thoughts on sakai

New CLE TCC Vice Chair Elected

2011-07-20T08:13:00.000-07:00

At the end of this month my tenure as the CLE TCC chair will end and the current Vice Chair, Beth Kirschner, will take the reins for the next 6 months. I am pleased to announce that Aaron Zeckoski will be the next Vice Chair for the TCC and in 6 months move into the Chair role.

Congratulations Aaron! We look forward to your leadership over the coming year.

Sakai CLE 2.8.0 Released

2011-04-18T16:04:00.000-07:00

On behalf of the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) Technical Coordination Committee, I am pleased to announce the release of the Sakai CLE, version 2.8.0.

The Sakai CLE 2.8.0 builds on previous releases by refining and stabilizing the 2.x feature set. It offers dozens of new features and improvements to key areas like accessibility, internationalization, performance, and security.

Among the many enhancements included in the 2.8.0 release, noteworthy items include:
• Configurable URL shortening service
• reCAPTCHA support for logins
• Collapsible portal navigation menu
• Mobile portal UI improvements
• Experimental CKEditor implementation
• Respondus question import handling
• Customizable letter grades in assignments
• Support for IMS BasicLTI outcomes and improved external integration capabilities
• Enhanced user profile options
• Persistent event logging for Quartz Scheduler jobs
• Improved integration with external user providers (e.g., LDAP)
• Inclusion of many new webservices
• Updated language packs (Chinese, Dutch, French Canadian, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish and Vietnamese.)
• Feature to set open/close dates for discussion boards, forums and topics and sort the threads
• Ability to preview message prior to sending in Messages tool
• Ability for site authors to change display order of announcements

A full list of features can be found in the release documentation https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/0Al6B

Obtaining the 2.8.0 release
• Release artifacts are available at http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/
• Release documentation including install guides is available at https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/xQl6B

Licensing
Sakai 2.8.0 is licensed under the Educational Community License, version 2.0.

Older Releases
With the release of the Sakai 2.8 series, official Community support for Sakai 2.6 ceases. Organizations running Sakai 2.6 (or earlier versions) are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest versions of Sakai 2.7 or 2.8 in order to take advantage of continued maintenance support.

Our thanks go out to the dedicated Sakai Community volunteers from around the world for their tireless work on this release.

Sakai 2.8.0 release date rescheduled

2011-03-03T05:57:00.000-08:00

On behalf of the Release Management Workgroup and the Sakai 2 Technical Coordination Committee I am writing you to let you know that the Sakai 2.8.0 release date has been pushed back. This can be traced back to a scarcity of resources in the Sakai 2 ecosystem that resulted in slipped schedules (ie late beta and release candidate tagging), final hour testing and subsequently, outstanding blockers.

The anticipated release date is March 31st with the following milestones.

March 8/9 Release Candidate 2
March 22/23 Release Candidate 3 (as needed)
March 24-30 Prep for release
March 31 Release

To reach these milestones the following strategy is being employed:

Blocker handling: Continue to triage the blocker list. If a ticket is not truly a blocker, downgrade it. In addition there will be regular communication with blocker assignees regarding progress on tickets.
Tagging: Continue to cut QA tags every two weeks until blockers are eliminated. If an opportunity exists to cut a QA tag early, do it. When no blockers exist, cut an rc tag and prep for release.
Continued testing: Encourage testing but do not allow shortfalls or delays in testing to hold up the release

Boston Sakai Conference Dine Arounds

2009-06-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

For some non-virtual social networking consider the informal “dine arounds.” You’ll join a group of fellow conference attendees for dinner at a local restaurant. There is a sign up sheet on the conference wiki (http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/yYhDAw) and a dinner facilitator will help coordinate travel to destinations. Each attendee is responsible for their own bill and gratuity.

Proposed Sakai Development Model

2009-03-25T18:05:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend a webinar session given by Michael Korcuska, the Sakai Foundation Executive Director, on the proposed development model for Sakai. First, I want to say that even though there were some hiccups (gotta have them!), this was one of the most beneficial forums for communication and engagement that I’ve experienced in Sakai in a long time.

One of the things I liked about the proposal was that Sakai as a product is defined. I think a lack of vision has been a major hurdle these past few years. I see this a positive step forward but the devil is in the details. Before I dive into critique, I want to be clear that I don't think these are things that can't be worked through. They just happen to be points that need careful consideration and detail before we all drink the kool aid.

