The Mac Air is the first time in recent memory where I went to a computer with less. Less disk – less screen real estate, less plugs, and nicely – less weight.
Here are my notes.

Continue reading →

The OSP group was discussion options for workflow and Mark Breuker opened up the topic of using IMS Learning Design to solve workflow problems. While I have not discussed this much except with a few pals – using IMS LD as workflow a pet idea of mine.
So I wrote up this response.

Continue reading →

I just came up with that one and wanted to write it down. I am about to end my hippie phase of growing my hair long and go back to the short hair cut. So now I will once again match my pictures on the web. It is easier to get a haircut than to update all of my profile pictures around the web.

The MIT Open Courseware project is a success at producing reusable learning materials for public consumption. As the impact of Open Courseware is broadened and more institutions provide open courseware materials, we will need to find ways to organize dynamic learning around those materials involving participants inside classrooms, outside of classrooms, and a mixture of both. Specifically, we will need to create global learning communities and support the ability of their members to work through materials collaboratively. As part of an effort to explore possible next steps beyond Open Content, we are taking a novel approach to teaching university courses where all of the course materials and participant interactions are done in the open. In these courses, anyone can join and participate in the learning community utilizing Sakai. Course materials are produced and published immediately – each participant is presented with one of three views determined on the basis of their relationship to the university course. (1) A public view available to anyone with an Internet connection and a browser. These participants see all the course material, but do not see or participate in the discussion or email interactions. (2) A learning community member view is available to anyone (including the general public) using a University of Michigan Friend account to join the course site. These participants engage in the course materials and the interactive tools. (3) A student view is available to students formally enrolled in the class. The only difference between the student view and the learning community view is that the students have access to an assignments tool which allows the submission and grading of assignments and exams. This poster will describe our experience using this approach in a masters-level class and an undergraduate class, and discuss the implications of our experience for teaching future classes.
Charles Severance and Stephanie D. Teasley, University of Michigan

I got the following question:
I think I’m most interested in what “stretching Sakai” to be a portal
would look like, a clearer picture of what the challenges and
solutions would be. Do you know someone in the community who is
trying to take this tack?
Here is my answer.

Continue reading →

I am preparing to merge SAK-11544 into the trunk – I invite folks to take a look at the code and give a shout out if they see any “gotchas”.

Continue reading →

Open Source Learning Management systems like Moodle and Sakai are becoming an increasingly significant segment of the LMS market. Open Source systems are adopted at all levels from young children to higher education and life long learning. While it is nice to get software for free – the ultimate impact of these systems will be how they change our thinking about teaching with technology. Most of the commercial LMS systems are based on a very structured model of teaching and learning with technology from the late 1990’s. However products like Sakai and Moodle are increasingly pushed to function in a Web 2.0 / Facebook oriented world – where the learning is brought naturally into a student’s multi-tasking and very busy life at the right point in that student’s life. By allowing those that teach and use these systems to have greater influence over the capabilities of these systems – the open source systems naturally evolve toward the real needs of teaching and learning. Having two or more strong entries in the Open Source LMS space insures that both products continue to innovate over time. And in particular there is increasing cross-pollination of ideas in one community that naturally move into another community. Perhaps the Sakai community will think of an innovation first and then Moodle community will improve on it or vice versa. With open source philosophy at the core of the communities developing and maintaining these systems sharing of ideas and innovations in pedagogy is as natural as sharing source code. While each community is very proud of their particular value, these communities tend not to feel that any one community “owns” any one innovative idea.

I used Oracle for the first time in my life today – thanks to help from David Haines – it was not nearly as scary as I had imagined. David told me about henplus – which is the “vi” of database debugging tools – fits my style perfectly.
He walked me through my properties and getting connected to the database. Once connected – it felt a lot like any other database. Hey – put semicolons at the end.
The MailArchive paging code came together in three compiles. Here are some cool queries.
select * from ( select a.*, rownum rnum from ( select XML from MAILARCHIVE_MESSAGE where (CHANNEL_ID = ? ) order by MESSAGE_DATE desc ) a where rownum <= 20 ) where rnum >= 11
Note that the rows start from 1 – unlike the LIMIT in HSQL or MySql – where the rows start from zero. But all in all pretty straightforward.

Generally when you are doing podcasts using Sakai you end up doing uploads using webdav because the files are so large – they end up busing the single file upload limit in the Resources tool.
I have become increasingly unhappy with the Apple’s Web Dav client built into Mac OS/X 10.5. It seems to be always downloading all the time – I am guessing that perhaps my operating system is trying to show me little preview icons in my finder view – so it downloads 300MB of data each time I mount the Dav drive.
Whatever the cause – Mac’s incessant unnecessary downloading was making my uploads unreliable – so I switched to Goliath.
Goliath makes up loads much nicer – it is a simple tool – it only retrieves information when you do something – more like a smart FTP. The built in support for Dav is using DAVFS – which is faking a real disk using webdav. This leads to some extra load on the server.
However Goliath marks the Mime-Type of the file as text – Yikes! My students download the podcasts and see gibberish in their browsers or end up with files with a suffix of .txt and Quicktime won’t play them! Grrr.
The Sakai Resources tool comes to the rescue – thanks to a feature added for OSP a long time ago, you can control the MIME-type of an uploaded file.
Go to Resources – find the file – and in the Actions menu (yay Harriet, Jim and the whole resources 2.4 re-design team) – find the Edit Details option.
Scroll down and change the MIME Type to application / octet-stream – save the properties – and viola – browsers save them properly – players play them – they end up with the right suffixes. All is well.

This week was really dominated by Teaching so I was only able to slip a few hours in on the weekend to work on MailArchvie performance.
I pretty much unbroke the MailAction.java bits – mostly making the single message view work again with the new focus on not reading all the messages into memory.
My next steps are doing the Oracle variants of the database limit stuff and testing. Then I make an initial back-port to 2.4 and have Thomas do some testing for me. Then it is on to cleanup and final testing of the post 2.4 and post-2.5 branches.
Then it is time to move this toward trunk and clean up bits of the Storage API while I am at it.