Dr. Chuck's Web Log

I Love Cyberduck (WebDav Client for Mac OS/X)

A few Months back - I was grousing about WebDav - like many people, I was trying to use Sakai/CTools to handle my Podcasts - which were usually 50-100MB. These files cannot be uploaded - but they can go in via webdav. Seth told me about Cyberduck for Mac OS/X from www.cyberduck.ch and I have been in heaven ever since. Cyberduck supports dav and sftp - and gives me book marks and drag/drop - all in all wonderful. And Cyberduck works wonderfully with Sakai.

I highly recommend Cyberduck to any Mac user using WebDav and Sakai (www.cyberduck.ch).

The long story is that the Sakai webdav is behind the times. Sakai's WebDav is based on Tomcat 4's Webdav - The Tomcat WebDav it was probably built and tested with the WebDav clients of 2001. I wrote the initial version of Sakai's WebDav back in 2002. Chuck Hedrick of Rutgers has put a lot of effort as well as many other folks in the community have worked on improving Sakai's WebDav over the years. We have dealt with a lot of issues and kept it sort-of working over the years but it is just impossible to keep up with the insane changes to the built-in WebDav clients for Windows and Mac OS/X. Each new release of these desktop operating systems somehow alters their WebDav clients in a way that causes them to not work with Sakai - Grrr.

Sometimes a few developer heros show up and debug the new clients with protocol analyzers and get things clunking along with the new built-in clients.

The problem is that the Mac OS/X Webdav client is there mostly for Mac to talk to MobileMe and the Windows WebDav client is there to talk mostly to SharePoint. So they add trick features here and there and focus most of their testing on *their* client and *their* server.

In order to use Sakai - we just need to get off the upgrade merry-go-round that happens with these built-in clients. Instead, go with a separate WebDav client like Cyberduck. The motivation for these clients is different - they want to work with all the WebDav servers - so they make more conservative use of the WebDav protocols. Also these folks test across multiple systems so they catch subtle incompatibilities and find a way to work with both systems.

I tried Goliath on the Mac - but it is just too old and clunky and has not been actively updated. Cyberduck is the answer on the Mac - I don't use a PC for teaching so I don't know what to do on a PC

P.S. Once of the great wins in moving to Jackrabbit in 3akai is the fact that we will get a brand-new super-fast and fully compliant webdav - written, tested, and maintained by the Jackrabbit team. Yay!

Pirate Story Hoax - Michael Feldstein's Blog

Michael wrote a cool blog post about a pirate hoax featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here is Michael's post:

http://mfeldstein.com/the-pirate-hoax/.

The CHE story is like a rerun - a history professor has his students put up a fake Wikipedia page and then try to spam the world with enough incoming links to the point where it has enough credibility to mislead some main-stream folks. At that point the history professor stops the "experiment" and writes an article about how "shocking" this is. Yawn!

Michael rightly characterizes this as "vandalism" as it goes against everything Wikipedia stands for and violates several of Wikipedia policies (which these students and their professor agreed to when they joined Wikipedia).

It is a great post - please read it. My response is below.

Michael, I completely agree with your article. This is very similar to a number of similar titillating stories where some person did something wrong or stupid on purpose - got away with it - and then call a press conference as if there are some sort of "genius". All systems where humans are involved are inherently imperfect. It amazing me how much energy is put into attacking Wikipedia from many angles and it is also amazing to me how much intelligent people who are otherwise quite rational - have a deep seated fear of Wikipedia. I think that the source of this fear of wikipedia is that it is a Bazaar - not a Cathedral. Folks like professors have spent their whole life to get to a position where their position (at the front of the class) gives them "authority by position" - they have earned their authority (tenure) and it cannot be taken away from them. Truly democratic efforts like Wikipedia do not respect titles such as "Full Professor" and Wikipedia does not give special voting privileges to Full Professors. These people with fancy titles prefer a structure where those "with a title" can override that without a title by fiat. Those who have earned their "Cathedral Membership Level 26" card generally prefer that things be done "Cathedral-style" because then their hard-earned membership card has some value. In the Bazar, everyone is a "Level 1" - and if you stop contributing - you move to "Level 0". Those of us who are Bazar-dwellers accept this as "how things should be". We are regularly visited by Cathedral-citizens who try to tell us the value of membership cards and and when Bazar-dwellers say "no thanks" - the Cathedral-citizens move into "discredit the Bazar" mode - and claim that they are doing it in the name of the "greater good" and that they are "protecting everyone" from the terrible Chaos of the Bazar. Ah well - the beat goes on.

