I was asked by a reporter to comment on technology classrooms – my response got a little long so I figured I would put it here to keep it.

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Somehow this year I am more interested in football than usual. The playoff games are good and there are a lot of good teams who are on the brink of destiny. Also I work on lectures on my laptop during the games so it is not completely unproductive.
This morning there is a video clip of Terrel Owens crying a bit as he defends Tony Romo’s recent vacation to Mexico. Basically he says “back off my teammate – we lost as a team” and then he breaks up a bit in a tough manly way. He breaks up in a way that if you made fun of him – he would pound you into dust.
Here is my point – this is leadership. Terrell Owens is a veteran player – he knows what it is like to have the media ready to blame him for everything that went wrong.
Frankly for the Dallas Cowboys this has been a pretty good season – you don’t win the super bowl every year – and this year they did better than expected. For the media to define the season into a failure because of a close loss to a good team in the playoffs where Tony and the Cowboys played very well – but just game up on the slightly shorter end of the stick – would be a crime and not good for the Cowboys prospects next year.
So after the game, Terrell did what he knew he had to do. He did something that made sure that the attention was partially on Terrell and not exclusively on Tony for the next few days. As a veteran he stepped up and directed some of the media frenzy at himself to take some away from Tony. And it worked – CNN this morning talked more about Terrell than Tony.
And after a few days – no one will care. The media and fans will realize that this was a great season for the Cowboys and instead of looking for blame where there is none, they will get thinking about how to make next season better and supporting their quarterback. And Tony can learn from the loss and hopefully do better next year for the Cowboys and take them even further in the playoffs.
Class move Terrell.

I sent a note to the Sakai UI and dev lists for folks to take a look at my new frameset portal branch.
I put a copy of the note here as well.

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Michael asked a cool question in his blog about gadgets versus portlets.
http://mfeldstein.com/gadgets-instead-of-portlets/
My response is in Michael’s blog – I replicate it here as well.

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I like to use iShowU to record my screen – sometimes I do record system audio. iShowU uses Sound Flower to do this. Most of the time – iShowU properly disables SoundFlower when it is done – but sometimes it does not. This is what you do when SoundFlower is stuck on (this is Mac OS/X 10.5)
Preferences -> Sound -> Output
Switch the output back to your built in speakers.
You know this has happened when you try to change the volume on your mac and the mac refuses to change the volume and you see the little “international not” symbol in the little volume display that pops up.
This fix is also described at the Soundflower page:
http://www.cycling74.com/products/soundflower

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.

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gem install rails –include-dependencies -v 1.2.6
gem uninstall rails
Select gem to uninstall:
1. rails-1.2.2
2. rails-1.2.6
3. rails-2.0.2
4. All versions
> 3
Successfully uninstalled rails version 2.0.2
Oh yeah – this is cool http://rubyosx.rubyforge.org/

I am about done with the code for the frameset portal (SAK-12402) – the progress went nicely – I am pretty pleased with the results. Thanks to some timey prodding from Nick, I expanded this from just JSR-168 tools to make it available to all Sakai tools by a simple tool configuration option that can either be set in a tool registration file or dynamically by the tool as the tool runs.
I invented a neat feature where the portal uses frameset navigation as much as possible (only turned on by a property) – it is nice because I could quickly test lots of navigation sequences and work through click streams so as to make the frameset portal work reasonably well – even when it is used heavily.
My feeling is that this will start out with a just a few tools like IMS Tool Interoperability and the iFrame (Web Content) tool. It will simply seem like the portal navigation “minimizes” from time to time.
Off to write some documentation and a test plan.

And it is a *LOT* of fun. Branches are a way to store code you are fiddling with on the server instead of scattered around your home directory. It is also a great way to version control your hacking. Up to now I kept making tar files each time something worked and I had made progress.
I made branches for all my outstanding fiddling
o Frameless portal – functional – 70% complete – needs cleanup
o iFrame Portlet – functional – 50% complete – needs careful moving of features from web content tool
o Mail archive tool performance improvement – 10% complete – I have refactored code to make paging calls. But it does not really do paging. The real work is to move paging from MailArchiveAction into the service and this will require SQL hacking.
Here is how you make an SVN branch:
svn copy https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/mailarchive/trunk/ https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/mailarchive/branches/SAK-11544/ -m “Branch for Mail Archive Performance Improvement”
svn copy https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/web/trunk/ https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/web/branches/SAK-12563/ -m “Create branch for iframe portlet”
svn copy https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/portal/branches/SAK-12350/ https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/portal/branches/SAK-12402/ -m “Create branch for frameset portal”
This is so easy and fun – I cannot believe I did not know how to do this until today. I learned from this web page:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch04s02.html
I love coding over holiday break! Coffee, pajamas, and a cable modem!

I am working on what I call the frameset portal
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-12402
This allows a JSR-168 portlet in Sakai to request to be shown with no left navigation. This has applications for externally hosted tools and content – like the iframe tool and the IMS Tool Interoperability tool.
The way most LMS’s do this is by using a frame set. The LMS puts a little tiny nav bar in a frame at the top so the user can get back to the LMS and puts the content in a second frame that gets the rest of the screen. This uses a frameset instead of iFrames – so the usability is not too bad – of course the accessibility is not so good. But for content that lives in a URL – this is the only choice other than a popup. This is better then a popup in many people’s opinion (and mine as well).
I think that this will allow publisher content to look really nice in Sakai.

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