Tricking out my Sakai Sites with Live Chat from hab.la

Well I have totally tricked-out my Sakai course sites for this semester using the new “htmlInclude” feature in Sakai! Last semester, I used I used Sakai’s pseudo-hierarchy feature to link my main course sites to the Discussion sites for each GSI (Grad Student Instructor). Now I have added real-time chat from hab.la. I am making use of a new feature SAK-15097 – the ability to add HTML in to a background document.
So I added hab.la’s JavaScript based chat to my course sites so students can find me and talk live to me. Hab.la augments presence and allows the instructor to be as available as they want to be to their class – without adding the whole class to their buddy list. Here is how it looks to the student:


The chat window appears when you come to the site. If the instructor is available you can chat live with the instructor without leaving the site – you can even navigate between pages in the site and keep the chat up. The instructor actually sees as the student moves between pages (it would be nice if Sakai had more rest like URLs :) ).
You also can see the hierarchy bit as the SI502 staff is a sub-site under SI502.
This is a really cool feature and my guess is hab.la is just the beginning – you could google analytics or really any widget that was smart enough to float over top of content.
The feature is in trunk but missed the 2.6 freeze. There is a 2-5-x patch in the JIRA – this is what is running at Michigan in production. I think that it should go into the 2-5-x branch and into the 2-6-x branch – it is a safe, simple patch with no performance impact – and it uses a site property (sakai:htmlInclude) – so unless you set the property, the UI is completely unaffected.
I am working with the folks who own hab.la to experiment with better integration with Sakai – so you could see the course and user name. I am also talking with the hab.la folks to see if they might sell a school a dedicated hab.la server so the data did not have to leave the schools “owned” servers – if a school wanted to deploy this on a large scale.
I need a big thank you to John and Matt and the folks at UM who got this into the UM production so I could play this semester – I owe you folks a beer.
If you have any questions or interest – let me know.