[Building Sakai] NeoChat for production use?

Tue Feb 19 13:07:42 PST 2013

Some superb points there, Keli. Could you possibly JIRA the particular
things mentioned, like disabling floating chat by site? There's a component
for portal chat at https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK/component/11412.

There's yet another name for the floating chat: portal chat. Which one do
folk prefer?

Floating chat
Portal chat
Neo chat

I'm thinking Portal chat myself ...

Cheers,
Adrian.

On 19 February 2013 19:32, Keli Sato Amann <kamann at stanford.edu> wrote:

> Hello,
> Neochat looks like something that might be useful to people struggling
> with a problem set who want to know if someone in their class is up at 2AM
> working on a problem set and can help, or if the instructor wants a back
> channel in a large lecture for questions. However, I seem to recall some
> thread a few months back citing concern about students over-collaborating
> (aka cheating) during timed online tests. Unlike a chat room, the
> instructor has no visibility into what's being said and can't remove the
> ability of students to talk to others in their class. Also, we are are in
> the process of disabling the ability of those with a guest role to see
> tools that show who is in the class because we are concerned about FERPA
> (Forums and Wiki for now, and if we start using them more, Messages, Chat
> Room, and Roster).
>
> These concerns, more than the fact that we have slightly more than 15,000
> student installations, is what is going to hold us back from taking the
> plunge. If we ever do jump in, I think we would need to do the following
> first:
> 1) Give instructors and admins the ability to remove the chat feature
> selectively from particular sites (is this possible by letting instructors
> change skin?) And possibly, to prevent chatting with My connections and/or
> develop a tool to show whether two people are chatting (don't think we need
> to see the content of the chat) in case there is some sort of investigation.
> 2) Remove guests from inclusion in the chat.
> 3) To better protect privacy by making options clear, I would suggest
> renaming "who can see my online status" to "who can see if I'm online?" and
> moving it above  "who can see my status" so the two are not confused. And
> does "everyone" for online status really mean everyone or just those who
> are in my classes and clubs? Might rename that option to "members of my
> sites" just for "who can see my online status"
>
> Barring that, the two scenarios I described above could also be met by the
> Chat Room alone. Neochat would allow students to ask questions directly to
> the instructor without letting other students see the question and neochat
> makes it easier to stumble upon other people who are online, because you
> could be in another part of the site. However, it would start getting
> harder to manage if more than 4 students ask a question, since new names
> pop up along the bottom, so maybe chat room is better.
>
> So, I wonder if anyone has any *other* use cases for neochat? I could see
> this being used more socially than anything else, so it might change the
> nature of Sakai use on your campus, causing people to stay logged in
> longer. I imagine that if schools wanted to experiment, they might create a
> skin that hid the chat in all but a few pilot courses, assuming that was
> possible. I don't think that would solve potential performance issues,
> because that is still in the background, but it would allow them to run
> usability tests without exposing chat to the whole class.
>
>
> Keli Amann
> User Experience Specialist
> Academic Computing Services, Stanford University
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Charles Severance" <csev at umich.edu>
> To: sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org, "sakai-dev" <
> sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2013 8:19:44 AM
> Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] NeoChat for production use?
>
>
>
> The reason we put the chat into 2.9 with a warning was so that we would
> avoid everyone on the super-large schools would turn it on at the same
> time. My hope was that schools would start turning it on and monitor things
> closely.
>
>
> In terms of the "more requests" - these additional requests do not
> increase database load and pretty much only tax the App Servers - In many
> Sakai installations the DB is the rate limiting factor in terms of
> performance and many schools have CPU to spare on their App servers.
>
>
> So I would encourage folks at the < 15,000 student installations to start
> using it. If no one ever starts using it - we will never figure it out.
>
>
> Think of turning this on at you school as helping the rest of us. :) If
> you encounter a problem I am sure that it will get quickly looked at and
> fixed.
>
>
> Its kind of like features like Dashboard or (earlier) SiteStats - we were
> a little nervous initially and then folks started turning them on and we
> improved things as we gained experience.
>
>
> To sweeten the pot, I will buy a very nice dinner steak dinner in San
> Diego for the first few schools who run this in production and report back
> by June.
>
>
> /Chuck
>
>
> On Feb 19, 2013, at 5:31 AM, Adrian Fish wrote:
>
>
>
> Load testing hasn't demonstrated any performance problems, although the
> process uncovered a few bugs, which have been fixed. I'd say that
> confluence page probably needs qualifying.
>
>
> Floating chat is a really nice feature, if I say so myself, and it seems a
> shame to denigrate it without some proper data.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Adrian.
>
>
>
> On 19 February 2013 10:50, Pablo San Roman Bengoetxea <
> pablo.sanroman at unavarra.es > wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> We are interested in NeoChat but we have seen in the document of new
> funcionalities (
>
> https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/Sakai+CLE+2.9+Release+Notes+-+What%27s+New
> ) that it is not recommended for production, only for small scale
> exploration. We are not sure if this state continues so we would like to
> know if somebody is currently using NeoChat in production.
>
> thanks,
> Regards.
>
> --
>
> ...........................................................
> Pablo San Roman
> HBGMI / CSIE | tel 8482
>
>
>
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