To begin with, the largest hurdle is going to be communication. Let's all be honest, we're all really bad at this for a multitude of reasons! The proposal adds complexity and without clear definition of who is to do what and how we're going to end up less coordinated. In addition, I have a few simple requests: I want it to be consistent, reliable and simple. Please, please don't make me read lengthy messages where I need to analyze every word for hidden meaning.

Also, I feel *strongly* that the product council should not include members of the board. The board should be visionary and assist in laying out a broad strategy for community execution (like the current proposal!). Once those members become bogged down in the day to day operational details, they will become less effective as the visionary leaders they have been elected to be. This isn't to say that there aren't members that wouldn't be a good fit on the council - they should just be one or the other.

Lastly, it seems that the product council is not only tasked with being the gatekeepers and shepherds but also the group that defines the standards. Performing as gatekeepers and shepherds requires quite a different skill set and temperament than defining the standards. I'd advocate that a short term task force that was charged with initially defining said standards that the council could use. I think that approach could result in a much faster implementation of this process as well as garner a wider breadth of knowledge. Something that will be *key* in ensuring we have appropriate standards/criteria. Future looking, when the standards/criteria need revisiting, the council could recommend the community assemble a new task force.

Unsubscribe me!

2009-03-07T14:17:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen your Sakai mail for the past few days, you're going to see that about 1/2 the email on the lists are pleas from former subscribers to be removed from the list. At first they were comical but I have to admit they are starting to grate on my nerves!

If you are still in need of unsubscription, Seth Theriault posted options for unsubscribing that can be found at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cms.sakai.devel/29319

Some suggestions to the foundation for any future changes to systems that are critical
1) Tell us exactly what is going to happen and with sufficient notice. I'd suggest at least a 24 hour lead time. With this notice you'd be able to get volunteers to assist in confirmation that things are working swell.
2) Please don't make changes at 10am on a weekday. I know this is a global project but 10am is a time that impacts a large portion of our community. When thing go awry (and we all know they often do), it'd be better to impact a smaller population
3) When there is a problem, have someone from the foundation tell us you know there is a problem, what it is, ect . .

That said, I'm sincerely happy that something was done to address the problems we were having with the lists on collab. As a community we had been crippled and are now able to communicate to make progress in an open manner. Further, the messages are now nicely tagged by audience.

Sakai 2.5.3 Released

2008-09-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to announce the availability of Sakai 2.5.3, the second maintenance release of the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment in the 2.5 series. This release includes 39 bug fixes and performance enhancements in Assignments, Blog, Database, Entity Broker, Messages, Forums, Worksite Setup/Site Setup and Wiki. This is an important milestone in the changes the community has been making in its release practices as the fixes selected for inclusion in the release targeted a subset of tools. The release is available in source, binary and demo versions from the main Sakai Subversion repository or from the Sakai website at http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/2.5.3/.

I’d like to thank all the QA and release team members that made this release possible: Bryan Batotich, Alan Berg, Angela Henry, Govind Iyengar, Matthew Jones, Huzefa Khalil , Peter Knoop, Michael Lockett, and Anthony Whyte.

Stepping Down from Sakai QA Director role

2008-09-04T17:32:00.000-07:00

As many already know, I've accepted a promotion at Indiana University and will be stepping down from my role as the Sakai Quality Assurance Director. If you're interested in the 'official community announcement' it can be found at http://www.nabble.com/Sakai-s-Quality-Assurance-Director-td19291371.html.

Working on the Sakai project as the QA Director has been an honor and a privilege. Over the past few years we’ve made serious strides in improving our processes and testing practices that have lead not only to increased quality in our software but an increased collective consciousness about what quality means to us as a community. I look forward to seeing the momentum carried forward under new leadership.

Many of you may be wondering my new role at Indiana is. The position is the Quality Assurance Team Lead / Project Planning Coordinator which is one of two team lead positions that were added to the IU team that works on Sakai. I’ll be doing a lot of similar things I did for Sakai on a local level, but I’ll also be involved with other activities, like project management. As Michael mentioned, my responsibilities in this role do include community engagement so I’m extremely pleased to say you’ll still be seeing and hearing from me!