Writing a book on Google AppEngine

This week I am pretty geeked that I heard from my editor at O"Reilly that my (almost written) book about programming the Google AppEngine was approved. I want to have the first draft all done by January 6 - before classes start.

I already have about 2/3 of the book done in first draft from materials I developed last semester teaching SI539. So now I am in a dead-sprint over the holidays to crank out about 75-80 more pages to send the book into first-draft review in early January.

You can look at the book at http://www.appenginelearn.com/chapters/toc.htm to see what has been written so far.

So this is great news but I will be chained to my keyboard for much of the holiday. I will be much happier when the first draft is truly done.

Checklist for One Question Mneme Test

This is my checklist to to make a one question test for my course in Mneme. I do this a lot and I find myself making one little mistake and things are messed up because you can't fix a test once published.

Hopefully by writing this checklist I won't make as many mistakes. Please don't use this checklist for your class unless you do one question essay tests - it is not intended as documentation for my blog reader - it is only a checklist for me to keep me from making mistakes.

Add new Pool - set the point value that you want for the whole test. There is a way to change the points on a pool - I just couldn't find it when I was in a hurry - so I just blast the one question pool and start over.

Add a question to the pool - paste in your question text. Make sure to proof this text and any attachments carefully - again hard to change later.

Make sure to "Select Attachments Only" *before* saving the question.

Then "Done" to save the question to the pool.

Then Select "Assessments" and then "Add" make a new Assessment.

Put in a title - the good news here is that the title can be the same as an Assessment that you archived so if you are doing this to fix a typo on the exam, you can republish later (with only a loss of any submitted grades at that point).

Then press "Add Manual Select"

Leave Part Title Blank. Press "Select Questions".

Pick the single question from the pool you just made. And press "Done". Press "Done" again to finish editing the Assessment.

Then immediately press the Publish icon (the little gear). I know we don't want to publish the test - we want to set some details of the test which are only shown on the Publish screen - we will *actually* publish later.

In Publish - Leave the open date blank - we will come back to this later. Set the Due Date and Close Date to your deadlines. Set Timed to "3:00" Set Manual release. Check Honor pledge. Then at the bottom of the Publish screen press "Save" - not "Publish" because we want to test drive it before we lose the ability to make any changes.

Now press "Test Drive" at the top. Do not be alarmed when it says that your test is "ready to begin" or it says it has has an infinite number of tries. Since you did not really publish it yet - this information is not accurate and can be ignored. Yes this is misleading and scary - but folks assure me that you you can safely ignore it. Then test-drive your newly minted assessment.

Test drive checklist: (1) make sure that the downloaded file is what you want, (2) make sure that the "Choose file" and "Upload" are actually there. (3) Upload something as your answer and press "Finish". (4) Then press "Review" to simulate grading. (5) Check that the points are as you like and you should see the uploaded "answer".

If this all checks out go back to "Assessments" and click again on the little gear icon (we will be publishing this time). Change the open date to whenever you want it to open - everything else should be right - but check it anyways. At the end press "Publish" - to completely lock the test, pool, and questions and make the test available to the students and impossible to change.

You should see a little green check near the publish (gears) icon instead of the gear without the green check.

Click on Grading to double verify that it is open for business.

If during the test you find you made a grievous typo or perhaps you forgot to add the option to upload an attachment to a question - don't waste time trying to fix it - you can't - the test is locked.

This is the recovery process:

First un-publish the test so no more students can take it. The change the name of the test to something like "SI539 - Final Exam (with typo)" - Note the students names who took the test with the typo so you can send apology notes to them.

Then start fresh. Delete the pool - delete the question - get rid of everything. When you make the new assessment you can name it "SI539 Final Exam" since you renamed your previous exam.

One good thing is that you can (if you so choose) simply request the students who already took the test - re-upload their answer - since they effectively get a new three hour window - they can start the question and immediately re-upload. This approach depended on whether you had a lot of students take the test before you caught the typo/error. Alternatively those students are just hand-graded form the old copy- but you need to make sure to place their grades in the new test - so the students can see their grades.

Hopefully with this checklist, I should be able to get my Mneme exams entered properly the first time and reduce my need to apologize to the students.

Sakai Board Elections

By now, everyone has seen the Sakai Board election slate at:

Sakai Board Candidates

Avid readers of my blog will recall my rant about having not having any commercial members elected in this round:

Editorial Position: Sakai Foundation Board Members should be from Higher Educatiion

To summarize - I am not "anti-commercial" - I just think that giving 1-2 board seats to a commercial partners does not end up doing a good job "representing commercial interests". For the company that gets a board seat, *their* commercial interests are well represented - but different companies have *very different* interests in Sakai. I made the case that we needed a way for *all* commercial partners to participate in strategic discussions - not just the lucky one that gets elected to the board.

