[Announcements] Sakai Newsletter January 10, 2013
Margaret Wagner
mwagner at umich.edu
Wed Jan 16 13:10:04 PST 2013
Sakai Newsletter
January 10, 2013
1. Michigan Upgrades to CLE 2.9.0
2. Sakai OAE Progress Report
3. Apereo Board Elections
4. ELI Pre-Conference Session on Analytics Readiness
5. Shopping Period Tool for Sakai CLE 2.8.2+ and 2.9.0+
6. Signup Tool, 2013 Release
7. Interesting Video about Sakai Implementation at the U. Valencia (In
Spanish)
8. Programmers Café held by Aaron Zeckoski at U. Amsterdam
9. Security Contacts -- Reminder
10. Events
----------------------------------------------------
1. Michigan Upgrades to CLE 2.9.0
The University of Michigan upgraded its "CTools" Sakai CLE installation
from 2.7.2 to 2.9.0 on 29 December 2012. Students and faculty returning
last week from the holiday break for the start of the new semester were
greeted with a redesigned skin, a variety of new capabilities and, not
least (and thus far), a stable and performant user experience. [1]
In the run up to our campus release we experienced elevated database CPU
usage during load testing. This issue was traced back to portal changes
and the new caching strategy of retrieving at login a list of all tools
associated with a user's site memberships. A fix for this problem has been
merged to the 2.9.x branch and is slated for inclusion in 2.9.1 [2].
Note too that during the initial hours immediately following the upgrade a
noticeable degradation in CTools 2.9 performance was detected. The issue
was eventually resolved with a reboot of the system, but the cause or
causes that triggered the system slow down remain under investigation.
During this period it was also observed that borrowed connections (as
opposed to new connections) in the Oracle database connection pool were
retrieving long textual CLOB data at very slow rates. An outdated
connection pool or long-established database sessions may explain the
slowdown in this case.
A small number of other issues have surfaced since the upgrade for which
tickets are being generated in Sakai's Jira instance. [2] Also, a major
refactoring of site object retrieval, handling and caching is currently
under way that should result in improved 2.9.x performance for both the
SiteService and the portal. [3]
We encourage all Sakai schools to consider upgrading to Sakai CLE 2.9 and
we look forward to news of other successful upgrades from around the
Community during 2013.
Cheers,
Anthony Whyte
arwhyte at umich.edu
[1] https://ctools.umich.edu/gateway/;
http://www.ur.umich.edu/update/archives/130109/ctools
[2] https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-22907
[3] For example, https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-23120
[4] https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/KNL-1011
----------------------------------------------------
2. Sakai OAE Progress Report
Hi everyone,
The third Sakai OAE Progress Update Report, which can be found at [1],
summarises the progress that has been made against the end-of-year
milestone that was set back in September. It also provides an overview of
the progress that has been made since the last progress report, mostly in
the areas of search, activities, preview processing and the user interface.
The team is planning to organise a community webinar later this month,
where the implemented functionality will be demoed. An announcement will be
made once a date has been chosen.
[1]
https://oae-community.sakaiproject.org/p/oQUSwec4mg/Christmas%20Progress%20Report.pdf
Kind regards,
Nicolaas Matthijs
nicolaas.matthijs at caret.cam.ac.uk
----------------------------------------------------
3. Apereo Board Elections
Dear Colleagues,
As you will be aware, Jasig and Sakai have merged in order to better serve
the needs of the higher education community. Our new organisation, Apereo,
came into being in late December.
Within this new framework, our projects will remain largely self-organising
and continue to rely to a significant degree on contributed and volunteer
effort. The same is true of our new Foundation. Over the course of the next
eighteen months we will develop Apereo to better serve existing projects
and their communities, and help incubate new and innovative software and
approaches.
To accomplish this we need the active engagement of our communities and a
strong, representative board. During January, we will be electing four new
Apereo board members. These will be elected by the membership as a whole,
and will join the four representatives each of Jasig and Sakai who have
already been appointed.
The timetable for the election process is as follows:
Monday 14th January - Call for nominations
Tuesday 22nd January - Nominations close
Wednesday 30th January - Publish candidates' personal statements on Apereo
website - election notice out - polls open
Thursday 7th February - Polls close
There will be a membership meeting associated with the ballot. Notice of
this teleconference will be circulated shortly. This is a tight schedule,
but we have much to do, and I am sure you understand the need for solid,
inclusive governance.
Information on the responsibilities of Board members can be found in the
Apereo bylaws, which can be found athttp://www.apereo.org/governance/bylaws.
The existing Board has also put together a guidance note on expectations
associated with Board membership which can be found at
http://www.apereo.org/governance/board-member-expectations.
If you wish to nominate someone to serve on the Board, please mail Deborah
Smith (dsmith at concentra-cms.com), providing the nominee's name and contact
details. It would be helpful if you could check that the individual is
willing to stand, but this is not essential. Please note that
self-nomination is allowed.
