Blogs

I have been serving as the Sakai Foundation "webmaster" for the past month. Part of my duties are to answer questions that come through the contact form at sakaiproject.org. Each day I get a few requests about licensing from commercial firms looking to see if they need to pay someone to use or distribute the software (no, they don't) or if they need to join the foundation to do so (no, they don't). But I also am getting a fair amount of basic support requests that fall along the lines of:

• How do install Sakai?
• How do I use Sakai?
• Will Sakai meet these needs (insert list here)?

My gut tells me that some of these requests are coming from folks that are familiar with the ease of installing applications on a LAMP stack and are surprised by the relative complexity of a Sakai installation. But beyond that, it seems that the distributed nature of the Sakai community has never done a great job of projecting the basic message of what Sakai (the software) is and it's basic features.

(I have gone through this discussion tens of times with IT folk. It has been written down by others so often it seems silly for me to even do it again. But sometimes ya feel compelled.)

Recently I was asked a question in an interview that went something like, "Have you had experience deploying commercial software? Something that you had to design your processes around?"

A little while ago we posted a set of forms and matrix that was a very literal interpretation of the AAC&U Essential Learning Outcomes at  OpenEdPractices.org. I understand that this is not the final version of those outcomes and rubrics, so we can expect a revision soon. Even so, it has been suggested that it would be nice to have a portfolio template created to accompany it.

I have some idea about what that would look like, but in the spirit of openness, I'd like to open the floor to discussion.

If you'd like to chat about the work done so far, the emergent template design or just Sakai and ePortfolios in general, I'll be in an Elluminate vRoom for most of today. If you can't get in there (there are only 3 seats in a free vRoom), ping me via instant messenger:

• AIM: smkeesler
• Yahoo Messenger: smkeesle

Last night I was building a series of reflection forms for a large matrix (15 rows). Each reflection form had a rich text editor to hold the reflection.

The design of these reflection forms included some "default text" that would help to guide the student's thinking about their reflection. Each row of the matrix was to have slightly different default text in that field. There are two ways I could accomplish the task.

We had a little time in between some projects recently, so we decided to try an in-house project that ended up being something we thought should be out there in the community.

I've been hearing about the AAC&U VALUE project for quite a while now and had been anticipating the project deliverables (a well researched set of rubrics for assessing ePortfolio work) as something we could refer clients to as an excellent example of how to assess student work. It took us a few days to get it done, but the result is something that I think may be useful for the community.

I am working on a set of forms for a well-researched set of rubrics for portfolio evaluation to donate to the http://openedpractices.org community library. There are 14 rubrics in the set, each dealing with a specific learning outcome. Every rubric has a set of 5-6 criteria that can be rated on a 0-4 scale.

Indiana University's version of the page composer idea allows students to create up to 7 top level pages in their portfolio. By default these pages are:

I just completed a modification of the University of Michigan's Page Composer for Indiana University. This work was based upon their 2.5 version of their templates.

Features removed:

Last month I made my way down to SUNY Delphi for the "2-3-98 Conference" and sat on a panel of folks that had been involved in open source in education to discuss the "Meritocracy of Open Source" with Martin Knott, CEO of Moodlerooms and Mike Zackrison, VP of Marketing & Strategy at rSmart. This was the smallest conference I have been to in quite a while and I really enjoyed it's laid back feel.