This may be old news to others, but I finally have my copy of the new “Sakai Courseware Management” book (courtesy of the folks over at Packt) and more surprisingly have even been able to carve out time to read the contents. For people who may not have been aware, this is the book that Alan Berg & Michael Korkuska have spent the last many months of their lives churning out.

After looking through “Sakai Courseware Management”, I’d say if you’re a technical staff member working with Sakai it’d be invaluable. Finally, much of the community knowledge and resources have been distilled into a single volume, greatly shortening the learning curve — and with enough topics that even old-Sakai hands will likely see some new bits, courtesy of the deep knowledge of Alan & Michael.

Continue Reading »

Don’t Stop at Gmail | The Hoya: “Georgetown has never been on the cutting edge of technology. Changes to our e-mail system and wireless service have come slowly, and the university is still in the process of revamping data security following a major security breach last semester. Here is an opportunity to cut costs without sacrificing user satisfaction, to participate in a dynamic programming project involving some of the nation’s top universities and to shake off our dependence on a for-profit vendor for support and updates. Georgetown has the chance, for once, to be in the forefront of campus technology, and this is an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.”

(Via Google.)

Post from the Georgetown school paper makes the case for transitioning from Blackboard to an Open-Source LMS, and specifically mentions Sakai

ландшафт. the exhaustion that was the combined CampusEAI Portlets2008 and Annual conference is now behind us, and it seems like time for some reflections and observations. Hopefully some of these items will be items which I expand upon at a future date, but in no particular order, dumped straight from my brain:

• JSR-168 is here! Everyone really wants to write good standards compliant portlets. Architecture and engineering is a harder sell (or at least the time/cost trade-off) but there’s wide consensus that standard portlets are the way forward — at least excepting a couple of us widget fans
• SOA is something people are interested in, but that there’s been relatively little forward progress on. Some is governance. Some is tools (SOAP, WSDL, and what’s this REST thing?). Some is just that it’s big and strategic, and there’s many tactical must haves. I suspect some of it is also that much of our interesting data/services are locked in vendor platforms that have shown little interest in opening up. Though, a small trend does exist of creating SOA-style services to reach into vendor platforms and extract data from them
• Mobile wasn’t as big as I thought it would be. Not sure why. Most people seem to be interested in the abstract, but with few concrete plans. Maybe my iPhone has clouded my vision, but I do wonder if we’re going to get blindsided come fall — our target demographic is basically 18-22 year olds, afterall…
• AJAX in portlets is still hard. There are some tricks like wrapper divs, namespacing, and builtin support and integration patterns, but it’s still not a common practice.
• Identity Management is big. Governance is a big thorny issue, though many IT departments are rolling out vendor products from big players (Oracle, Sun, a little IBM) in the interim, tho ugh the exact scope of those items is somewhat unclear.
• Oracle is really putting portlets in lots of interesting places. Webcenter. Product mashups. Inside BI tools, and other GUI devices. I think they’ve probably embraced the architecture more than any other major vendor which is an interesting trend.
• Lots of awareness, and wanting to look at uPortal 3. Ooohs and ahhs over both the AJAX D&D, and maybe more importantly the new content adding UI — good going Jen!
• Really beautiful portals — some, though not all new portals really seem to be breaking out of the lots of boxes approach, or at least wrapping it in neat functionality like Boston College’s Agora design. Nifty trend. Sign of maturity?
• Community Development is hard. Aligning roadmaps, agreeing on implementation strategies, and putting all the pieces together is challenging. Even more so, justifying “doing it right” (and fit to share) versus quick and dirty, or getting a student up and running was a big trend. Makes my inner-engineer quail, but my inner-economist says that throw-away code lowers the barrier for solving problems, which is a good thing. Evolution isn’t always pretty and all that.
• Lots of desire for training, best practices, and advice on policy and governance. Real role for communities of practice, not just code and software.
• Increasing interest in “Enterprise Learning Management”. Lots of worries about migration, but the beginning of seeds wondering whether our current platforms are sufficient for a foundation for the next 10-15 years, and University strategic goals. Of course, some of this is the “enterprise IT guys” getting pulled into the LMS discussion for perhaps the first time in many places.
• Good beer is key to facilitating interesting non-session discussion. Content is king on the program, but largely only because it gets people in one place and produces interesting spontaneous interactions. Hands-on is something everyone wants, but it’s not clear a conference composed of many 1 hour sessions is the right format to deliver it.
• University IT teams wear many, many hats.
• British Universities seem to have a much richer and more abundent IT project management structure than (most) American schools. Really interesting thread about Imperial College in London blending ITIL and Agile methodologies.

