[Announcements] Sakai Newsletter May 14, 2009

Sakai Newsletter


May 14, 2009

1.  10th Sakai Conference Update: Early Bird Registration Discount Ends Soon

2.  Boston Sakai Pre-Conference Workshop: Building a Portfolio for Your Institution

3.  Boston Sakai Session on a New Vision for the Open Source Portfolio in Sakai 3.0

4.  DSpace + Fedora Commons = DuraSpace

5.  Blackboard Catalyst Award Winners: Jim Pease and Michael Morrison

6.  9th Annual Cyber Teachers' Institute -- Registration is Open!

7.  Identity Services Summit

8.  Marist College Has Made 2 New QA Servers Available to the Sakai Community

9.  Poll:  Personnel Assigned to Sakai

10. rSmart Job Opening:  Senior Software Engineer

11. Recent Email Group Discussions

12. Events


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1. 10th Sakai Conference in Boston Update:  Early Bird Registration Discount Ends Soon

This is a quick reminder that the Early Bird Discounted Registration for the 10th Sakai Conference ends on June 5.  If you have not already registered for the conference, please do so using the link below.

In addition, the discounted hotel rate of $199 per night (including free internet access) ends on June 5.  After that date, the rate will increase and rooms will be available on a space-available basis.

Conference Registration:  https://educonference.com/sakai/boston/registration/index.php

Hotel Registration:  https://resweb.passkey.com/go/65705248

We look forward to seeing you in July!

Mary Miles
mmiles@...


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2. Boston Sakai Pre-Conference Workshop:  Building a Portfolio for Your Institution Using Sakai

The Open Source Portfolio Community is pleased to offer a full-day pre-conference workshop at Boston Sakai entitled:

"Building a Portfolio for Your Institution Using Sakai"

Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Morning and Afternoon

At the workshop, faculty, instructional technologists, and web developers will collaborate on a simple portfolio project. Participants will receive step-by-step guidance on building OSP data structures, a chance to do it yourself with hands-on activities, and the opportunity to get your questions about building portfolios answered. The hands-on activities in this workshop will allow your team to return to your campus to build your first implementation of OSP! We encourage you to:

- Send your faculty and instructional technologists to the morning session to learn how the OSP tools work together to enhance teaching and learning, and to get hands-on practice in creating matrices, wizards, and forms.

- Send your web developers and XML gurus to the afternoon session to focus on technical knowledge and best practices for building OSP data structures to implement a given portfolio design.

If you plan to attend the Teaching and Learning workshop in the afternoon, please come to the OSP workshop in the morning and ask the web developers from your institution to participate in more technical activities in the OSP workshop in the afternoon.

For more details and the workshop schedule, please refer to the Three Canoes Consulting website at:

http://www.threecanoes.com/2009-boston-workshop

Once you are registered for Boston Sakai, there is no additional charge for this workshop.

The OSP Community hopes to see you there!

Janice A. Smith, Ph.D.
Three Canoes Consulting
janice.smith@...
jasmith@...


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3. Boston Sakai Session on a New Vision for the Open Source Portfolio in Sakai 3.0

Dear OSP, Teaching and Learning, and Sakai UX Communities,

The OSP Community is pleased to announce that it will host a "blue sky" discussion session on redesigning OSP for Sakai 3.0 at the Boston Sakai Conference in July 2009.

This session will draw on previous work done at Sakai Amsterdam, Sakai Paris, and weekly OSP community calls, to focus on preserving and enhancing the core portfolio functions of Guide, Collect, Reflect, Document, Tag, Associate, Evaluate, Present, Share, Assess, Report, Flow, Customize, and Preserve.

We invite you to join us to discuss ways our communities could collaborate to address areas of common focus in Sakai 3.0.

Janice A. Smith, Ph.D.
Three Canoes Consulting
janice.smith@...
jasmith@...


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4. DSpace + Fedora Commons = DuraSpace

In case you haven't heard by now, DSpace and Fedora Commons have joined forces to create DuraSpace.  From their press release:

"Fedora Commons and the DSpace Foundation, two of the largest providers of open source software for managing and providing access to digital content, have announced today that they will join their organizations to pursue a common mission.  Jointly, they will provide leadership and innovation in open source technologies for global   communities who manage, preserve, and provide access to digital content.

