Just got off the plane and am at the hotel for the Sakai Conference (explains the flurry of blogging — no distracting internet, so time to write 
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I’ll be out in Newport Beach, CA from Fri 11/30 – Fri 12/6. If you’re around (esp. Fri night) and looking for something to do give me a holler. Especially if you’re from around NYC — I’m trying to work out a NYC Sakai User Group meetup sometime, maybe wed or thu night. JA-SIGers feel free to give a holler too.
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p>The Ed Techie: What Mailbox limits reveal:
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Grainne posted recently about the frustration of continually getting the ‘Your mailbox is over its size limit’ in our OU email accounts. I can’t tell you how annoying this – sometimes I am just trying to send a quick response to someone before I have to dash out of the door, but it won’t let me because I have to find and delete any attachment over 2K to free up space. Grrrr.
(Discovered this site through the Edublogs Awards.)
It’s interesting to see the comments on the gist of this article — in terms of how reasonable the restriction or attitude behind it are. IT usage restrictions always seem to generate two separate camps of apologists and critics. Apologists focus on the rational behind it, the need to balance services with resources, and limitations of the technology or workflow. Critics tend to express frustration over inconvenience, limitations, or restrictions that make their work harder, or prevent them from performing a specific action, or in a particular way.
While I can’t claim to have a solution to IT limits (regrettably, my superpowers don’t seem up to the task) I do notice that we seem to have an opportunity for dialog. IT Governance is an increasingly hot topic, particularly with institutions struggling to prioritize during lean budget years. We clearly have a pool of customers who are more than willing to tell us what they think is important.
I think the need to create dialog highlights one of the reasons a number of us found Collier’s MyUMBC feedback feature so compelling. By integrating feedback submission forms into every page, portal visitors are encouraged to communicate their reactions and thoughts (even about email quotas ) making the barrier to contribution very low. At the same time, while many of us have feedback forms that email teams, the MyUMBC example of integrating the admin panel & tools to ease followup/contact make it easy to go back, and mine through the data, or engage customers in dialog regarding their experiences with the product or service.
I’m happy to say that Jenn’s work on the feedback portlet stemming from the JA-SIG Unconference seems likely to move uPortal (and maybe someday Sakai or other portlet containers ) further in the direction of built in mechanisms to collect these user sentiments and provide information so we can work to better address our users concerns, experiences, and frustrations.
While working on merging 2.5 into our local trunk, I was doing a bunch of svn merge --dry-run, svn merge statements, and thought “wouldn’t it be nice if subversion could color-code the status output for me.”
svn help didn’t produce a –color or –colorize option, so some googling lead first to a handy sed recipe: sed -e $'s/^C/\e[31m&\e[0m/g' and finally to a reference to colorsvn — a Perl script which gives me a commandline utility that will automatically colorize the status messages from subversion.
Excellent.
Update: Mostly excellent. Doesn’t seem to like svn commands that include flags that don’t start with – or — like working copy paths, or merge branches. Will have to dip into the code later to take a look at that…
Update2: Back to excellent. Should have known — make install put in an /etc/colorsvnrc file in behind my back that excluded merge and some of the other commands from colorization by default. Color’s back, and back to making things rock
Eric posted the video from uPortal’s EDUCAUSE Catalyst award onto Youtube:
So, the JA-SIG un-conference (even the working sessions) is over, giving me a chance to do some thinking and reflection about the event and its aftermath.
Overall, the attendance, interest, and excitement demonstrated by all of the participants was pretty overwhelming. We had both more individuals, institutions, and organizations represented than we ever would have anticipated for an inaugural event. Even JA-SIG product deployers like Collier from UMBC and FLUID were well represented. While everyone undoubtedly came away from the event with different thoughts, two items struck me as particularly exciting.