I started this entry while I was riding a train back from the Laguardia ePortfolio Conference I’m endeavoring to reflect upon and synthesize threads from various (enlightening) presentations I’ve seen, and discussions I’ve had the privilege of participating in. First a brief plug: the content from the conference was fantastic — many congratulations to the folks from Laguardia Community College for organizing such a wonderful event.

Sakai has amazingly broad potential. The energy and excitement in the community and among those who have been watching Sakai make it clear that we’re really realizing the benefit of contributor’s blood, sweat, and tears in the form of some exciting tools for teaching and learning. Sakai seems uniquely positioned to become the base of a whole ecosystem of tools supporting different facets of the academic experience ranging from instruction, to assessment, to facilitating interactions between learners. I think we may be at a crossroads in terms of positioning, particular as we evolve towards explaining the product, beyond the project & community. Laguardia’s conference and discussions, especially those related to “Sakai vs. OSP” really focused my thinking on various opportunities for Sakai to support different areas of teaching, and learning.

A statement: I think the the common usage of Sakai to discuss both a specific set of tools supporting course/learning management (Sakai CMS/LMS?) and a platform/environment upon which those tools can be built and deployed has resulted in some confusion. I have heard many questions recently in the vein of “do you have to use Sakai to use OSP?” or “we’re a Blackboard school, and aren’t going to switch, does that mean OSP is out?” The fact that OSP is a toolkit built on top of Sakai (the platform) seems to be a confusing point for many who don’t currently have plans to deploy Sakai as a CMS/LMS.

To clarify, yes: it is quite reasonable to deploy OSP as a system exclusively dedicated to portfolios, completely separate from the other tools. Inputting text, adding reflections, uploading evidences, and managing assessment are all perfectly capable of being performed in a stand-alone environment. In the same way that past releases of Sakai downloaded from sakaiproject.org “stealthed” (hid) the portfolio tools an institution could choose to leverage the OSP piece of the Sakai ecosystem without forcing your users to adopt the entire environment — one advantage of the platform’s open-ness and customization capabilities.

In fact, I think this scenario illustrates a very real way to explain Sakai. If Sakai is a platform upon which bundles of tools (courseware, OSP, etc.) can be built, then we have a product with many facets. Each facet (LMS, OSP, Collaboration) supports a different interaction scenario, part of a greater whole of learning. Going forward, perhaps explicitly separating that greater platform from its concrete manifestations (particularly as courseware) would help emphasize Sakai’s potential as a learning suite or system — with facets focused on all aspects of a learner’s experience: courses, co-curricular’s, career advising, libraries & research, collaboration, and personal expression for a start. This thinking was really influenced by listening to many people talk about OSP — as a toolkit for building concrete artifacts: resumes, co-curricular transcripts, certification documents, personal expressions — all leveraging the same tools, but in many respects separate endeavors linked only by

I think there’s a danger that we could allow ourselves to slot Sakai into a box defined by the products that came before. though that’s where many adoptors initial exposure came from. The example of OSP illustrates the clear potential of Sakai’s modular architecture to enable assemblage of higher-level environments supporting particular styles of teaching or interaction. A common environment lets us both build on previous work, and also focus on integrating the experiences for out students and teachers, participants and leaders. My programmer’s mind sees this as being much the same potential as is now playing out in the Eclipse eco-system.