I do want the community to be assured that there will be a smooth transition to the new QA Director and that the release and testing activity for 2.6 will remain a top priority for me until the new QA Director is hired.

Test case documentation

2008-09-04T17:18:00.000-07:00

This evening I was perusing Confluence and noticed a recent update for some ongoing work with Sakai Session clustering via Terracotta. The title referenced manual testing and of course caught my eye. I found one of the most awesome documents about the testing I've seen in confluence. This page details the environment, configurations, test cases and current results . . . . check it out at http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/UgCEAg. Two thumbs up Cris Holdorph!

Sakai Project Coordination - Day one am

2008-06-28T01:15:00.000-07:00

Interesting update from Linda Place, the lead of the Performance work group. Many of you might not know this but since the conference last summer in Amsterdam a small group has been working on a proof of concept for a community wide set of processes and practices for performance testing. this includes

provisioning of test environment - creation of sites and users. This is based off of work by Alan Berg
Use of open source tool (Grinder) to create test scripts
Baseline tests and results

Linda, Chris Kretler and Alan Berg will be holding a session that will include a demo Tuesday at 17:00 in Amphi 55A. If you're hear in Paris I encourage you to attend. For those of you not attending, I will blog afterward.

It just gets better and better

2008-05-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been feeling a little discouraged about what I perceived to be a lack of enthusiasm and dedication toward bettering our QA processes . It was a hot topic at the last conference, but there hasn't been a lot of wide discussion. Boy was I wrong! Things must have been simmering below the surface. Within the first hour of the project coordination meeting in St. Paul, MN there is serious agreement about incorporating unit and performance tests into the process as we explore the kernel extraction and separate release process. How cool!

Sakai just might be ditching that frumpy dress

2008-04-30T22:24:00.001-07:00

If you haven't seen MyCamTools yet you have got to check it out! For those of you familiar with igoogle, you'll be delighted to see that the folks at Cambridge have a working prototype where igoogle meets Sakai.

AWESOME!!! It's about time Sakai stopped wearing that frumpy dress and put on something a bit sexy. There are sweet little widgets that allow you to quickly add a file or post an announcement to any of your sites without further navigation. Users can pick and choose to make a highly personalized environment.

For those of you interested, there are a few more screen shots and a bunch of information on Confluence. If you happen to be here in Minnesota, definitely take the time to stop one of the guys from Cambridge for an in person demo.

Hot Diggity - earthquake in the midwest!

2008-04-18T03:17:00.000-07:00

This morning started out with unexpected excitement. Normally, I don't make it a habit to get up at 5:30 am but needed check on some system maintenance. I'm sitting on my couch, logging into Oncourse with both eyes barely open and I start to feel this tremor. I live in an older apartment building and the first thought that crosses my mind is "seriously! is this place going to collapse and good thing I'm on the top floor - I'll be at the top of the rubble." Guess what? I don't want to die!

The intensity increases . . . . my blinds are starting to swing, the wine glasses begin clicking and suddenly the whole building is shaking! By this point I'm onto the fact that it might be an earthquake but am still in disbelief that it's *really* an earthquake. Come on' I'm in Indiana! Eventually I shuffle over to a doorway. The shaking didn't last much long, but I could feel tremors I felt for a few minutes after. When it's all over, I'm still wondering if it really happened or if I just dreamed it.

Rest assured, I'm safe and don't see any damage :) For inquiring minds, Sakaiger and Sakaigress are safe but still reeling from their first earthquake experience :)

The USGS has got the 411 on this most unusual occurrence - http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2008qza6.html

2.5 Release and QA Happenings of late

2008-03-08T11:16:00.000-08:00

I'm back from a hiatus I took from posting to my blog and from here on out plan to be posting much more frequently. Between my last post and now life has pretty much focused on testing and preparing for the Sakai 2.5.0 release. Those of you familiar with the our past time lines, the testing cycle for 2.5 has been much longer - we're well past the 5 month mark. While this is a little longer than I'd like to see, this extra time has allowed us to refine our processes for the betterment of the release. When it's all said and done I believe well have a better tested release that folks can confidently install than ever before.

