[Building Sakai] Request for Comments: Sakai On Mobile Platforms

[Adam Marshall]

we have a mobile phone interface to Sakai available via m.ox.ac.uk. 

We have more or less adopted approach 2 and use oAuth for authentication. 

The first time a user tries to access sakai via m.ox they do fully fledged authentication. This will direct Sakai to trust m.ox until told otherwise, in other words, m.ox will become a trusted proxy albeit with a much reduced permission set (mainly read access but with some write access). From this point onwards authentication is not required.

We use an open source package called Molly (see source forge) which proxies requests from a smartphone, and makes calls to Entity Broker and then renders a customised page. We have adopted an iPhone like interface and are not going down the 'pda portal' route. 

We have 'done' (or are going to 'do') the following tools (although not all are live yet):

 - polls
 - tutorial sign-up
 - resources
 - surveys (evaluations)
 - announcements (& MOTD I think)

By 'doing' I mean have applied oAuth authentication and (with the exception of Resources) developed a smarthphone interface. Adding oAuth support to Resources was necessary as images or attachments may be used with most of the tools listed above.

There are other tools that we'd like to add but have been able to due to lack of Entity Broker support, things like Schedule for instance. We dont really use Gradebook but I do quite like the idea of presenting notifications and new assignments.

We have also developed an oAuth management tool for My Workspace. This allows users to tell Sakai to no longer trust m.ox which is necessary when a phone is lost or stolen.

Here are a couple of blog posts to give you an idea:
 
http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/adamweblearn/2010/09/weblearn-now-available-on-a-mobile-phone/
http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/adamweblearn/2010/10/call-for-participation-weblearn-polls-via-m-ox-mobile-oxford/

And here is the wiki page detailing what we have had to do to 2.6 to get things working. 

http://wiki.oucs.ox.ac.uk/weblearn/ErewhonProject

We're very indebted to Matthew Buckett and Steve Swinsburg for doing all the work. All I do is brag about how good m.ox is!

I know there has been interest from other US institutions but I'm not sure whether anybody else is adopting Molly; we'd be very keen to lend a hand is anybody else is interested.

adam
--

Dr AC Marshall (WebLearn Service Manager)
OUCS, 13, Banbury Rd. Oxford. OX2 6NN

________________________________________
From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Mustansar Mehmood [mustansar at rice.edu]
Sent: 15 November 2010 20:04
To: sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org Dev
Subject: [Building Sakai] Request for Comments: Sakai On Mobile Platforms

Hi,
 I am trying to initiate a discussion to see best ways to present sakai on smart phones and current state of affairs. There are primarily three options I guess.

1-Using sakai from browser with a new presentation layer targeted for smaller screens of smart phones.
  I have noticed that some work has been done on this direction. Considering many phones display a touchscreen keyboard on the screen leaving even smaller space for the content display/review. I am not sure how ready this project is and how far are we on the effort. Would love to know the status to adjust my expectations.

2-Multiple applications with limited functionality like posting a discussion comment, new assignment/grade availability notification from courses being tracked etc.Here multiple applications may need to be written to address major smart phone platforms i.e iphone, android, and blackberry etc.

3-A third approach where a combination of both may work depending on nature of the task i.e delivery/consumption of content.

If there is any work being done by individual institutions on any of those perhaps there is a chance that more than one schools could benefit from the work and possibly share the development/design ideas/workload.
Regards,
Mustansar

--
Mustansar Mehmood
Educational System Developer& Integrator

Information Technology
6100 Main St. MS 119
Houston Texas 77005

Phone:(713)348-2523
Fax  :(713)348 6099
email:mustansar at rice.edu<mailto:email:mustansar at rice.edu>





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    -- Poul Anderson