So the question I think this brings up is: if we focus on this broader picture, and think about these “bundles” as being the real deliverable, could we better frame this relationship by rebranding (consistent with recent thoughts about relaunching) the Sakai courseware tools as a separate entity within the Sakai umbrella — “Sakai Classrooms” maybe? Leaving room for thinking of the ecosystem as bundles, which you can mix and match: “Sakai Portfolios”, “Sakai Communities”, “Sakai Social Networking”. Different bundles of functionality built on the same platform, possibly using the same individual tools, but illustrating some of the broader possibilities.

Clay from Georgia Tech shot me an email recently which spurred me to try and put to words how my thinking has evolved about the relationship of an enterprise portal and Sakai, and where these technologies and communities are heading.

In general I think the focus of “enterprise portals” has always been one of integration and convenience, and as a result these products are moving towards being the place that knits together all the attention streams a user might have across the digital (and non-digital) campus. I think there’s a couple key use cases, some of which have more successfully been deployed than other.

1. One stop shopping (typical) + SSO
2. Summary Views & Aggregation

Less commonly actually implemented, though often talked about/pitched: 3. Dashboards 4. Actionable Intelligence (you have overdue books, return them!) 5. Deep aggregation (e.g. pulling in all the announcements from different systems and putting them into one stream)

In addition to portals focused on horizontal integration, I think we’re starting to see vertical integration around “portals” in Learning, Collaboration, HR/Admin, SIS, Libraries? and other clumps of functionality. Some of the goals around bundling related tools together are similar, but focused around a particular toolset, or context. At some point these could probably decompose into the “lots of tools/portlets in the uber-portal” that I think represented the portal thinking years ago, but I think the reality is market forces, as well as organizational and reporting structures make that unlikely to happen any time soon.

I suspect the interrelationship w a product like Sakai to a portal is mostly as a provider of information/data — pushing out items like announcements, scheduling, files in resources, and exposing them in a different context. Ideally if we shift our thinking more along the line of wire protocols (RSS, Real SOA, RESTful APIs) this I think positions us to also start doing “network integration” where Sakai can also start talking with and working with say Banner, or Kuali FS, or Facebook, or whatever platform. I’m very impressed with CARET’s mySakai work, and think John Norman’s vision on this is similar to the kind of plan I’d outline as benevolent dictator of the Sakai universe.

Along this line, I’ve scheduled another LMS-Portal integration BOF for JA-SIG and would like to use this project as the testbed for both a WG, and an incubated integration project within JA-SIG. I think a lot of the architectural level aspects should really span LMS’s — e.g. if we do it right, ANGEL, D2L, BB, and everyone should be able to use the same protocols, though Sakai seems an ideal reference implementation. I admit to being weak on knowledge of the IMS-spec side, and am not sure whether there’s work on that front we can leverage as well. So far what I’ve seen at least on the TI front has been less API/Data centric than I think we need to go though, though Enterprise seems promising.

One particular short-term item I’d like to see Sakai expose more broadly is the group contexts expressed in the form of class enrollments & particularly ad-hoc groups represented by project site membership. In many respects I think this is the most useful data in Sakai — it’s a social-network like context that integration with and hooking other systems into seems quite valuable. Enterprise grouping systems like Grouper while promising architecturally seems to have had slow adoption, and I suspect fitting systems like Sakai with something like OpenSocial or Google Contacts-like APIs to mesh groups together may get us farther faster in the short run.

Blackboard Won:This just in

A Texas jury has found Kitchener software company Desire2Learn Inc. guilty of infringing on an American competitor’s patent.The verdict, announced this afternoon, allows Blackboard Inc. to demand a ban on sales of Desire2Learn’s products in the United States.

(Via e-Literate.)Michael F. isn’t the only one who’s speechless at this decision. The precedent this sets is uncomfortable on many levels, despite the fact that both:

1. The patent itself looks to be well on the way to being invalidated
2. I doubt Desire2Learn will have any trouble getting more Amicus motions filed for them at any subsequent trials or appeals.

