laura gekeler

Dream about... TED's sixth sense technology and education

Feed the Students their Courses (RSS, that is)

This one looks good (Wed, July 15th, 8:30am Potomac 1/2).

Support Student Learning and Keep Them Informed: RSS Feeds in Blackboard Learn

Housatonic Community College and U of Westminister are both sending out from Blackboard to students' mobile devices. 5 of them discuss how that works Wed July 15th from 8:30am to 9:15am in Potomac 1/2.

And what makes this really cool is their planning for our sakes: "Materials available post-session at Blackboard Connections will include a tutorial from Housatonic Community College to help you immediately implement RSS in your course as well as access to the University of Westminster project website and RSS feeds for further information and networking."

BbWorld 09 and Openness

I'm intrigued by this scheduled session: "Customizing the Blackboard Virtual Learning Experience with Openness"

If you like acronyms, you may have noticed VLE in there, as Virtual Learning Environment (or Experience. Take your pick.).

I have every respect for John Fontaine and even his new quirky title: "Senior Director, Technology Evangelism." I hope he converts all you sinners to openness.

Somehow I can't help but seque to the openness marketing campaign even though I can't quite come up with a metaphor that doesn't involve naked vs bundled people in some Apple vs PC parady. Fontaine will be accompanied leading this session by George Kroner, Developer Relations Engineer. His title really invokes a new priesthood, one which embraces software engineering in kum-ba-ya community. Seriously, I don't know how you do this with real engineers unless genetic manipulation is involved.

I think you'll like this session. July 14th 11:30am to 12:15pm. Potomac Ballroom A.

(Hey.. Can this one be recorded? Video too? ).

A Day in the Life of a Course Management Administrator

Monday.

Post-holiday weekend.

No, I'm not a drinker or a party-er. Just a Mom.

Last Thursday we moved the IP address of the service's front-end to a new appliance. That was done by a DNS record change after the health checks were confirmed to be in place. I checked it out. Took a while to propagate.

Friday. Saturday. Family. Kids. Fireworks buying. Macaroni salad. Hamburgers. Open House.

Sunday. 7:47am. I didn't set an alarm. Knew I wouldn't need one. Tip-toed past the husband. Sat out on the couch in my bathrobe, logging in to the VPN, then ssh'ing onto the production servers, where I'd prepp'ed the new license files Saturday in between family stuff. Yes, Notre Dame is 7 days into our 14 day grace period. Restarting the application. Good. We're legal again.

Monday. 6am. Elliptical workout. iPOD wailing inspirational music. It's not working. Packing the kids up for day camp. Wear swimsuits. Take backpack of clothes, towel. Lunches. Fix hubby eggs and bacon. He doesn't cook but still believes I do. My MagicBullet smoothie isn't spinning up, shoulda had the eggs...

Short bicycle ride in. Nice weather. Arrive in the nick of time for our group's Monday morning touch-base. We tell each other what we plan to get done. On Wednesday we tell each other what we still hope to get done. On Friday we tell each other what we failed to get done.

Log in to Change Tracker. Close out the changes I made to servers. Find the dates in Euro format. Decide to be a good neighbor and report it. There ensues email exchanges the rest of the day. They also tell me I didn't add my closeout note in the correct format. I even referenced their document. More emails.

Track down QA Coordinator and explain how WK package from Oracle Companion Products didn't get installed on the new Linux RDBMS, only my application cares. I didn't catch it. Why. What next. The DBA has to re-install binaries, reinstall Companion, add patches. We'll schedule during quarterly Oracle patching. Garbage Collect won't run 'til then...

Instructor calls Help Desk. Looking for a WebDAV file space. Campus doesn't have such a thing, but Bb Vista does. He wants to use Zotero client and backup to WebDAV share. Whoa. Wait a minute... Gotta research. This sounds crazy. Download and install Zotero.

BbWorld coming up. Look up the schedule. See what I can attend. Why do ANGEL clients get their own search theme but Vista clients don't? Wish I could search on that...

2:47pm Now finishing up integration testing on new DEV cluster. Sys admin cloned it and needs me to sign off that the app didn't break. Sign off? Open Change Tracker again?

Going for another cup of coffee...

I *need* something fun. CollegeHumor's own...

