[Announcements] Sakai Newsletter June 11, 2009

Sakai Newsletter


June 11, 2009


1.  From the Executive Director 

2.  Sakai Product Council

3.  10th Sakai Conference Approaches!

-- Sakai Conference Newcomers Reception
-- Cambridge Hyatt Rate

4.  JForum 2.6.4 Now Released

5.  Stockholm University to Introduce a New Version of Mondo

6.  rSmart Contributes Live Virtual Classroom Tool

7.  Sakai Local/Regional and Language Groups

8.  Library Sakai Integration Meeting Summary

9.  OSP 2.6 Demo

10. Sakai 3.0 Group Management Project -- Request for Volunteers

11. Upcoming rSmart Webinar and Workshops

12. Call for Papers: 1st Workshop -- LMS meet Adaptive Learning Environments

13. Recent Email Group Discussions

14. Events


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1. From the Executive Director

The attached document is the first installment of a Sakai Executive Brief that the Sakai Foundation plans to publish every six months. (You can also see the brief at http://tinyurl.com/sakaibrief0906 .)  It is focused on providing organizational managers and executives with a brief overview of what has been and what will be happening in Sakai. I hope you find the information useful to understanding the current state of Sakai development, what is taking place in the Sakai community, and how your institution can further engage in our efforts to make Sakai the premier academic collaboration and learning environment.

These executive briefs are an important component of an increased focus on communication at the foundation. Formal communication channels have become increasingly important as we now hold conferences approximately every 12 months. Early efforts to develop Sakai 3 -- a completely new version of Sakai -- increase the importance of understanding what is happening in Sakai and how you can participate and benefit.

You'll be seeing a variety of new ways to get information and provide feedback to the Sakai Foundation in the coming weeks and months. In particular, I'd love to hear what you'd like to see addressed in these executive briefs and in other forms of communication. You can always reach me at mkorcuska@..., and I'd be happy to schedule a phone call at a mutually convenient time.

One quick note -- There was a small delay between finalizing the attached brief and my sending this email. We have announced the initial membership of the Product Council mentioned on page 5. The list of members and more information can be found in the next item in this newsletter or on our wiki at:

http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/m4RDAw

Best regards,

Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska@...
phone: +1 510-931-6559 mobile (US): +1 510-599-2586
skype: mkorcuska


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2. Sakai Product Council

The Sakai Foundation is pleased to announce the formation and membership of a Product Council to ensure exceptional quality and cohesiveness of Sakai product releases in support of varied teaching, research and collaboration needs. The formation of the Product Council is the result of over five years of success and learning of the Sakai community in effectively developing community source software that enhances learning, research and institutional effectiveness.

The Product Council has two important roles: determining which components will be included as part of each product release, and informally advising projects as they progress from R&D to production-ready maturity. As a community-developed open source project, components of each product release are contributed from many different institutions, companies and individuals. The Product Council is the coordinating body for each release, and will work to assure the product's evolution continues to meet the needs of the educational community in terms of functionality, production worthiness, and usability.

More information about the Council structure may be found on the Sakai wiki at http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/m4RDAw

The members of the Product Council are:

Nate Angell -- Nate works with clients in education and open source communities for rSmart (http://www.rsmart.com), a Sakai Commercial Affiliate. Nate previously led web communications at Portland State (http://www.pdx.edu ) and at the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry (http://www.omsi.edu). Nate holds an MA in film, television, and digital media studies from Brown University.

Noah Botimer -- Noah is the ePortfolio Technical Lead for the University of Michigan. He is an open source and open education advocate. Before joining Michigan, Noah helped establish a campus-wide Sakai course and ePortfolio environment at Saginaw Valley State University.

Eli Cochran -- Eli joined UC Berkeley and the Sakai community two years ago as a user experience designer and Javascript programmer on the Fluid project. After more than twenty years experience in interface design and development, Eli feels that successful systems must be more than understandable and usable, they must also be beautiful and fun.

Michael Feldstein -- Michael is Principal Product Manager of Academic Enterprise Solutions at Oracle and the author of the e-Literate weblog. He is a frequent invited speaker on instructional technology and has been interviewed about e-learning by media outlets including The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Associated Press, and U.S. News and World Report.

David Goodrum -- David is Director of Academic and Faculty Services for University Information Technology Services at Indiana University.  In addition, he chairs the functional requirements committee as well as the support and implementation team for IU's implementation of Sakai.

John Lewis -- John is the Chief Software Architect for Unicon and a 17-year veteran of the software engineering industry. His passions include open source and agile methods. John is active in several higher education open source communities, including uPortal and Sakai, and serves on the Board of Directors of Jasig.

Stephen Marquard -- Stephen is Learning Technologies Coordinator in the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town, where he leads the team responsible for the University's popular and widely-used Sakai deployment known as Vula. Stephen is a Sakai Fellow and serves on the Sakai Board of Directors.