Desire2Learn has reassured their customers:

With your support and that of the entire educational community, we were able to present a strong case. While we are disappointed that the jury did not agree with our position, we will continue to challenge the patent’s validity and Blackboard’s charges of infringement. We are currently evaluating our next steps.The United States Patent and Trademark office has committed to reviewing the patent. As these activities take place we will provide you updates through our patent blog at www.Desire2Learn.com\Patentinfo.

(Via Desire2Learn)First off, addressing confusion and concerns I’ve heard expressed during conversations with a number of individuals: this decision in no way implies that Sakai infringes on any Blackboard IP. Additionally, both Sakai deployers and any Commercial Affiliate you may contract with for services are explicitly mentioned under Blackboard’s previous commitments not to sue Universities and open-source.So “all” we (the Sakai Community) have directly lost is freedom of choice and a small piece of the spirit of innovation in education. While I don’t live in the right district, drafting Lessig for Congress seems like a better idea all the time. I do wonder however, if Blackboard’s previous “pledge not to sue” open-source products and affiliates might have unexpected implications.Though open-source communities seem unlikely to play the FUD game, does this mean that cautious schools may have only 2 options: Blackboard products or open source? If you’re looking to upgrade an existing LMS or deploy a system for the first time, does this affect your decision making regarding product selection?I should also take the opportunity to point out that this kind of key vulnerability is exactly why the separation of licensing from commercial relationships is such a powerful dynamic. Desire2Learn is by all accounts an excellent company, whose customers are happy. No matter how good the company behind the product, however, choosing D2L as a platform also directly binds you to the fate of a single commercial entity. A company who can fail, be sued, bought (a la WebCT, eCollege), experience a strategy shift (Be Inc.), etc.Participating in a community (or to grab a phrase from Barak Obama “a movement”) like Sakai gives you tremendous long term advantages. You can get competitive bids from multiple vendors due the huge number of commercial affiliates. You can switch vendors if you’re unhappy without having to migrate your service. If Sakai moves in a direction not aligned with local interests you can choose to create your own fork or derivative product. Finally, in the same way that diversified investments allow you to reap the rewards of the stock market while lowering your overall risk — Sakai (and other open source products like Moodle, Atutor, etc.) allow you capitalize on eLearning technology without putting all your eggs in one basket.Update: Michael Korkuska (Sakai Executive Director) blogged about the decision and it’s impact on Sakai and the industry as well.

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.

MyUMBC

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:

• Presentation: Collier threw away the assumption a portal must allow users to add/remove/re-arrange content. This dramatically simplified his problem domain, and allows him to capitalize on web-design techniques to tune his layout and presentation.
• Focus: MyUMBC is focused on end-user tools, not building frameworks. While in many portal project 75% of the time seems to be spent bringing up the platform, and making changes there, Collier spent 75% of his time building tools for news, events, favorites, etc.
• Integration: MyUMBC has a number of tools and concepts that serve to knit the experience together — the favorite stars, the dashboard on the start page, navigation cues all make the experience feel integrated
• Feedback & Monitoring: MyUMBC built a feedback system integrated into every page, and a lightweight dashboard to extract key statistics from that system. As a result, feedback is easy (~6000 in less than 6 months) and mining the data for trends is also correspondingly easy. This combined with standard tools like Google Analytics support a nice feedback-response loop while requiring minimal custom tooling.

Portlets

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.

I’m interested in topics like Open Source Communities, Development Methodology, Enterprise Portals, User Experience/Interface Design, Instructional Technology, and Identity Management and try to make it to relevant conferences and meetings when possible.

Upcoming

Limited events coming, though I’ve become pretty involved in the local Meetup Community in NYC.

Past

Portlets 2009 @ Canada

EDUCAUSE 2009

Portlets 2009 & CampusEAI Annual Conference (Cleveland, OH)

Jasig 2009 (Dallas, TX 3/1-3/4) Attending the 2009 Jasig & Community Source conference. Will be presenting a bit on some of the work we’re doing in myCampus around extending CAS for SSO w/blackbox applications, as well as covering Eugene’s presentation on Cross-Platform portlet development.

