[Announcements] Sakai Newsletter September 10, 2009

Sat Sep 12 10:13:13 PDT 2009

Sakai Newsletter

September 10, 2009

1.  From the Executive Director

2.  New Sakai Initiative Focused on "Instructional Visioning"

3.  Gradebook2 Upcoming 1.1 Release

4.  Update on Joint rSmart/IBM/Marist Work at Marist College

5.  Log Event Descriptions for Sakai 2.6 Now Available on Confluence

6.  Feedback on New Feature Contributions to Tests & Quizzes

7.  Another Successful Google Summer of Code Winds Up

8.  Update on Unicon Gradebook Work

9.  Kuali Foundation Job Opening

10. Recent Email Group Discussions

11. Events

-------------------------------------
1.  From the Executive Director

This week, as I prepare to head to Australia for AuSakai 09, I want to  
draw your attention to an email that Sakai Product manager, Clay  
Fenlason, sent out just before Labor Day weekend here in the US. It  
provides a lot of good information about what is happening with Sakai  
Releases.

The email covers:
- 2.6 maintenance releases
- Preparations for 2.7, including staggered tool QA along the way to  
2.7.0
- A proposed "maintenance team"
- The need for branch managers for 2.7

I encourage you to read the entire email if you haven't already and  
give Clay any feedback you might have:

http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/management/2009-September/000166.html

If you're interested in tracking these kinds of conversations I  
encourage you to subscribe to the "management" email list. You can do  
that here:

http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/management

See you in Bathurst!

Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska at sakaifoundation.org
phone: +1 510-859-4247 (google voice)
skype: mkorcuska

-------------------------------------
2. New Sakai Initiative Focused on "Instructional Visioning"

Following the 10th International Sakai Conference in Boston this past  
July, a diverse set of community members representing UX, Teaching and  
Learning, Portfolio, and others have been working to organize a new  
effort focused on the need to find new ways for our community to  
discuss, identify and document the types of instructional practices  
that Sakai needs to support now and into the near as well as distant  
future. In order to begin work on this new effort, the weekly Sakai  
Teaching and Learning phone conference is being rescheduled as well as  
refocused on this issue.

Any and all members of the Sakai Community are welcome to participate  
in this new effort.  Our first phone conference is being scheduled for  
the week of September 14th.  If you are interested in participating  
please go to our Doodle site at http://www.doodle.com/fv6feshva2wybxfs  
to input times when you would be available. A final time will be  
selected and posted, along with call-in information, sometime next  
week to the Sakai Teaching and Learning and Using Sakai mailing  
lists.  See the www.sakaiproject.org for details on subscribing to  
these lists.

If you have questions, comments of suggestions please email Josh Baron  
at Josh.Baron at marist.edu.

-------------------------------------
3. Gradebook2 Upcoming 1.1 Release

Hi All,

Just a heads up that we will be releasing the 1.1.0 tag of the new
Gradebook 2 tool next week.

Highlights Include:
- Letter Grading
- Grader Permissions
- Course Grade and Item Level Statistics
- Scantron Import
- XLS Import
- Export / Import with Comments
- Weight Items by Points in Weighted Categories mode

If you're curious for details,

1.1.0-rc1 : tasks, fixes and enhancements for the current release
candidate are visible here:
http://jira.sakaiproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&pid=10491&fixfor=11605

And here are known critical issues:
http://jira.sakaiproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&pid=10491&priority=2&resolution=-1&type=1

(For those who missed the 1.0 release:
http://jira.sakaiproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&pid=10491&fixfor=11585)

Best,

James Renfro
jlrenfro at ucdavis.edu

-------------------------------------
4.  Update on Joint rSmart/IBM/Marist Work at Marist College

Starting this fall Marist College will be providing a hosted version  
of Sakai for five local school districts that are part of Marist's  
K-12 Greystone Consortium. The Greystone Consortium program offers an  
online education environment that includes online undergraduate  
courses for high school juniors and seniors and graduate courses for  
K-12 teachers. This year, through this new Greystone pilot project  
(dubbed zSakai -- https://greystone.marist.edu/), participating  
teachers at each of the schools will be able to use Sakai for their  
own classroom instruction. There are 10 teachers signed up starting  
this school year with more anticipated for the spring semester. This  
hosted version of Sakai is rSmart's 2.6.1 CLE running on a Websphere/ 
DB2/Linux/z platform.

