EDUCAUSE | Sakai

Blackboard Customers Consider Alternatives

ckeller — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:57:32 -0500

Open-source software for course management poses market challenge.

A Bridge Between Blackboard and Open Source?

ckeller — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:57:22 -0500

"Blackboard, the dominant player in course management software, has the ability to inspire devotion and, for the more fervid open-source adherents, not a little contempt. So today’s announcement may cause a stir among those more apt to liken Blackboard to the devil than a gentle giant: The company is partnering with Syracuse University to develop a way to integrate Blackboard with Sakai, one of the primary open-source alternatives."

Course Management Systems: A Change on the Horizon?

drupal — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:37:33 -0500

Course management systems provide many features that enhance teaching and learning. Choosing one from among the many systems available is a major decision and commitment for any institution. The best way to evaluate a CMS is a semester-long test to ensure that both instructors and students gain a deep understanding of its features and limitations. Currently we are conducting a CMS project in which three platforms are running simultaneously: Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai. The project will evaluate the usability/management for each. This presentation will discuss the challenges and lessons learned during our project.

Dynamics of Supporting Sakai Through Local and Global Collaboration

gdobbin — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:06:36 -0500

This ECAR research bulletin discusses the adjustments that the Indiana University information technology organization made, and continues to make, in order to support membership in Sakai. It has been said that supporting Sakai can seem like trying to change a tire on a moving car. As co-founder of and active participant in the Sakai collaboration, the effects of IU’s decision—the unexpected, the challenging, and the delightful—are discussed in terms of the intra- and interuniversity realities of highly collaborative efforts.

Citation for this work: Goodrum, David, Jan R. Holloway, Anastasia S. Morrone, Lance Speelmon, and Elizabeth A. Van Gordon. “Dynamics of Supporting Sakai Through Local and Global Collaboration” (Research Bulletin, Issue 11). Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 2008, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Traversing the LMS terrain

ckeller — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:37:29 -0600

With the emergence of strong open source contenders in the Learning Management System (LMS) arena, many schools are evaluating whether to stay with one of the commercial LMS products such as Blackboard/WebCT or moving to one of the open source solutions which are free to use, but offer no corporate support. There are many factors contributing to such a decision beyond price including migration from a current LMS, technical and faculty support and buy in. In the end, it is a decision that an institution needs to be well informed to make.

Beyond What's In It for Me: Sharing Sakai

drupal — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:38:51 -0600

The Appalachian College Association (ACA) LAMP initiative is the sixth-largest production implementation of Sakai in the world, based on user counts on Sakai's Web site. This session will share how a consortium of 36 small, private Appalachian colleges built a successful learning management and collaboration community.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Mara Hancock, ETS Associate Director of Learning Systems at UC Berkely.

gbayne — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:57:20 -0600

In this 17 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Mara Hancock, Associate Director for UC Berkeley's Educational Technology Services department. Educational Technology Services promotes and supports the effective integration of technology in teaching, learning and communication at the University of California, Berkeley. We are dedicated to service, partnership, and innovation.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Michael Korcuska, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation.

gbayne — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:13:19 -0600

In this ten minute podcast, we feature an interview with Michael Korcuska, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation. Sakai Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the community and development of Sakai, a course management and collaboration system for higher education.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Mark Notess, Development Manager & Usability Specialist at Indiana University

gbayne — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:47:36 -0600

In this 12 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Mark Notess, Development Manager & Usability Specialist at Indiana University. He is involved in several online learning and research tool development projects including the Variations 3 Digital Music Library Project, and Integrating Licensed Library Resources with Sakai. He also co-authored an article with Lisa Lorenzen-Huber entitled, "Online Learning for Seniors: Barriers and Opportunities". He spoke with Carie Windham at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference in Seattle, Washington.

E07 Podcast: Implementing, Supporting, and Maintaining Sakai

kellywalker — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:58:20 -0600

This 49-minute podcast recorded during the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference features Lance Speelmon, Manager Online Development, Indiana University System speaking on "Implementing, Supporting, and Maintaining Sakai."

The session abstract:

Learn how Indiana University has successfully implemented the world's largest installation of the Sakai open source collaborative learning environment on eight campuses statewide. This presentation will cover migration from an enterprise legacy system, tiered support model, virtualized hardware solutions, source code management techniques, and balancing local needs with community-driven development.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Alex Wirth-Cauchon, from the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

gbayne — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:47:50 -0600

In this 20 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Alex Wirth-Cauchon, Participant Relations Manager for the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE). This interview was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference in Seattle, Washington.