"The joined organization, named 'DuraSpace,' will sustain and grow its flagship repository platforms -- Fedora and DSpace.  DuraSpace will also expand its portfolio by offering new technologies and services that respond to the dynamic environment of the web and to new requirements from existing and future users.  DuraSpace will focus on   supporting existing communities and will also engage a larger and more diverse group of stakeholders in support of its not-for-profit mission.  The organization will be led by an executive team consisting of Sandy Payette (Chief Executive Officer), Michele Kimpton (Chief Business Officer), and Brad McLean (Chief Technology Officer) and will   operate out of offices in Ithaca, NY and Cambridge, MA."

You can read the full press release here: http://tinyurl.com/pdraod

Congratulations to both organizations!

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


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5. Blackboard Catalyst Award Winners:  Jim Pease and Michael Morrison

Jim Pease (jmpease@...) and Michael Morrison (memorr02@...) of Syracuse University have won a Blackboard Innovative Development award for developing a "Sakai Learning Environment Connector" between Blackboard and Sakai.   You can read more at the following site:

http://blog.vcu.edu/blackboardfaculty/2009/05/bb_announces_catalyst_award_wi.html


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6. 9th Annual Cyber Teachers' Institute -- Registration is Open!

You are invited to participate in the 9th Annual Cyber Teachers' Institute (CTI)!

CTI has served as a meeting place for great teachers to learn, unlearn, and relearn how to make effective use of web technologies to support online teaching, learning, and collaboration. The engaging dialogue on teaching principles and best strategies is the highlight of CTI.

CTI is offered entirely online in an asynchronous format, delivered through Etudes (based on the Sakai software). It consists of the following professional development courses:

- CTI 100: You CAN Teach Online
- CTI 101: CLASSIC Cyber Teachers' Institute
- CTI 102: ADVANCED Cyber Teachers' Institute

Registration is now open! The courses are offered in June, July and August.

The first course in the CTI series starts on June 1, 2009. If you are interested, please register ASAP:  http://etudes.org/training-schedule-cti.htm

Each course is scheduled for three weeks. Many participants take all three courses and enjoy moving through the experience together, as a community. As per ex-participants, CTI is most valuable, rewarding, engaging, and fun.

"The courses challenged me to question my old habits more intensely than I have done in the past. I have experienced an exponential growth in those things I need to teach (and learn) in the future." - Russ

"I am going on my third year of teaching so I am considered new to academia. However, I have learned more in these short weeks than my three years of teaching." - Mark

For more information, see: http://etudes.org/cti/

We hope to "see" many of you in CTI this summer!

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


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7. Identity Services Summit

Jasig is co-sponsoring an "Identity Services Summit for Higher Ed Open/Community-Source Projects" at the Internet2/EDUCAUSE annual ACAMP event in Philadelphia on June 18th and 19th.

At this "Advanced CAMP," architects, developers, and deployers of higher ed open/community-source software projects will explore Identity and Access Management issues and challenges. Participants will work together to identify common approaches to creating a more coherent IAM environment across these projects.

For information about program, registration, and hotel accommodations, please visit http://net.educause.edu/content.asp?Section_ID=434.

Jonathan Markow
jjmarkow@...


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8. Marist College Has Made 2 New QA Servers Available to the Sakai Community

Marist College is pleased to announce the availability of two additional QA servers: QA10-US and QA11-US. As part of Marist College's joint activities with IBM, rSmart, and the Sakai community to enable Sakai on Websphere and DB2, they have added these two servers. QA10 provides Websphere/DB2 on the System z mainframe environment for testing the latest tag releases of 2.6.x; and QA11, Websphere/DB2 environment on the System z mainframe is for testing trunk releases. These two servers are the first-ever hosted Sakai applications on a System z. This takes the total number of QA servers hosted by Marist for use by the community to a total of five. For any questions concerning these test instances, please contact me.

Adam Hocek
Information Technology
Marist College
Adam.Hocek@...


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9. Poll:  Personnel Assigned to Sakai

I am curious as to the number of people assigned to running and maintaining Sakai, and their roles. And so is my boss, and his boss, and so on.

It would be great if you could take a moment to list the people assigned to Sakai at your institution along with a very short description of what each person does.

The installations list is a great resource, but it doesn't say much about personnel:

http://sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-home/page/29186420-3b36-4381-9d53-bba4d17b6f1f

I'll start:

UC Merced: 1 employee, 4500 users

1. Full-time, general (programmer, sysadmin, dba, help desk)

Thanks for any and all responses!

Joshua Swink
UC Merced
joshua.swink@...


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10. rSmart Job Opening:  Senior Software Engineer

We are looking for an energetic and motivated Java Engineer to join our team working on open-source web applications used by colleges and universities around the country, specifically on our Sakai CLE offering. The principle focus of this position will be integrating new versions of the open source software into our product, developing enhancements, and working directly with the Sakai community to further enhance the application. This position will report to the Software Development Manager.