EDUCAUSE 2008 (Orlando, FL)

Jasig Unconference (Madison, WI)

Portlets 2008 & CampusEAI Annual Conference (Cleveland, OH)

Gettysburg Portals 2008 (Gettysburg, PA)

Sakai Conference (Paris, France)

Sakai Conference (Newport Beach, CA 12/4-7) – Attending the Sakai winter conference in Newport Beach.

JA-SIG Unconference (New Brunswick, NJ 11/12-13) – Am very interested in exploring portal-LMS integration and the roadmap/direction for the new uPortal 3 effort.

NJEdge Conference (10/31-11/2) – Presented a talk on Virtualization in Development and Testing.

EDUCAUSE (10/24-26)uPortal Training Conference (U. of Dundee, Scotland 10/15-19)

NYC Sakai User Group Meetup (NYU 9/25)

JA-SIG Summer 2007 (Denver 6/24-27) – I was on the conference program committee for the summer JA-SIG conference, and delivered a pair of Sakai related presentations.

• Integrating External Services With SakaiWednesday, June 27, 2007, 8:30AM-9:30AM
• Tuning Sakai for ProductionMonday, June 25, 2007, 4:45PM-5:45PM

Sakai Conference (Amsterdam 6/11-13) – Attended the Sakai Conference, to get up to speed and meet some of the various members of the community.

Portlets 2007 (University of Montana, May 16-18) – CampusEAI and the University of Montana organized a workshop/conference focused on portlet development. I presented 2 sessions, as well as met and networked with a number of University portlet developers. The sessions were:

• Portlet development using the Spring Framework. (slides)Thursday, May 17, 3:30PM – 4:20PM
• Central Authentication Service – CAS (slides)Friday, May 18, 10:30AM – 12:00PM

Spring 2007 uPortal Developers Meeting (JHU April 23-24) – XHTML/CSS theme work and anything that I’ve been doing with Jen from Yale related to AJAX D&D customization. Only made it to one day of this and dinner, but got to talk to a lot of other uPortal developers, and also picked up some Sakai tips to boot Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise (Philadelphia March 28-29) – Chariot Solutions is sponsoring a conference to talk about Enterprise, lightweight Java, Web 2.0 etc. I’ll be presenting:

• Leveraging RSS in Enterprise Integration (slides)Thursday, March 29, 1:00PM – 2:00PM

JA-SIG Winter 2006 (Atlanta 12/2-5) – I presented/facilitated a number of sessions.

• Assessing Identity Management Maturity: A Rutgers Case StudyMonday, December 4, 2006, 3:30PM-4:30PM
• Identity Management Best Practices DiscussionMonday, December 4, 2006, 4:45PM-5:45PM
• uPortal User Experience DiscussionTuesday, December 5, 2006, 11:30AM-12:30PM
• Providing Calendar Data within the PortalTuesday, December 5, 2006, 3:30PM-4:30PM

Fall 2006 uPortal Developers Meeting – Attended via video conference the uPortal developers meeting hosted at UW-Madison.Spring Forward 2006 – Attended this conference sponsored by Philly Spring JUG and Chariot Solutions. Was good, well focused, and seeded with implementors.Spring 2006 uPortal Developers Meeting – We hosted this one at Rutgers. JA-SIG Summer 2005 (Baltimore) – My first JA-SIG conference. I presented some of my experiences related to customizing the uPortal user interface.

Bollywood in Internet download deal – BANGALORE (Reuters) – India’s film makers are offering Internet movie downloads on web site Kazaa in a move that could lower costs and boost revenues in Bollywood, the world’s most prolific film production centre. [Reuters UK]

As I “previously blogged”:89 Bollywood seems to be embracing the prospects of digital technology much faster than the hollywood mega-studios. I guess this makes sense, the large studios biggest advantage is their prominent place in the current system, independents and foreign films are the ones most advantaged by trying to go around it as their biggest problem isn’t protecting blockbusters, but getting exposure and distribution for their films.