Howard Baker
hcbaker at us.ibm.com

-------------------------------------
5.  Log Event Descriptions for Sakai 2.6 Now Available on Confluence

A full list of all user actions, or "events," that are logged within  
the Event Table for Sakai 2.6 are now available on Confluence at this  
URL:http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/5A7tAw

The events are grouped by Sakai tool and include the tool, event code,  
a general description, and whether or not the event is being tracked  
in SiteStats 2.0.  Also, a list of known Sakai tools (core,  
provisional, and contrib) are provided at the bottom of the page.

DEVELOPERS:  Please check to make sure that the events for your tools  
are complete and accurate, particularly those with question marks (??)  
next to the description. Additionally, please add any missing events  
for tools that you have worked on or are responsible for.

Thanks,

Steven Lonn
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Usability, Support, and Evaluation (USE) Lab
Part of the CTools / Sakai Team
University of Michigan
slonn at umich.edu

-------------------------------------
6. Feedback on New Feature Contributions to Tests & Quizzes

The following new Tests & Quizzes features have been developed by Rice  
University. These features are running locally on Rice's local  
instance of Sakai, and Rice would like to contribute them back to the  
Sakai community. As part of the review process, the Tests & Quizzes  
team would like to gather feedback from the Sakai community on the  
desirability of these features. For those Sakai schools currently  
using or considering using Tests & Quizzes, would any of these  
features fill an existing need at your particular institutions?   
Please review the specific JIRA entries and accompanying specs from  
Rice University for details on each feature.

Please send your comments directly to me at jamai at stanford.edu by  
Tuesday, September 22.

Partial Credit for Multiple Choice  Assessments
http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-16823

Sakai Samigo Pause Between Quiz Retakes
http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-16824

Partially anonymous assessments
http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-16821

The ability to choose "Average" for the "Recorded Score if Multiple  
Submissions"
http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-11690

Thanks for your feedback,

Jacqueline Mai
User Experience Specialist
CourseWork Team
Stanford University
jamai at stanford.edu

-------------------------------------
7. Another Successful Google Summer of Code Winds Up

Google Summer of Code has now ended for 2009. Sakai's three students  
all had a great summer and passed all their programme evaluations!

Congratulations and many thanks to Shashank Agrawal, Andre Leger and  
Yuri Vishnevsky, who have all written useful code for Sakai and made  
really valuable contributions as GSOC students.

Many thanks for guidance and advice to the mentoring team, Oszkar  
Nagy, Amyas Phillips, Nicolaas Matthijs and Claude Coulombe. Our  
mentors all got good reviews from their students and did an excellent  
job.

It's been a great learning experience figuring out how the GSOC  
process works, and helping bring together volunteers to make more  
wonderful software.  Google seems really happy with our progress --  
Sakai now counts as an experienced and successful project in GSOC  
terms!  If anyone is interested in mentoring or administering GSOC  
next year, do get in touch (laura at caret.cam.ac.uk) -- the more the  
merrier.

You can find out more about GSOC here:  http://socghop.appspot.com

Laura James
CARET, University of Cambridge
laura at caret.cam.ac.uk

-------------------------------------
8.  Update on Unicon Gradebook Work

Unicon contributes monthly development to assist with the growth of  
the Sakai application.  The progress made in August on the Sakai  
Gradebook Jiras SAK-14173 (http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/ 
SAK-14173) and SAK-14520 (http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/ 
SAK-14520) is a representation of work done within the Unicon  
Cooperative Development Team.  We are happy to say there are many more  
hours of development to come and some exciting work ahead.  We hope  
many institutions within the Sakai Community can take advantage of the  
output of our development.

Charise Arrowood
carrowood at unicon.net

-------------------------------------
9.  Kuali Foundation Job Opening

The Kuali Foundation is looking for an exceptionally talented  
technology professional who has the vision and execution skills to  
lead a rapidly growing open source community's technical direction.  
This unique opportunity is for the Kuali Rice Lead Architect position.  
Kuali Rice is an enterprise middleware suite that provides the  
foundation for Kuali's enterprise applications such as the Kuali  
Financial, Student, and Research Systems. Kuali Rice is also being  
adopted by educational institutions as a core part of a next  
generation enterprise architecture. This position offers the right  
candidate an opportunity to have an important impact improving the use  
of technology to further education globally. The successful candidate  
will have proven leadership abilities, experience with open source  
communities, exceptional communication and collaboration skills, and  
strong service-oriented architecture and design expertise. For more  
information please see: http://kuali.org/news/2009/architect.html.

Qualified candidates should send a resume and letter of interest to jfoutty at kuali.org 
.

