[sakai2-tcc] Agenda - Re: Invitations sent for TCC - CLECC meeting this week

Thu Dec 20 05:44:34 PST 2012

Yes, student intention. Sakai OAE has a nice link at the bottom to a free cloud service where suggestions can be made and voted on. In CLE there is a facility to add custom text through sakai.properties, so an equivalent could be set up in the demo as default with one patch.

Regards,
           Alan

Alan Berg

Innovation working group
On the use of ICT in Education & Research
University of Amsterdam
________________________________
From: sakai2-tcc-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [sakai2-tcc-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] on behalf of Neal Caidin [nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org]
Sent: 20 December 2012 14:24
To: Steve Swinsburg
Cc: sakai2-tcc at collab.sakaiproject.org 2
Subject: Re: [sakai2-tcc] Agenda - Re: Invitations sent for TCC - CLECC meeting this week

One tricky thing about tools and statistics is that they don't tell you Why a particular tool is used heavily or not used at all. For example, if a tool is not used at all, it does not mean there is not a need for a similar kind of tool, but could just mean that the existing tool does not do a good job of meeting the need, so folks look elsewhere, including outside the LMS, to find a tool that does meet the need. LTI enables this choice, which is a good thing, but still brings up more questions about what constitutes an LMS.

-- Neal

On Dec 19, 2012, at 5:50 PM, Steve Swinsburg <steve.swinsburg at gmail.com<mailto:steve.swinsburg at gmail.com>> wrote:

I would concur that they are both heavily used. That doesn't mean the architecture behind them isn't poor though.
Maybe if we had this feature, we'd know for sure what people are using. Or they could just look at the serverwide stats in SiteStats.
https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-22850

cheers,
Steve

On 20/12/2012, at 1:20 AM, Neal Caidin <nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org<mailto:nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org>> wrote:

I tend to think that both Announcements and Email archive are heavily used tools. Though I don't have anything to back it up, other than some experience at my last institution, the currently #1 rated basketball team in the country, again (though not-so-secretly I root for a rival's team far more).

-- Neal

On Dec 19, 2012, at 5:30 AM, Adrian Fish <adrian.r.fish at gmail.com<mailto:adrian.r.fish at gmail.com>> wrote:

Hi Matthew,

A very enlightening email, that :) A bit scary, but interesting reading, nevertheless.

However most of the tools in Sakai are such bad shape that it would probably be faster if you (or other developers) just wrote a new tool or integrated a new external tool rather than trying to fix what's there now. There are no longer support teams in core except for:

That can be risky though. Some of the core tools are painful to work with but have, over years, had loads of bug fixes and db optimisation work done. This is the problem with going down the new and shiny route; there is a risk of reintroducing problems that were ironed out years ago. I personally think that steady, thoughtful, planned out mutation is preferable to just  starting with screen shots and nothing else.

Samigo - Karen
Profile2 - Steve
Assignments/Site-Manage - Zhen
Lessons - Chuck
Messages and Forums - Michelle
Portal - (Probably still Dr. Chuck and Adrian, though a little of everybody)

That's it.

If there's an issue with any other tool it's it needs to be high priority, then it's almost always someone from that above list or one of the commercial affiliates that looks at it.

I'm doing some work on Assignments and will help out on Site-Manage, but this is on Blackboard's dollar, so, again, a commercial affiliate.

Also . . .

- Both tools that extend the BaseMessageService should be replaced. Email Archive & Announcements. There are about 100 open issues in both of those tools that will never be looked at and multiple developers have put in patches and left (Sakai). They're difficult to figure out and the bugs are hard to fix when they need to be fixed. There might be some great technical idea to improve the storage of all the XML content then selectively pulling out data that needs to be indexed over time (in fact I know there is, using new tables instead of columns to index this schema-less data). However implementing that could take more time than using something new. . . Though maybe neither of these tools or any of the 100 issues are that really that important.

Announcements not important? It's probably the most widely used and appreciated component of Sakai here at Lancaster. I suppose the question with Announcements could around the amount of functional overlap with things like mail sender. The functionality could perhaps be merged with a db refactor during the process. You could embed the db conversion code into an admin tool. A bit hairy, but maybe better than just dumping the whole thing.

- Even though Assignment has someone working on it, it should either be decided to keep Assignment forever or replace it with Assignments 2. There are pros and cons for both which I was planning on writing up in a future message. Technical cleanup in both Assignment and site-manage seems to be an ongoing project.

We probably need to address the issue of RSF sustainability. Does any other project in the world use it yet? It's poorly documented and has little community around it.

  - Speaking of GB2, it looks like GXT has added an exception for their license since the last time we reviewed it (years ago) possibly making the library compatible for use. Though we'd probably want someone to confirm this.
  http://www.sencha.com/legal/open-source-faq/open-source-license-exception-for-applications/
  - Though the gaps mentioned above would need to be re-addressed

What about Dart? What if Google dump GWT?

Cheers,
Adrian.

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