Lastly, please consider standing for Board election yourself. This
represents a significant opportunity to play a shaping role in the
formative stage of our new organisation. Your participation and energy
would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Ian Dolphin
Executive Director, Apereo Foundation
ian.dolphin at apereo.org
----------------------------------------------------
4. ELI Pre-Conference Session on Analytics Readiness
Hello all,
If you will be attending the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Annual
Meeting in February, please consider registering for our pre-conference
seminar on analytics readiness. Our goal is to come out with the core of an
analytics readiness survey. Your brainpower would be a wonderful asset!
Please let me know if you have any questions!
http://bit.ly/laready_eli
Presenters:
Kimberly Arnold
Evaluation Consultant, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Steven Lonn
Research Specialist, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Matthew D. Pistilli
Research Scientist, Purdue University
>From the seminar webpage:
What is necessary for an institution to begin using analytics to inform
teaching and learning? This session will review and discuss current
findings and components of learning analytics frameworks as identified by
experts in the field. The audience will engage in discussion and hands-on
activities that synthesize these ideas to begin to identify the readiness
of learning analytics success at their own institutions. Furthermore,
participants will collaboratively develop the core elements of a
crowdsourced survey instrument that will focus on the elements necessary
for institutional-level readiness and the likelihood of achieving success
in learning analytics.
Steven Lonn, Ph.D.
Research Specialist
USE Lab, Digital Media Commons, The Duderstadt Center
Learning & Teaching, MLibrary, University of Michigan
Web: http://www.umich.edu/~slonn
Skype: stevelonn | Twitter: stevelonn
----------------------------------------------------
5. Shopping Period Tool for Sakai CLE 2.8.2+ and 2.9.0+
Dear Fellow Sakai Users,
Columbia University is pleased to announce the release of the Shopping
Period tool for the Sakai CLE. This tool is an extension of the Delegated
Access tool and allows schools, departments and instructors to open course
content to the public and/or authenticated users during a specific time
period for the purpose of registration. Individuals, courses and tools
within each course can be made available. Like in the Delegated Access
tool, institutions can choose what role (permissions) students shopping for
course content will inherit.
The Shopping Period tool was conceived of and designed by Columbia
University and was developed by The Longsight Group under contract. Bryan
Holladay of Longsight is the lead developer. The tool is licensed under the
Educational Community License, Version 2.0.
The tool was first launched in Jan 2011 as a pilot and production launched
in September 2011. During the fall-2011 term, course content of over 2300
courses was made available to students during the registration period.
While most course content is limited to authenticated users, a list of
open courses may be viewed at "Search Viewable Courses" on the gateway page:
https://courseworks.columbia.edu/welcome/ or directly at
https://courseworks.columbia.edu/portal/site/VIEWABLE_COURSES
See more information about this tool below. If you have any questions or
need additional information, please contact Maneesha Aggarwal at
Maneesha at columbia.edu.
Documentation:
Confluence site with screen shots are available at:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DAC/Delegated+Access+Tool
Conference:
We plan to demonstrate this tool at the upcoming 2013 Sakai Conference in
San Diego.
Release 3.0 tag & 3.x branch:
The 3.0 tag is available at
https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/delegatedaccess/tags/delegatedaccess-3.0/
The 3.x maintenance branch is available at
https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/delegatedaccess/branches/3.x/
Getting it to work on your instance:
The Delegated Access and Shopping Period tools are capable of running in
Sakai 2.8.2+ and Sakai 2.9.0+ without any patches to core tools.
Please reference
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DAC/Delegated+Access+Tool#DelegatedAccessTool-Building
(header
"Building") for more instructions and for earlier versions of Sakai.
Once it's built, look how to set up the tool at
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DAC/Delegated+Access+Tool#DelegatedAccessTool-UsingtheTool
Jira:
The Jira project is named Contrib: Delegated Access and has a prefix of
"DAC"
https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/DAC
Live Demo:
- Log into http://nightly2.sakaiproject.org:8085/portal
username: admin
pw: admin
- Add "Delegated Access" to your My Workspace. (You have to do this
through the "Worksite Setup" tool in MyWorkspace or the Administration
Workspace.)
- Add "Shopping Period" to your Gateway page. (You have to do this
through the "Sites" tool in MyWorkspace or Administration Workspace.)
- Go the Delegated Access tool and click "Search Users."
- Search for yourself (or another user you want to grant access to) and
click the ID. This is where you can grant access to specific nodes in the
hierarchy. Checking the boxes will enable the permissions. Doing this
enables additional options in the tool, which will show up when reloaded.
- Grant yourself "Shopping Admin" permission on the top node and save.
- Refresh the browser.
- Click top nav link "Shopping Admin."
- Choose what sites and what permissions you want to test and save.
