In my recent visit to Spain (15-Dec-2007 - 20-Dec-2007) my primary intention was to work technically with the multi-university Campus project building interoperability between Sakai and Moodle using OKI OSIDs and the Campus Project OKI bus. I am very excited about this project because as far as I know this is the first time an organization has decided *not* to choose between Sakai and Moodle - but instead - they decided to use both Sakai and Moodle.
This is a great challenge and there is a talented and well funded team in place making very good progress. As with any time you venture into uncharted technical waters - time becomes and issue. The teams are working under a lot of time pressure - so I wanted to come and visit as soon as classes were over to see how / if I could help. I scheduled five days in order to visit all of the Sakai universities in Cataelonia - Lleida, Valencia, and LaSalle in Barcelona. Previously I had only visited Lleida.
Saturday December 15
Arrived at noon from London Luton Airport. Met with Lluis Vincent of Las Salle University, his wife, and Edward and Xavier to have lunch and dinner and plan the visit. It was cold, windy, and raining - we had great fun - we went through a cathedral filled with people taking their chidren to a nativity display and went to a christmas market - I learned some Catalan traditions - The tradition about striking a particular tree with a stick and then the tree "emits" presents. I also learned about another interesting tradition described at www.caganer.com.
At about 11, Edward and Xavier left us - and we went to Luz de Gas (www.luzdegas.com) - there was a great band named Talking Rabbit and free drinks because the bartender was from the same town as Lluis.
Sunday December 16
Got up and took a train to Valencia - this is a very beautiful trip with mountains on one side and the Mediterranean Sea on the other side and much of the trip goes through orange groves and small towns. I did not see much of it because I was mostly sleeping due to the previous late night at the disco.
When I arrived in Valencia - my hotel was downtown and it was awesome - very modern architecture. An awesome bathroom - and free Internet. The Valencia downtown has a river that is no longer a river - because it was diverted and the river is now a park with very modern buildings that house concert halls and museums. I had a few hours before dinner at 9PM so I went to the science museum and the Titanic museum.
I had dinner with Miguel Ferrando (CIO), Aristóteles Cañero (User Support), and Raúl Mengod (Sakai lead at UPV). It was a very nice dinner and we talked about the UPV installation of Sakai and planned Monday's visit. Afterward Miguel and Raul took me on a brief tour of the city showing me the old and new sections and the old walls including a wall where marks from Napolean's cannonballs can still be seen.
Monday December 17
We started with a demonstration of the unique features of the Sakai instance running at UPV. They are the largest installation in Europe with over 40,000 users. They have invested in further internationalization of Sakai because there is a legal requirement for the students to be able to pick the language of their choosing - and everything (including tool names) must change to the new language. Valencia has done significant work on Samigo to fix issues and problems and is now happy with Samigo - they have a great relationship with Stanford and have been giving Stanford their fixes which have been put into the trunk of Samigo.
Another very interesting approach that they have taken is to use Oracle's web toolkit to make simple tools. They write the tools in Oracle and then make a variation of the Web Content Tool which knows how to construct the URL to Oracle. These tools are protected by single sign on. The tools manipulate Sakai data tables directly- something that can be done as long as great care is taken. Typically each tool does a very simple task - users do not even know these tools are not part of Sakai. A clever and quick solution to local problems.
They are starting to look at 2.5 and approximating the effort it will take. They will do two steps - first they will work to get many of their fixes and improvements into trunk. Then they will take a version of 2.5 and back-port their patches - then they will apply their local modifications to the 2.5+ version. This is a very clever approach which makes it easier for them to upgrade to future versions of Sakai and we all benefit.
We also looked at one of their very clever lecture capture technologies - Polimedia. As you well know I am a lecture capture geek so I found this very interesting. The particular cleverness of Polymedia is that UPV has 6 small studios, each operated by a single person. Faculty book the studios to make modules - the studios are very popular. The pedagogy is to record 5-15 minute segments that are reusable - these become part of a library that the instructor can pull from. My own thinking is that these videos might be part of a lecture - but not the whole lecture. I will experiment with this approach next semester.
I already recorded my first lecture (Introduction to Ruby) at UPV. It was great fun. I wish I had started the lecture with this joke: "Hi, I am a Mac and this is my PowerPoint". You will get the joke when you take a look at the video.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/media.php?id=85
During the rest of the day, we visited the Cave 3D environment and a novel approach to 3D HD cameras. The visit finished with Aristóteles taking us on a tour of their campus television station - it was a very efficient operation wit a strong focus on producing local content on a regular basis. You know me - I am always fascinated with media stuff :)
At the end of the day I took the train back to Barcelona.
Tuesday December 18
I spent the day at LaSalle. In the morning I met with the Open Campus Project team to discuss technical aspects. First met with I met with Xavier Gumara, Edward Cespdes, and Maiye who make up the LaSalle Open Campus Project technical team. They are working on a SCORM engine, a and QTI statistical analysis tool, and a synchronous graphical virtual classroom which emulates a physical classroom. After a demonstration of the LaSalle Open Campus tools we met with the Campus Project lead architects - Pablo Casaro and Francesc Santanach - we reviewed the symmetry of the OKI bus - I was also introduced to some of the technical approaches they have been using to help speed development. There are a set of tests called the "Dummy OSIDs" that allow work to be done independently.
Later in the morning I gave my talk to the faculty and staff at LaSalle. Here is the Url of that talk:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/talks/2007/2007_12_17_lasalle.ppt
It was interesting for me to talk about Sakai from a teacher perspective. I had a lot of good interaction with the group after the talk - since Sakai is in pilot at LaSalle and they are also looking at Moodle I was asked about comparing the two products and projects.
After the talk we went to lunch with some of the influential folks in teaching and learning on the LaSalle campus. One topic we talked about was the importance of portfolios in the upcoming changes for the Bologna process.
I spent the rest of the afternoon with the LaSalle technical team. For dinner we went to a bar named Los Toreros - it was chosen by Maiyeeiia - we had great Sangria and the food was really good - my new favorite restaurant in Barcelona.
Wednesday December 19
Alex Balleste picked me up and took me to Lleida. At Lleida, the first thing we did was to review Alex's work on the Campus project - building the Sakai version server side of the OKI bus for the Campus project. While there is a lot of work to do and very tight timelines - the OKI work is very mature. I met the new CIO for Lleida. For lunch we had some very very delicious baked snails.
At lunch we met with the Dean of the Informatics at Lleida and we explored the notion of an exchange program between Lleida and the Michigan School of Information.
After lunch I had to catch the bus back to Barcelona.
Since this was my last evening in Barcelona Lluis and I went to dinner at Cafe Viena to sample the best sandwich in the world:
http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/travel/15Bites.html
Afterwards we went to the Luz De Gas again (http://www.luzdegas.com/). Because Lluis is well-connected, we got a tour of the backstage and later the Mayor of Barcelona came backstage as well and we got to meet the mayor and his press corps. It was a great time - pictures start at:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2007/12/index.php?img=20-12-07_211107_04.jpg
Summary
This was a great trip - I was glad to get to visit Valencia since they have done so much for Sakai. I learned a lot about the Campus project - they are making excellent progress even though they have very tight timeline.
I really enjoyed my meetings at the campuses - particularly now that I can talk from the perspective of a teacher using Sakai.
Probably the biggest thing that the three campuses (LaSalle, Lleida, and Valencia) have in common is the need for a portfolio system - while they might be able to begin some experiments with OSP - my guess is that really meet the needs of the Bologna process - significant new functionality will be needed.
Posted by csev at January 7, 2008 07:03 PM