John Norman -- John is the Director of the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) and "Head of e-Learning" at the University of Cambridge. CARET provides infrastructure and support to the campus for the use of technology in teaching, learning and research, including the deployment of Sakai campus-wide. Prior to this he had experience as an engineer and medical devices entrepreneur on three continents. John chairs the advisory board for OSS-Watch and is an advocate for open standards and open source software in higher education.

Max Whitney -- Max is the technical team lead for enterprise academic services in ITS at New York University and an active member in the DIY technology communities in New York. She has managed the Blackboard implementation at NYU since 2001, most recently acting as the technical lead for an enterprise upgrade impacting 45,000 users. She also led the Sakai pilot at NYU in 2007. She holds her M.S. in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU.

Additionally, the soon-to-be-hired Product Manager will sit on the Product Council.

We thank all of those involved in the nomination and selection process, and look forward to the contribution of this important council in continuing to enhance the academic and scholarly success of institutions across the Sakai community.

Best regards,

Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska@...


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3. 10th Sakai Conference approaches!

Things are shaping up very nicely for the 10th Sakai Conference in Boston.  Over 400 people are currently registered!  It's going to be a very well attended and very exciting event, which is especially gratifying when budgets are especially tight. The program looks fantastic, with keynote speaker Vijay Kumar, over 100 other sessions, and a full slate of pre-conference workshops on Tuesday. The venue looks fantastic and Boston is a great city.

You can register for the conference at https://educonference.com/sakai/boston/index.php  and get yourself a room at the hotel athttps://resweb.passkey.com/go/65705248

Hope to see you there!


SAKAI CONFERENCE NEWCOMERS RECEPTION
If you're coming to the 10th Sakai Conference in Boston and are a newcomer to the Sakai community, I'd like to invite you to the Sakai Newcomers Reception on Tuesday evening. The reception will be held at the conference hotel, the Cambridge Hyatt.

As the name implies, this reception is intended for Sakai Newcomers. Who is a newcomer?  Well, if you've never been to a Sakai conference before you're certainly a newcomer. But anyone who feels like they'd benefit from meeting other attendees in advance is welcome.  We'll also explain how the conference is organized and provide a few tips for getting the most out of your time. Many conference committee members and Sakai Board members will also attend so you'll be able to meet some old hands as well.

You can RSVP by visiting: http://sakai.pingg.com/newcomers09

Space is limited, so sign up soon. Hope you can join us!


CAMBRIDGE HYATT RATE
As you may know, the Hyatt advertised a rate lower than the Sakai group rate. They are not supposed to do this (by contract and by common sense). We've spoken with the hotel and have come to a resolution.

I'm pleased to let you know that they will be reducing our group rate to $184/night. This will apply to all existing reservations up to June 12. For those who have made existing reservations there is nothing you need to do -- the hotel will be manually adjusting your room rate. The only exception to this reduction is for those who have requested a specific type of room (e.g., "River View" or "Balcony"). In these cases the rate will remain $199/night.

This is, in fact, slightly more than what community members were able to find on the internet. There are a few reasons why we thought the Hyatt's proposal was fair:

Our rate includes complimentary in-room internet ($12.95/day). So our effective rate is $171/night.

Not everyone would have been able to take advantage of the promotion as there were a limited number of rooms available at that rate. So some would have gotten a better deal while others would have been stuck with the original rate. We felt this was the fairest to everyone in the Sakai community.

The Hyatt may still lower the hotel rate if rooms remain unsold. If anyone does find a lower rate and wishes to change their reservation they should feel free to do so (I'm tracking this via yapta and will let folks know when/if it alerts me). We will manually reconcile hotel guests with conference attendees and Sakai will get credit for those room nights. If you decide to do this it would be helpful to let Mary Miles (mmiles@...) know.

So, a big thanks to Lydia from Stanford for finding the lower rate.   She's helped save everyone a few dollars!

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Michael Korcuska
mkorcuska@...


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4. JForum 2.6.4 Now Released

I am pleased to announce the release of JForum 2.6.4.

JForum 2.6.4 is a small release that introduces several nice enhancements to JForum's private messaging and email notification functionality. See highlights of features in this release: http://etudes.org/release/discussion/2.6.4/

DOWNLOAD JFORUM 2.6.4
JForum 2.6.4 is available to deploy with Sakai 2.3 or higher.

Instructions on how to download and build JForum 2.6.4 can be found at:  http://etudes.org/release/discussion/

Conversion is required when upgrading from earlier versions of JForum. Scripts are included.

FEATURES & FIXES in JFORUM 2.6.4
Summary of enhancements and fixes:
- Add ability to flag one or more private messages for follow-up.
- Add ability to clear the flags once messages have been handled.
- Add the ability to see if messages have been replied to (new "replied" icon).
- Change folder icon of Private Messages menu to orange if there is new activity.
- Include actual text of forum new topic or new reply in body of email notification.
- Include actual text of private message (PM) in new PM email notification.
- Include attachments in email of PM and topic email notification, if any were attached.
- Preserve the start/stop forum dates with import from site.
- Do not list topics from "Deny access" forums in the gradebook.
- Quotes in forum titles get stripped out along with title upon edit/save. Fixed.
- Data truncation error in private messages, if the message is too long. Fixed.
- Strip out offending MS Word comments prior when posting text with "W" icon. Fixed.

FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
For information on future development, feature requests, and known issues, see: http://etudes.org/jforum_features.htm

CREDITS
Many thanks to Murthy Tanniru, Senior Java Developer, Etudes, for his on-going work on JForum.

Also, many thanks go to the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office for their funding support for this software development work.

QUESTIONS
To report issues or ask questions about JForum for Sakai 2.x, send a message to: dev@... or sakai-dev@....

Vivie Sinou
Executive Director Etudes, Inc.
http://etudes.org/


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5. Stockholm University to Introduce a New Version of Mondo

On 15 June, Stockholm University will introduce a new version of Mondo based on Sakai 2.6. In addition to all enhancements that come with Sakai 2.6, a number of localisations have been made to better support Sakai users at our institution. Also, the excellent Site Stats tool from Universidade Fernando Pessoa has been added as a new tool available for site owners.

Per Wising
per.wising@...
Stockholm University


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6. rSmart Contributes Live Virtual Classroom Tool

rSmart is happy to announce the contribution of its Live Virtual Classroom tool (LVC) to the Sakai community.  (For more information, follow this link and see the information below:
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/LVC/Live+Virtual+Classroom+Tool)

ABOUT THE TOOL
The Live Virtual Classroom tool was originally developed in 2006 as part of an engagement between Mesa Community College (MCC) and rSmart. At that time, the tool integrated Sakai 2.2 with on-premise deployments of Elluminate Live! MCC has since agreed to contribute the code to the community, and rSmart has ported it forward to 2.6.

In its current form, LVC works only with Elluminate Live! The front end is sufficiently separated from the back end, however, to permit integration with other webcasting tools by simply swapping out the service-level implementation. To extend the tool's functionality, developers need only extend VirtualClassroomServiceImpl and re-implement the communication layer with the desired external webcasting tool. rSmart plans to use this approach to provide support for Adobe Connect in the near future.

Live Virtual Classroom is the second tool of its type to be contributed to Sakai. Last year, Unicon contributed functionality that works with Elluminate's hosted offering (information available here: http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/ELLUM/Home). Because the rSmart tool supports on-premise deployments of Elluminate Live!, institutions using Sakai and Elluminate Live! can now choose the integration tool that is appropriate for their situation.

FEATURES AND SCREENSHOTS
The Live Virtual Classroom tool enables users to perform these activities:
- Schedule one-time or recurring meetings from within Sakai.
- Edit and delete scheduled meetings and recordings.
- Automatically create moderator users in Elluminate.
- Join active meetings from within the Sakai tool.
- Watch recordings of past meetings from within the Sakai tool.
- Filter and sort lists of meetings and recordings from within the Sakai tool.
- Ping the Elluminate server (allows users to check configuration and status between the servers).

Note: Sakai maintains a list of meetings associated with different Sakai sites, so users of different sites see only their site's meetings.

VIDEO DEMONSTRATION
A screencast demo of LVC is available here:
http://www.screencast.com/users/johnbush/folders/Jing/media/0f7ede7d-eb14-4f4e-b2d7-b46b111f7eaa

Jonny Brown
jonny.brown@...


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7. Sakai Local/Regional and Language Groups

A question I received recently about local Sakai user groups reminds me that as the number of Sakai deployments has continued to expand, there are probably more people now running Sakai near each other, or who share a common language (other than English) then ever before. There are already some local Sakai groups, such as the New York City Regional Sakai group, the Spanish Sakai group (which is mostly organizations in Spain, but also communicates in Spanish), and others:

http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/jAfJAg

You might want to take a look at this map and see who else around you is running Sakai:

http://sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-community/page/d89dabbf-a033-412f-80c4-a38931056b26

If there are enough of you in an area, or who share a common language, then you might think about starting your own regional or language Sakai group to get together and talk Sakai periodically, in addition to participating in the global Sakai community. (If your deployment is not shown on the map, please get in touch with Anthony Whyte, arwhyte@..., and let's get you on there!)  If you're interested in setting up a local Sakai group, please let me know.

Peter Knoop
knoop@...
Sakai Project Coordinator


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8. Library Sakai Integration Meeting Summary

Thank you to all who participated in the May 28 meeting to discuss library integration with Sakai 3.  We discussed potential library vignettes to support incorporation of library-related information, data, or services into a Sakai 3 page.  Vignettes are available at:http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/SLIB/Sakai+3+Potential+Library+Vignettes

In discussing the vignettes, participants expressed the need for interoperability with other systems and concern that building functionality that only works in Sakai may be limiting.