Keep a list as you're listening ... as you're smiling ... this is the experience of the kids in our colleges.

BbWorld '09 Amenities for Attendees

Last year, remember the BbWorld '08 conference at the swank Palazzo in Vegas? Nice. Very nice. But for a conference I found two things missing: ubiquitous internet (Remember that? Venue and Room wireless were both pay-for services.) and ... water.

Blackboard does listen.

This year these amenities are part of what Blackboard has negotiated for us:

• USA Today delivered every weekday morning (Washington Post delivery on weekends)
• In-room high-speed Internet access
• Wireless Internet access in the guest rooms, dining outlets and atriums
• Fitness center access
• 2 bottles of water per day in guest room
• Local phone calls (1^st 20 minutes per call)
• 800 access and toll-free calls (1^st 20 minutes per call)

Notes on Sakai implementation webinar by Josh Baron, Director Academic Technology, Marist College

Introduction

• History -Sakai project started in 2004 as homegrown solutions getting old, helped to solve the "build (again) or buy" dilemna.
• Sakai paradigm somewhere in the middle. (Early 'owners' Stanford, MIT, U of M).
• Sakai now at version 2.6

What is Sakai?

• an open-source model

no fees, no royalties

cannot be sold (codebased)

 

• a community

includes institutions AND commercial vendors (Oracle, SunGard, etc)

• a collaborative learning environment (CLE)

courses

portfolios

projects

"My workspace"

• the Foundation

(Least important? Did Josh really say that?)

Not a top-down organization. The community sets priorities, not the Foundation.

Mission (project intellectual property); Governance

 

Marist College Sakai Implementation

• Liberal arts institution, Poughkeepsie NY, 5700 FTE students, 200 FT faculty, 500 part-time faculty; strategic plan calls for growth in distance learning (revenue growth)
• Impetus way back in 2005 when VPs mentioned Sakai to Josh.
• Reasons Marist chose Sakai:

1) "Built by educators for educators";

2) Human collective of developers;

3) Ability to involve students and faculty;

4) Decoupling code from service (ie, you buy the product and the support from same vendor) you can switch service vendors without switching products, if dissatisfied with level of support;

5) Open standards support interoperability, ie IMS course cartridge, QTI. Faculty want to bring courses with them when they move from Institution A to Institution B; students want to bring their High School ePortfolios to college with them.

• Myths vs Reality

1). You need lots of developers (not to run/maintain)

2. Best thing about OSS is that there is no licensing fee. Not necessarily, return on investment comes from investing in the human capital. (Because you can or need to with the money you saved on licensing fees?)

3). Can a bunch of volunteers produce the same quality? Research suggests fewer bugs were line of code?

4). Can't run OSS because I need commercial support & none available. (Not true, rSmart, Unicon).

Marist College Decision Criteria

• Functionality
• Staffing and Support Requirements (didn't add any, went to comercial affiliate for support). Currently have 2 to 2.5 FTEs in house.
• Health of Sakai Community (is it here to stay?)
• Reliability and Scalability
• Innovation truly possible?

Transition Overview

• Ran concurrent system. Goal of 15% faculty conversion 1 semester. Instead 65% transitioned.
• Training includes Refresher, Open Labs,
• Support Services: Best Practices booklet, FAQs, Web tutorials, Student Tip Sheets
• Migration Services: course by course migration as detailed in Course Migration Guide.

Next Steps

• Expanding ePortfolio pilots
• Integration with SIS (rSmart assisting with Banner integration)
• Teaching and Learning innovation: Instructors are moving from a transition mentality to an innovation mentality
• 3rd party integrations, plenty existing (ShareStream, Wimba, Elluminate, Respondus).

Follow up on Sakai 3 Webinar ...

After the June 1st webinar, Kim Thanos of thanospartners.com emailed to say,

"I have been working with Michael on Sakai 3 communications and would love any thoughts that you have. Specifically, I know that ND is using Bb today. As you view Sakai 3, what will set it apart from Blackboard? Where do you see Blackboard’s capability will continue to be preferable for your users? "

With Kim's permission, I'm responding to her here.