Alex Wirth-Cauchon is Participant Relations Manager for NITLE. In that role he attends NITLE's relationships with participating colleges and partner organizations and builds new relationships with interested organizations and campuses. He serves as a first point of contact for inquiries and expressions of interest from participating colleges. In addition, he advises senior staff regarding the needs and interests of participating colleges and the usefulness of NITLE services and programs to them.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Per Wising

kellywalker — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:37:05 -0600

In this 8-minute podcast, we feature an interview with Per Wising, Product Manager, Stockholm University. He discusses open source software development and the state of cyberinfrastructure in Sweden.

Into the Frying Pan: Lessons Learned Deploying and Supporting Sakai in a Liberal Arts Environment

drupal — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 11:04:17 -0600

In the summer of 2006, Mount Holyoke implemented Sakai, an open source learning management system, to replace WebCT and provide diverse capabilities through a single portal. This presentation will cover planning, deployment, and transition of users and materials. The discussion will particularly focus on lessons learned including successes, challenges, and vision for future development.

Implementing, Supporting, and Maintaining Sakai

drupal — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:42:40 -0500

The quest for sustainability in open courseware

pault — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 11:43:27 -0500

I've been reflecting recently on the subject of open courseware and, more specifically, OpenCourseWare following the keynote for the Sakai conference in Amsterdam delivered confidently and enthusiastically by Hal Abelson (a podcast is available). In this post I'll briefly recap some of the core aspects as I understand them and then go on to explore this area, based on personal experiences and ideas I've been formulating at Oxford.

Abelson took a broad view, inviting the audience to go back 25 years and defined programming as a "novel formal medium for expressing ideas." Against that, he got us to consider the aspirations and expectations that we might have had then, encapsulating this in 3 predictions for 25 years thence (i.e. today):

a global encyclopaedia
TCP/IP global
collaborative educational resources

It's the third that has yet to be properly delivered. Starting from consideration of why not, he then developed the rationale leading to the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative and the more recent Creative Commons Learn (ccLearn).

Abelson described OCW and ccLearn as means to building infrastructure for sharing academic pursuits, covering platforms and materials in Sakai, policy structure and media structure, designed in such a way as to protect academic values. The need to beware certain kinds of commercial activities was drilled into the audience: such concerns are, he argued, keen on monopolising and overcharging us. So, in the face of impending monopoly, it was argued that we need OCW, shared repositories etc, in order to be taken seriously at national and international levels. The IPR issue highlights a tension between the commercial and academic world. He urged everyone that we shouldn't leave it to the publishers to control, and by way of illustration mentioned that universities can have a policy on publication that insists on the right to retain rights and publishers should be sought that allow reasonable IPR.

Enter Creative Commons' ccLearn:

Our goal is to make material more "interoperable," to speed up the virtuous cycle of use, experimentation and reuse, to spread the word about the value of open educational content, and to change the culture of repositories to one focused on "helping build a usable network of content worldwide" rather than "helping build the stuff on our site.

It's new to me and one month on I've subsequently tried to find out more. I certainly haven't searched far, but ccLearn still seems largely hidden, with little information available: someone who hears about it might well type cclearn in Google and would find cclearn.com, the 'Center for Creative Learning,' which has also taken the domain cclearn.org. I found it difficult to come across much of substance regarding ccLearn - just a few snippets, e.g. a mention on Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. Of course, as it's a Creative Commons project, you could go to the creativecommons.org site, but when I entered cclearn site:creativecommons.org in Google only one match was returned! At least it informs us that they now have an Executive Director - Ahrash N. Bissell - congratulations to him :-)

The presentation itself flowed swiftly with ease until ... there was a big anticlimax at the end when the economic realities became evident - in Q&A at the end he admitted that the average cost of preparing an MIT course the OCW way is around $15,000-$20,000, mainly down to legal concerns apparently.

Indeed in a subsequent session, 'Open courseware, pedagogy , Social Practices and Tools,' which elaborated on OCW initiatives, major problems with the current OCW were identified:

too expensive to create OCW sites
little or no automation
no connection to CLE
only large institutional commitment can get OCW off the ground

OCW is a meritorious activity and undoubtedly makes a major contribution to making more visible the academic enterprise - the Webometrics 'World University Rankings' provide some indication of this with MIT sitting on top of the table (whereas Oxford lies many places beneath). It can be argued that these are very limited measures, but Web visibility really does count.

Given that it's worthwhile, but costly, how might there be economic sustainability? One might look for inspiration to open source software (OSS) generally and follow the example of seeking revenue from support, certification etc., but I expect this has already been covered. More specific to the educational context, the Open courseware session expressed the hope that the next generation of OCW, dubbed OCW2, will reduce cost by employing graduate students, trained to understand licensing, and enabling them to share in the academic sphere. To enable this, they are looking at incentive structures, trying to get early buy in. The graduate helpers are called Digital Scribes whose engagement can work positively to foster "co-creation" and "communities," but I think graduates may well swap and change how they earn enough to get by, so can't always be depended on. We also heard that from another point of view, OCW may be regarded as filling out the long tail of publishing (a phrase coined by Chris Anderson), as illustrated by Amazon, which is able to sell at least one copy of every book, no matter how obscure, thus offering a chance to support specialisms (J.R. Hartley would be pleased!) and I guess Lulu is another good illustration. However, overall, I'm not convinced this will be much better.