- Log out (or log in as a normal user) and go to the gateway page and use
the Shopping Period tool.
Bryan Holladay
holladay at longsight.com
----------------------------------------------------
6. New Signup Tool -- 2013 Release
Hi All,
We are pleased to announce a new annual 2013 release of the Signup Tool
(version: Sign-up 1.0.0). We, at Yale, have just deployed this new version
into production after our successful QA. We greatly appreciate Oxford
University and Steve Swinsburg for their major contributions to this
release. This release has many rich new features, bug fixes and it
resolved up to 53 Jira issues.
It is now available for sakai-2-8-x and sakai-2-9-x version. For any other
Sakai versions, you need to modify the pom.xml files in the signup tool
accordingly to your selected Sakai version.
The major new features from this release are as follows:
- Provide the ability to auto-generate site-groups according to the time
slot in the event
- Provide the iCal attachment for external Apps such as MS Outlook and
Google Calendar
- Allow Event organizer to select multiple co-organizers (or coordinators)
for managing the event
- Allow Organizer to define a category metadata
- Numerous bugs haven been fixed
Related Jira Issues shown below:
https://jira.sakaiproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&jqlQuery=project+%3D+SIGNUP+AND+fixVersion+%3D+%221.0+[Tentative]%22+AND+status+%3D+Resolved+ORDER+BY+priority+DESC&mode=hide
The Signup Tool installation and configuration guides are available at:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SIGNUP/Home
If you have any questions, please let me know.
Thanks,
Peter Liu
peter.liu at yale.edu
----------------------------------------------------
7. Interesting Video about Sakai Implementation at the Universidad
Politécnica de Valencia (In Spanish)
Hi,
This link will take you to the video (in Spanish) of a speech about the
implementation of Sakai at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Really
interesting!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okDhfL9leJk
Saludos
Diego del Blanco Orobitg
Director de operaciones
diego.delblanco at samoo.es
Tlf Oficina: 673 80 32 69
Tlf Móvil: 653 683 489
www.samoo.es
----------------------------------------------------
8. Programmers Café held by Aaron Zeckoski at the University of Amsterdam
Aaron Zeckoski delivered a programmers café at the University of Amsterdam
on the 8th and 9th of January. The café taught 60 graduate software
engineers the basics of developing in Sakai. The event took place at the
science department (Faculteit der Natuurwetenschappen, Wiskunde en
Informatica). The programmer's café is part of a larger month-long event
where the students are split into scrum teams, which then build Learning
tools using the BasicLTI protocol.
For more details about the event, feel free to read the abstract of two
presentations that Alan Berg and Hans Dekkers from the University of
Amsterdam are giving at the Sakai Conference in Paris (
http://www.congres.upmc.fr/sakai2013/29.html).
Potential advantages of immersion of software engineers within a higher
Education community source sphere are:
- Creation of a pool of software engineers who can build learning tools
- A nucleation point for collaboration between member organizations in a
community
- The acceleration of key community goals within its software roadmap
- The immersion of software engineers in the mentality and ethics of a
higher ED community
For more information, feel free to contact us by email or in person at the
Paris conference.
Regards,
Alan Berg
Innovation working group
On the use of ICT in Education & Research
University of Amsterdam
A.M.Berg at uva.nl
----------------------------------------------------
9. Security Contacts -- Reminder
Dear Community,
To those of you responding to these requests, thanks. You can ignore this
one -- it is a repeat.
Please make sure that your institution is being kept apprised of the latest
Sakai security updates. Email security at sakaifoundation.org with the
security contacts from your institution, including their full name and
email address.
If your institution is a new adopter of Sakai and you don't have any listed
contacts, we recommend you provide two, but there is no absolute limit on
the number of contacts and we will review on a case-by-case basis.
If your institution is an existing Sakai school and your list of contacts
has not been updated recently, we recommend you review the list of contacts
provided in the past and update as necessary. We will be happy to work with
you on this.
Thanks for your attention.
Sincerely,
Neal Caidin
Sakai CLE Community Coordinator
AIM: ncaidin at aol.com
nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org
----------------------------------------------------
10. Events
First Apereo Conference - 2013
June 3 - 6, 2013
San Diego, California
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/JCON/Apereo+2013+Conference
2013 EuroSakai Conference
In association with ESUP and Jasig
Jussieu Campus, University P.M. Curie (UPMC-Sorbonne Universités) Paris,
France
January 28 - 30
January 30 - ESUP Days at University Paris-Descartes
http://www.esup-portail.org/display/ESUP/Bienvenue+sur+le+site+du+consortium+ESUP-Portail+%21
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/announcements/attachments/20130116/4e85040f/attachment-0001.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Sakai.Newsletter.1.10.13.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 144657 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/announcements/attachments/20130116/4e85040f/attachment-0001.pdf
More information about the announcements
mailing list