First I've got to say I don't understand Sakai very well. I don't understand where to go for more information about the software, what it does, what it's capable of ... It's strange. I'm a bright person but before I can even find out whether the thing I might be interested in is worth further effort, I have to wade through a series of communication channels, none of which are what I'm accustomed to. I can sign up for these kinds of listserves: product development (which I don't care about yet); product design (too highlevel for me. I want to know what it does today). These listserves aren't helpful because people who already know what they're talking about use their internal shorthand there.

I do know how to find information on most software, what its feature set is, what it integrates with, when the next version is available, whether and how to set up a demo environment for myself. And I don't need to know another language to do that.

Sakai reminds me a little of Amway or MaryKay, where you think you're involved in a product demonstration so you can buy the best cleaners or cosmetics, but really the pitch is to sign you up to sell Amway and make a billion bucks yourself. You're not sure yet whether you even like the current product enough to personally USE it, let alone evangelize it.

So... Kim's question about what will set Sakai apart from Blackboard ? First it will be in the same categories I rate Blackboard:

• Does it function as a glue to manage permissions and route access to best of breed 3rd party tools? (It claims to. So does Blackboard).
• Does it integrate with my SIS to automate account creation, accredited Program, Course, and section enrollments? THEN - does it support other access controlled (or not) groups such as research?
• Does it understand different types of content (public, copyright, controlled access, Instructor's intellectual copyright)?
• How do I do content authoring?
• How does it accomodate term to term management of existing content in all those categories?

Not until I get the answers to those questions do I care about Sakai as a 'service' in which I am part of a greater community which delivers that to each other. We Blackboard Admins today do that pretty well among ourselves, something I don't thin Sakai proponents understand.

Kim's second question, "Where do you see Blackboard’s capability will continue to be preferable for your users?"  Hmm... Integration with SunGard Banner is important to us. I can't emphasize how much. Blackboard's new product currently doesn't have parity with the Bb Vista product in this area.

I also had an email just this week from the Chairman of our CMS subcommittee to Notre Dame's Academic Technologies governing body. His main question about whether Sakai would ever be preferable for our users is whether its capabilities as needed by Notre Dame could ever be supported by Notre Dame for less $$$ than Blackboard today.

It would be helpful to find others with policy and requirement similarity to Notre Dame to discover what skills and resources they require to effectively manage their Sakai CLE service.

So far it's still the devil that I know winning over the devil I don't know....

Conversation about the changing role of the LMS

What exactly do we want this "thing" to be? Where does the content come from? Where is it authored? How can copyrighted pieces be controlled? What about non-copyrighted pieces? The Instructor's intellectual property? The erudite student-contributed discussion from last semester?

What do librarians contribute to this discussion?

 

Sakai 3 Webinar Notes - Michael Korcuska

Impetus for creating Sakai 3: Read-write web and Campus demand for project-based sites.

Envisioned benefit: Flexibility of presentation/content flow as managed by Content Authors.

Sakai 3 Themes

• "unSakai" : it's recognized that not all will implement Sakai the same way. Some may use it as a shell for interactions that happen elsewhere (cloud apps, etc).
• Content Authoring through simple page creation; template-based authoring, interactive widgets.
• "Everything is content" to include and go beyond user documents uploaded, such as discussion posts, user profiles, test questions... therefore, all should be taggable, linkable, portable, searchable. Therefore, a unified content repository.
• Academic Networking, perhaps content-based as who is reading the same articles or taken the same classes.
• Groups of users taken OUT of sites and managed independently. So group can be created across course sections or project sites. (Huge change in the way CMS/LMS/CLE manage users).

Demonstration

• Page building demonstration in Sakai,  full screencast on the Sakai website.

Technology Goals

• Incorporate reliance on other open source efforts wherever possible (sling, shindig)
• Improve cluster support
• Make it easier to install/build

Release Timelines

• Sakai 2.7 Summer 2010
• Sakai 2.7 / Sakai 3.0 Fall 2010
• Migration to Sakai 3 from Sakai 2.7 attained through a front-end that allows concurrent hybrid environment (sounds like Vista -> Learn 9 co-production model).

 

Before I listen in on news or vision from the Sakai Foundation the next time, I'll need to take a brief orientation to their structure and history, because I find references to things I don't follow regularly (Product Council, previous initiatives being built upon) to be confusing. Sakai members tend to communicate as though they are always talking to members of their "in-group." (I suppose we all do that.) Anyone know of good orientation materials?