My feeling is that academic board members - whilst they may have subtle differences in local agenda and needs - there is far more commonality than disagreement - and with 6-7 academic representatives - we will hopefully have most of the main perspectives represented.

Back to my point...

That said, I want to talk a bit about the slate of nominees. This is a great bunch of folks! The nominating committee has assembled a great set of nominees - like open source somehow tends to accumulate some of the best technical talent - the folks who are nominated are pretty great in terms of commmunity leadership talent. If I were ever to want to form a different non-profit board - this group of folks would make a damn fine founding board.

I am pleased to see some of the leaders from the top contributing schools (John Norman - Cambridge and Stephen Marquard - University of Capetown). Both have contributed a large amount of technical leadership, technical resources, and community leadership and community building. You can see in the visualization of Sakai activity that both UCT and Cambridge are strong long-term contributors to Sakai and also are increasing their commitment to Sakai at this time.

Maggie Lynch is a teacher and represents the teacher perspective - the recent successful regional meeting at VA Tech shows how badly we need to voices of teachers in our thinking. Funny - some teachers actually *like* Sakai - while all us tech folks always want to dramatically change and improve Sakai - because it is our "pride and joy" - sometimes stuff that just works - is also mighty nice. Also perhaps we need to separate the UX complaints between "transition complaints" that are effectively "I am pissed cause I lost one feature from the last LMS we had" - to real UX complaints that actually lead to improved software functionality like "I have tried as hard as I can try with this new software and while I like most of it - this little thing needs fixing". Again - a teacher perspective is badly needed to balance the overwhelming tech and commercial perspectives that currently "own" community direction and thinking.

Speaking of Virginia Tech, John Moore has made himself available - John has been a solid leader and contributor to Sakai and other open source projects from the beginning. The recent teacher's workshop at VA Tech is hopefully the beginning of a whole new set of contributions that will greatly richen our community.

Both Per Wising of Stockholm and Sean Mehan of University of the Highlands and Islands bring a much needed viewpoint from the international community. Sakai has been too US-centric for too long - the increasing technical leadership from Cambridge and increasing participating and leadership from folks like Per and Sean will lead the Foundation to the right perspective for the whole community - where the growth will increasingly happen outside the US.

Both Per and Sean also have the advantage that they have been involved in Sakai for a "long time" - but they were not involved in Sakai "from the beginning". Those of us who were in Sakai at the beginning have a lot of baggage (myself included). While some baggage might be counted as "valuable experience", most baggage is just baggage and not helpful in forming the right vision for the future of the product and the community. Both Per and Sean came into the community after the (somewhat explosive) initial formation of Sakai - they came into the Sakai community with eyes-wide-open - they could see the what was right and what was wrong with the product and community - and not always viewing it through the foggy lenses of living through the experience (like I and many others do).

I am glad that I am not voting. I do think that we should *all* vote for John Norman to continue for three years - Cambridge is so essential to the future of Sakai - I think that we should show John the love in our votes. But for my second choice - it is so painful to have so many good choices. I wish we could vote for 3-4 people this round - but ah well at least we are choosing amongst great alternatives.

Good luck to the voters and candidates.

Pocket Digital Audio Recorder

Someone asked the following question - so I answered it.

On Dec 7, 2008, at 12:05 AM, Matt Hampel wrote:

I'm searching for a small digital audio recorder that uses common media formats and connects to Macs without extra software. Do you have a favorite you can recommend?

Thanks,
Matt

My Answer:

Yes - I love the Sansa MP3 Players as voice recorders:

http://go.shopsansa.com/content/clip

They have good sound and record into compressed WAV files - The clip clips to your lapel like a microphone. You can get them at Best Buy off the shelf.

They are just a USB drive on the mac - so it is drag and drop - you do have to convert from WAV to MP3 before putting them up for podcast - I use the software called "Switch" for that to convert from WAV to MP3.

There is something weird w.r.t the mac and Sansa - at least the older model Sansa that I have and use daily - when you eject the player's disk it re-mounts instead of staying ejected - maybe this has been fixed in later models. My workaround is to do my copy/delete/empty trash - eject the disk - let it remount the disk and then just yank it out and tolerate the warning.

Note: I do not use the Sansa as anything other than an Audio recorder. I don't leave it plugged into my Mac - I just plug it in, copy data and unplug it. I actually charge the Sansa using a Wall USB charger (for my ipod). I use an iPod for my music and Sansa only for my audio recording.

/Chuck