[DG: Teaching & Learning] Sakai 3 groups, roles, and course sites

[Ray Davis]

The recently staffed Sakai 3 "Groups" project is tackling a lot: group 
management, roles, permission mappings, and integration with group 
memberships in the Real World -- notably the real world memberships of 
classrooms, tutorial groups, and academic departments. Currently the 
best place to track and aid our progress is an odd little side-room in 
the sakai-dev Confluence space:

http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SAKDEV/Creating+and+Managing+User+Groups

(I'm certain that this URL will change -- we still need to get a 
dedicated collaboration space and task-tracking -- but given all the 
conference discussions and how many of you we'll be bothering over the 
next few months, I didn't want to wait any longer to send this 
introduction.)

We're starting with a somewhat risky split between a UX effort focused 
on good basic "group management" and a service development effort that 
tries to lay a foundation for flexible real-world integrations.

In Sakai 3, such integrations won't be _confined_ to "course sites" but 
they certainly need to _include_ them. To put it more verbosely, two 
aspects distinguish a course site from other online collaborative spaces:

(A) Incorporation of (or integration with) existing academic social 
structures. This may include basing online access and user roles on 
things like department position, cohort membership, class enrollments, 
section assignments, tutorial groups, librarian specialties, and so on. 
We know that some installations will mimic these associations by 
entering all the data by hand, others will fill them in automatically 
from campus systems, and still others will let end-users themselves 
decide how and when to create Sakai workspaces from those systems. But 
no matter which approach is taken, at the end of the process, 
participants consider themselves in the context of a real-world academic 
community.

(B) Specifically pedagogical functionality: assignments, grading, use of 
mentor-like roles, and so on.

Either of these can make an online collaborative area seem more like "a 
course" than like (say) "a wiki which happens to include some students 
and instructors." If successful, our project will (among other things) 
directly support the first aspect and help to support the second. 
Obviously, though, it can't be successful without a massive amount of 
assistance. Please keep us in mind as you bump into related issues, 
enabling technology, and good role models, and please don't be startled 
when we come begging for favors.  :)

Best,
Ray