-------------------------------------
10.  Recent Email Group Discussions

[Building Sakai] Question pool slowness
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Question-pool-slowness-td3606539.html#a3606539

[Building Sakai] qa2-us to be updated with new sakai-2.6.x.-qa tag
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-qa2-us-to-be-updated-with-new-sakai-2-6-x-qa-tag-td3626169.html#a3626169

[Building Sakai] about configuration of the new site
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-about-configuration-of-the-new-site-td3624492.html#a3624492

[Building Sakai] Sakai Slow Down
http://n2.nabble.com/Using-Sakai-Sakai-Slow-Down-td3620984.html#a3620984

[Building Sakai] Calendar widget problem with IE7
http://n2.nabble.com/Using-Sakai-Sakai-Slow-Down-td3620984.html#a3620984

[Building Sakai] YAFT: Single User View & Gradebook Integration
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-YAFT-Single-User-View-Gradebook-Integration-td3577139.html#a3621606

[Building Sakai] Base64 encoding/decoding, commons-codec 1.4, and K1
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Base64-encoding-decoding-commons-codec-1-4-and-K1-td3620694.html#a3620694

[Building Sakai] AssignmentAction.readGradeForm ->  
readAllowResubmitParams? Alert "Accept submissions deadline set to be  
in the past"
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-AssignmentAction-readGradeForm-readAllowResubmitParams-Alert-Accept-submissions-deadl-td3621027.html#a3621027

[Building Sakai] how to deal with figure in the test and quiz
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-how-to-deal-with-figure-in-the-test-and-quiz-td3619747.html#a3619747

[Building Sakai] When (if) plugin repositories go down..
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-When-if-plugin-repositories-go-down-td3620476.html#a3620476

[Building Sakai] IE6 users as percent of total
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-IE6-users-as-percent-of-total-td3614912.html#a3619214

[Building Sakai] PERL SOAP on Windows Gotchas
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-PERL-SOAP-on-Windows-Gotchas-td3611347.html#a3611347

[Building Sakai] rudimentary clicker device using report in email  
archive
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-rudimentary-clicker-device-using-report-in-email-archive-td3606527.html#a3606527

[Building Sakai] Log Event Descriptions for Sakai 2.6 Now Available on  
Confluence
http://n2.nabble.com/Using-Sakai-Log-Event-Descriptions-for-Sakai-2-6-Now-Available-on-Confluence-td3605044.html#a3605044

[Building Sakai] 2.5.x maintenance and Entity Broker
http://n2.nabble.com/WG-Sakai-QA-2-5-x-maintenance-and-Entity-Broker-td3603524.html#a3603524

[DG: Teaching & Learning] Tell us about your users: Rethinking the  
capabilities of learning activities tools, such as Tests & Quizzes,  
for 3.0
http://n2.nabble.com/DG-Teaching-Learning-Tell-us-about-your-users-Rethinking-the-capabilities-of-learning-activities-too0-td3629076.html#a3629076

[DG: Teaching & Learning] unconverted pinyin
http://n2.nabble.com/Using-Sakai-unconverted-pinyin-td3615507.html#a3615507

[Portfolio] MetaAnalysis - Verbs and Primitives
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-MetaAnalysis-Verbs-and-Primitives-td3610266.html#a3610266

[Portfolio] Global template
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-Global-template-td3625815.html#a3625815

[Portfolio] Collaborative Portfolio Editing
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-Collaborative-Portfolio-Editing-td3529271.html#a3529271

[DG: User Experience] Creating groups without leaving current context...
http://n2.nabble.com/DG-User-Experience-Creating-groups-without-leaving-current-context-td3627537.html#a3627537

[Using Sakai] Feedback on new feature contributions to Tests & Quizzes
http://n2.nabble.com/Using-Sakai-Feedback-on-new-feature-contributions-to-Tests-Quizzes-td3616799.html#a3616799

[DG: User Experience] Swapping text links for icons
http://n2.nabble.com/DG-User-Experience-Swapping-text-links-for-icons-td3603714.html#a3603714

[DG: User Experience] Searching Resources
http://n2.nabble.com/DG-User-Experience-Searching-Resources-td3602749.html#a3602749

-------------------------------------
11.  Events

AuSakai '09
September 17-18, 2009
Charles Sturt University Bathurst Campus
Bathurst NSW, Australia  http://www.csu.edu.au/division/landt/ausakai09/ausakai09.htm

1st Workshop: Learning Management Systems meet Adaptive Learning  
Environments  (LMS-ALE'09)
September 29 - October 2, 2009
EC-TEL  Nice, France
http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/lms-ale-09

The Jasig Fall 2009 Unconference
September 28 - 30  Unconference sessions
October 1-2  Developer meetings
Urbana Champaign I Hotel and Conference Center University of Illinois  
Urbana - Champaign, Illinois
http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JCON/Fall+2009+Unconference+-+Urbana+Champaign

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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