JSR-168 support

Thanks to a lot of work by Ian Boston and David DeWolf we have support for JSR-168 in Sakai.
I just finished fiddling around with it and wrote some documentation. Here are my notes about it…
I still need to work more on this documentation and play more with developing portlets- but the basic support seems solid and there.

Continue reading →

A Really Good Day – IMS Tool Interoperabiltiy v2.0

I am at the IMS meeting at the Oracle Conference Center here in San Francicso. I have decided to focus my IMS energy on IMS Tool Interoperability Version 2 for the next year or so.
I have visited a lot of Sakai partners in the past year and one thing comes up all the time as an important use case. You don’t want to choose a single LMS system – you want to be able to mix and match from whatever system and what ever components you need.
This is like a holy grail – like a quest – and some have tried and come up short – SUNY is a good example where they insisted that hte “future is now” and ultimately ran out of steam and “lived in the present” and went with Angel (a good choice by the way).
Take a look at this response I wrote to SUNY over a year ago about the perils of this approach and why we need TI v 2.0 SO BADLY:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/papers/2006/2006_01_07_suny_rfq_response.pdf
So Tool Interoperability is a quest! It is a challenge – it is a mountain to be climbed – it is a standard to be developed. It is the search for the holy grail of LMS technology.
So, yesterday was a good day – sitting with the assembled knights (brave lady and gentleman knights BTW) from Blackboard, D2L, Angel, Wimba, Microsoft, and others it simply felt great to get my hands a little dirty.
The TI group has been meeting with great leadership from Chris Moffat of Microsoft for some time – but this is the first time I have joined the quest. The group is finishing the charter and I *hope* can get off the dime.
I wil be frank (please don’t tell anyone I said this) – I think that the key for TI2 is to come up with some web services for things like File Manager, Schedule Manager Mail System, etc etc and lets *Standardize* these things. This way, we can start writing tools that actually have rich functionality that run outside the LMS. I think that we just need to look at the web services in Angel, D2L, or Blackbaord – and pick something, clean it up, build up consensus and than standardize on it.
Hey – this is what hapenned for TI 1.0 (inspired by PowerLinks) and IMS Common Cartridge (inspired by Blackboard’s import format). Lets cut to the chase and do it for TI2.0 – lets find some successfull commercial approach and make it the standard so we can all implement the same thing and get interoperating.
Sorry for the outburst – I am just so excited – at the beginning it is all potential and no one has to put in the hard work :)
I also apologize in advance if I come to visit your site and I keep finding ways to bring up IMS TI in conversation – because I think that if TI2.0 is successful, it could be this is the most transformative technical achievement in the teaching and learning field.
Sheesh – I cannot stop talking about it.

Getting Velocity Portal to Work from Trunk

1) Check out trunk
2) check out
svn co https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/portal/branches/charon_velocity_portal/
vi pom.xml
– <module>portal</module>
+ <module>charon_velocity_portal</module>
vi osp/pom.xml
– <module>portal</module>
+ <!– <module>portal</module> –>
<module>presentation</module>
mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true -Dmaven.tomcat.home=/Users/csev/dev/apache-tomcat-5.5.20/ clean install sakai:deploy

Cool Saying / Neat Quote

I used this quote in a recent note where someone (one more time) suggested that a vote be the way we allocate volunteer resources in Sakai (setting me aflame as usual).
I apologize in advance to its somewhat offiensive nature :)
Some in America (myself included) look at “votes” as the mindless polling of poorly educated individuals who have been programmed by watching endless commercials interspersed in between soft-core porn reality shows – so that we can have the perception that there is democracy

BlackBoard Patent – New Development

Blackboard has made a legal non-revokable non-assert patent pledge which formalizes their position on patents with respect to open source course management systems like Moodle, ATutor, Sakai, and many others. For many months Bb has said “they had no intention to sue universities” and the community has asked Bb to put that in writing – this pledge is “in writing”. :)
The patent pledge is available at:
http://www.blackboard.com/patent
Sakai and Educause have prepared a statement which should hit the web sites of Sakai and Educause soon. I attach the final version below.

Continue reading →