We're so close to releasing I can taste it! There was a last minute gotcha design bug with new functionality with the gradebook. The project team was able to quickly work with the community to determine a solution that wouldn't result in a substantial amount of time being added to the testing and release cycle. The speed in which the community can rally together to resolve a problem never ceases to amaze me. We should have the final release candidate to go on Monday and my hope is that the code will be good to go by mid-week. Once the release artifacts are built, 2.5.0 should be officially announced.

Then the community can turn it's attention to a 2.5.1 maintenance release . . . .

On a sad note, I learned last week that Margaret Petit's contract with Stanford is up. I'm fairly certain that Margaret predated my involvement in Sakai. She's been a great asset to the QA WG and contributed greatly to moving quality forward. To give you an idea of the impact she's had, she's filed 459 bugs (which btw, is more than I have!) and verified countless others. With all that knowledge and experience with Sakai, it is my hope that another institution snatches her up and that she is able to continue to work on the project.

K-12 Open Minds Conference- what an enlightening experience!

2007-10-14T07:14:00.000-07:00

October 9th-11th I had the opportunity to attend the K-12 Open Minds Conference, a conference that brings together teachers, technicians and educational leaders to share and explore the use of open source in K-12 teaching.

It's very apparent that the technology available today has changed the way students learn. It's something that I myself have experienced to some degress, but it's still an eye opener to take a step back and really reflect on all that has changed and what will be changing! The connectivity that exists opens up so many avenues for the exposure of information and collaboration - but how do we harness that so that it's meaningful?

One thing that struck me about this conference was the fact that the majority of the people that
attended were teachers. I learned a lot from these folks about what it is they currently do with technology and what it is they'd like to do. It make me realize that I haven't interacted with a lot faculty at the Sakai conferences. These interactions are critical in developing a system and the Sakai community should strive to make bring in more of this perspective.

The use of technology varied greatly. Some were new to open source and looking for solutions to replace proprietary software with heavy licensing fees while many were looking to explore the sharing of best practices. One session highlighted over 30 different open source or free resources and more were shared by the participants. There were a variety of resources used in the classroom that I hadn't ever heard of such as Google LitTrips and Celestia and it was really neat to learn about them . . . as someone that loves reading, I'm definitely going to be checking out the Google LitTrips further. My take away - keeping tabs on what's going on in primary and secondary education is very important as the students of tomorrow will have their expectations shaped by the experiences they have there.

Another aspect I found interesting is that teachers are not only using technology for the use of teaching pupils, but also to share lessons plans with resources like Teacher Tube. The professional development of teachers a very important aspect of the evolution of tech in learning. It's much easier for younger generations to pick up new technology given how ingrained it's become in society. In higher education hearing about an instructional technologist being among the staff is pretty common - in primary and secondary education these types of positions are less common and those that do exist are supporting entire schools or districts.

Not unexpected was widespread use of Moodle. In my conversations, many did not even know what Sakai was. I did spend some time talking to Lic. Douglas Galindo of the Universidad of Dr. Jose Matias Delgado in El Salvador. While this university is using Moodle, they've been following the progress of Sakai as an indicator of the health of open and community source software and are very encouraged by the progress Sakai has made. We had an interesting conversation about the challenges of making a smooth transition for learners as they progressed through their learning careers as well as supporting the teaching activities/workflows in different ways. This conversation (and many others) made me realize how much we have tool silos that force users into actions that probably aren't very natural.

Quick summary of what I took away from the conference -
1) Support the integration of resources. There is so much out there and there will be more and more as time progresses!
2) How can we change Sakai to break down these tool silo's and facilitate a meaningful flow of activities?
3) The need to not only support the teacher <> pupil education process but provide professional development avenues for instructors
4) Keeping tabs on what's going on in primary and secondary education is very important as the students of tomorrow will have their expectations shaped by the experiences they have there.
5) Work with well known standards so the data that is accumulated can traverse the learning landscape with learners.

Where to go in '07?

2007-01-07T12:44:00.000-08:00

2007. It's a new year and time when many are working on their resolutions. I however, like to use the new year as a time to evaluate and then set forth or adjust goals for the coming year. As I mentioned at the Sakai project planning meeting in Atlanta, my vision for 2007 is to foster a workgroup that is active all the time rather than just during the QA cycle for an upcoming release. This will enable the community to better speak to the level of quality with a release as well as to better document our process, grow our participation and develop the WG skill set.