapolis
October 25-27, 2009
The Westin Indianapolis
Indianapolis, Indiana
http://www.planning.iupui.edu/institute
Online Educa Berlin 2009
December 2-4, 2009
Hotel InterContinental Berlin
Berlin, Germany
http://www.online-educa.com/the-conference
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