Duties and Responsibilities:

- Design, develop, and implement web-based Java applications based on Sakai.
- Resolve technical issues for our clients through debugging, research, and investigation. - Merge defect resolutions and enhancements between code bases.
- Work collaboratively with a diverse team of developers, web designers, QA staff, and functional experts.
- Represent rSmart within the Sakai community, possibly including community development time working on version 3.0
- Follow the company's software development processes and standards.

You can read the full job description here:

http://www.rsmart.com/news/open-position-sr-software-engineer-sakai

If you are interested or know anyone interested please contact me directly.

John Bush
Development Manager
602-490-0470
john.bush@...


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11. Recent Email Discussion Groups

OSP stylesheet question
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--OSP-stylesheet-question-td2901954.html#a2901954

Change the wiki ?
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--Change-the-wiki---td2908649.html#a2908649

Sakai components modification
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--Sakai-components-modi-fication-td2898570.html#a2906659

Remote Eclipse over X-Terminal
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--Remote-Eclipse-over-X-Terminal-td2889805.html#a2889805

FCKeditor improvement?
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--FCKeditor-improvement--td2893338.html#a2893338

Setting up Sakai development environment
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--Setting-up-Sakai-development-environment-td2890177.html#a2890177

Import available users from a file to Sakai
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--Import-available-users-from-a-file-to-Sakai-td2883200.html#a2883200

Large Scale Quizzing
http://n2.nabble.com/-Using-Sakai--Large-Scale-Quizzing-td2884599.html#a2884599

about insert data in the database
http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--about-insert-data-in-the-database-td2870624.html#a2870624

performance storing resource bodies in SQL database vs network-filesystem http://n2.nabble.com/-Building-Sakai--POLL%3A-performance-storing-resource-bodies-in-SQL-database-vs-network-filesystem-td2867234.html#a2867234

Portfolio Share & Notify
http://n2.nabble.com/-Portfolio--Portfolio-Share---Notify-td2789573.html#a2789573

USER Poll: Any Sakai folks here using VoiceThread?
http://n2.nabble.com/-Using-Sakai--Poll%3A-Any-Sakai-folks-here-using-VoiceThread--td2886764.html#a2886764

Group assignments behaviour when a student out of that group
http://n2.nabble.com/-Using-Sakai--Group-assignments-behaviour-when-a-student-out-of-that-group-assignment-drops-the-course-td2871630.html#a2871630

Is anybody storing resource bodies...in MYSQLdatabase?
http://n2.nabble.com/-Using-Sakai--Is-anybody-storing-resource-bodies...-in-MYSQL-database--td2846937.html#a2846964

Is everything content in Sakai 3?
http://n2.nabble.com/Re%3A-Is-everything-content-in-Sakai-3--td2100598.html#a2100598

Proposal: create new Jira issue type: proposal
http://n2.nabble.com/-DG%3A-User-Experience--Proposal%3A-create-new-Jira-issue-type%3A-proposal-td2789784.html#a2826951


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12. Events

eLearning Africa
May 27- 29, 2009
Le Meridien President
Dakar, Senegal
www.elearning-africa.com.

2009 MoodleMoot San Francisco and 2nd Sloan-C Symposium on Emerging Technology in Online Learning
June 17-19, 2009
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
San Francisco, California
http://moodlemoot.org/course/view.php?id=9 http://www.emergingonlinelearningtechnology.org/

Advanced CAMP: Identity Services Summit for Higher Ed Open/Community-Source Projects
June 18-19, 2009
Radisson Plaza-Warwick Hotel Philadelphia
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
http://net.educause.edu/content.asp?Section_ID=434&bhcp=1

10th Sakai Conference in Boston
July 8-10, 2009
Cambridge Hyatt
Cambridge, Massachusetts
http://www.sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-news/page/04ed2fa2-77e2-40da-8100-e0a08b9fea15

AuSakai '09
September 17-18, 2009
Charles Sturt University Bathurst Campus
Bathurst NSW, Australia
http://www.csu.edu.au/division/landt/ausakai09/ausakai09.htm

Assessment Institute in Indianapolis
October 25-27, 2009
The Westin Indianapolis
Indianapolis, Indiana
http://www.planning.iupui.edu/institute

Online Educa Berlin 2009
December 2-4, 2009
Hotel InterContinental Berlin
Berlin, Germany
http://www.online-educa.com/the-conference