Collier demonstrated the MyUMBC work he’s been doing. While not uPortal based, the reactions related to the functionality of his portal ranged from “wow, I want it” to “you built that yourself?” to “don’t show that to my users or they’ll want it.” A couple of thoughts on why everyone in attendance found Collier’s work so compelling:
JA-SIG and uPortal have always been very focused on building out uPortal as a portal Framework. A consistent thread throughout the un-conference however (partly sparked by MyUMBC) is a bubbling thread of focusing on portlets and tools. I think there’s a growing recognition in the community that the tools are what users are visiting a portal for in the first place — and an area we have not focused as much attention on in the past.
In particular, collaborative efforts in the portlet space received a lot of discussion at several different sessions. LMS, SIS, Library, and other areas all seem to be places where schools have repeatedly re-invented the wheel. Collier’s demonstration of the return from focusing on tools, and the timing related to the talk on JA-SIG project incubation I think have all contributed to an atmosphere where people are highly interested in collaborating higher up the stack.
Blackboard Is Losing Customers, but What Does It Mean? at e-Literate
“The big loss appears to be unambiguously in Blackboard Basic licenses. One factor that theoretically might have contributed to this loss is consolidation of Basic licenses under a consortial Enterprise license. In this case, the loss of a license wouldn’t equal the loss of a customer. But according to Mr. Stanton, the number of Basic license losses due to consortial consolidation in the last year was ‘immaterial’ because Blackboard currently only supports a very small number of consortial licenses. So it looks like the drop in Basic licenses really does represent a loss of customers.”
I was really surprised to find out that Blackboard Basic customers don’t get LDAP authentication — it’s a feature I certainly expect in pretty much any serious product at this point. In particular, given the recent focus on Identity Management (IdM), it seems that many institutions would be hard-pressed to even consider any products that don’t integrate within a broader campus authentication strategy. Additionally, with LDAP being such a widely-deployed standard, the marginal cost of the feature has to approach $0.
Fortunately, with Sakai converging on the Unicon JLDAP provider, this is a story that we’re at least getting better at, though in the past we’ve suffered from an embarrassment of riches in this area.
After taking out a while to do introductions and handle the administrativa (even unconfs can’t seem to get away from it) we’re into the lightning talks which I’m trying to keep up with to podcast. They’re going pretty fast, we’ve gone through something like 6 so far, and they’re coming up fast.
Update: I was reminded (and should have been more explicit in the original post) that you really need permission to distribute recordings of speakers. To clarify — I have recordings of most of the lightning talks, but certainly intend to email all of the speakers to ask for permission before posting. I had hoped to have real release forms available for the event, but didn’t quite make it — in the future events we certainly aim to have all our ducks in order in advance.
Now on Google Earth: Map where Congress spends your tax dollars | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
“The Sunlight Foundation on Tuesday released a downloadable Google Earth layer that plots what it says are some 1,500 earmarks attached to a proposed U.S. House of Representatives defense spending bill. The Washington-based group describes its mission as promoting political transparency through use of Internet technologies.”
(Via News.com.)
I have to think that one of the real take-aways from the mash-up phenomenon is this kind of data visualization. In the initial wave of web applications, we provided windows into data — but generally geared around specific tasks or workflow. Lots of basic CRUD “enter an order”, “lookup my profile” type stuff.
Now we’re starting to see APIs and services that let us plunge into all that interesting data we’re collecting, and the low-hanging fruit seems to be aggregation and visualization. Taking things like public databases and mapping them, or integrating sales data with a product image catalog. The plus side in government certainly seems to be that we’re seeing an increasing number of mash-ups that provide increased transparency into government operations and spending by displaying simple visualization extracted out of the reams of official data. Maybe we’re moving towards Governmental-Accountability 2.0?
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“ad-hoc-cracy” and a a mention that only 2 industries (IT and Illicit drugs) refer to their customers as users highlighted this presentation. Overall the presentation was good, though I think at the end of the day, the audience question was “how do we get to a sane model?” to which the answer seems to be — it’s not easy, but I’m a consultant and do this for a living…
