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).

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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.

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.

Update: Please see my New post (with video) describing the one-question Mneme test

This is my checklist to to make a one question test for my course in Mneme/Test Center. 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.

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. Here is the text I use for my question:

This entire test is in a file which you edit. You are to download the test and insert your answers to the questions in the document and then save and upload the document. This file should open in any word processor. When you upload the file you can upload text file, Word Document, or PDF.

When you have finished the exam – come back and upload your modified document as an attachment to this question below.

For the text Download here, you use the editor to turn this into a link and upload a copy of the exam document with no answers as the linked document.

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.

The next step is to check the test to see if it works using the Publish and Test Drive.

The last time I tried to test drive (December 2009) – I was unsuccessful – I have three possible reasons: (a) Mneme was simply broken, (b) some bit of permission is not correctly configured at UM, or (c) because I have admin power and Mneme gets confused when it sees someone who is both an Instructor and an Admin. In December 2009, I simply gave up and knowing I had properly authored the test. So I published the test at the right time and things were fine.

Hopefully this works better for a normal “Instructor” – or perhaps some upgrade to Mneme made things work better – I hope that Publish and Test Drive works for you.

I am really looking forward to the next version of Mneme/Test Center which makes this use case much easier because it is less obsessed with regards to always making a pool for everything.

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.

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

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