So what would this small person from a small island suggest as an alternative approach?

Allow me to start with a quote from one of last year's extraordinary debates on the governance of Oxford University. It comes from Donald Fraser, Professor of Earth Sciences, who as reported in proceedings from Congregation , 14 November, 2006 stated:

Dynamic knowledge-based businesses are moving away from large, centrally administered monoliths, towards small, self-organising entrepreneurial cells, flexibly connected and practically self determining—just look at the campus models of companies like 3M, Google and Apple.

What does that mean to me as someone who works in academic support? The message I read (and readily agree with) is that academics rather than administrators are the ones who, along with their colleagues and peers, are in the best position to determine what they should do with their academic activities - in terms of how it can help them, their department, their field of study and their students. In the context of the debate as a whole, he was arguing against the motion because it contained proposals that were seen as increasing central control over the academics in ways that would threaten their independence and autonomy. From this, I infer that essentially that academic endeavour starts internally and is facilitated by an inter-networking mode of operation. If you look at the origin and flow of ideas, it often starts wthin one individual, spreads to a group and then more widely. It's a fact not just of research, but of teaching and of any other activity. Institutions need to support this as best they can, particularly as individuals are becoming increasingly mobile, moving from one institution to another.

This view of academic freedom doesn't deny the institution and its overall mission, but it does ask for a light touch, in terms of how academic enterprise is directed and also in terms of general bureacracy, particularly the legal aspects. I guess this is one of the major issues of OCW and I wonder if OCW2 really lessens this. I think a basic lesson to take from the governance debate (I'm not sure I could grapple with many of the subtleties) is that we should seek first to clarify principles: the professor is the academic authority who should drive the decision-making subject to the authorisation of the institution. In order for this to work effectively, the authorisation should be devolved, which is actually the traditional way in which Oxford works. If it's not suitably devolved, then you get a lot of overhead, so that institutional approval becomes necessary for very small steps, making things very expensive.

Such a devolved view can then transfer much of the responsibility to individuals, requring them to focus especially on basically two main issues:

appropriate use of content that you haven't produced yourself
deciding on the rights you wish to grant to content you have produced

If these issues are addressed as early as possible in the course creation lifecycle - by determining what's needed in the way of permissions and what should be granted in the way of rights - then that should save a lot of resources later on. With the right training, by the time materials are published the first time in a course management system, the main licensing issues and policy should already be resolved so that when it comes to making available as open courseware, the main effort is technical. This is dependent, I think, on authorisation at the highest level established as early as possible, ideally at the outset, so that it is quickly devolved. The kinds of authorisation I have in mind is a policy document on the kinds of licensing that are permitted, how the University is identified with each publication, specifically giving academic members the rights to publish according to Creative Commons licenses subject to various terms and conditions. Gaining authorisation itself may not be easy, though, as the institution will likely require strong arguments as to the benefits of making content free to use and repurpose - ICT staff may already have had a taste of this in trying to persuade their institutions to let them release software under an open source license.

Assuming processes can be put in place, what does this mean for implementation?

The OCW presentations I've attended have conveyed the sense that OCW is a long way from just open educational content - I certainly got that impression from the Educause '06 presentation Open Sharing, Global Benefits - The OCW consortium where open educational resources - were defined in terms of digitised materials offered freely and openly to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research; whereas open courseware are specific kind of educational resource materials, which have to be organised around a course, though the duration is open. There's a lot of emphasis on process and, in particular, OCW requires that content must be IP-cleared: every contribution gets passed through and checked - sometimes it is removed or replaced where it is felt that copyright has not been granted on at least some content. When I stepped back to reflect on openness in open courseware, I could see quite a few severe hurdles to surmount, some of which seemed unnecessary. Such a heavyweight approach has led to some consideration of sustainability in terms of a few institutions managing the processes, hosting OCW content, and selling this as a service: Wolfgang Greller sees this is an opportunity for OpenLearn, the OU's version of OCW.

However, I have reservations about the hosting provision at such institutional level through third parties and, in any case, my view is that we are dealing essentially with another output, one that results from existing internal processes to which most resources have already been devoted. Rather, institutional ownership can be expressed naturally through their own LMS, which can provide many organisational benefits, not least a single point of access to all study resources for students and for external examiners. However, If we are to support academics individually as originators of content, then the LMS system needs to support personalisation, a flexible environment in which to organise and publish. Indeed, I feel that the way Oxford is run in a devolved and self-organising way points to more organic and sustainable means that make sense particularly with the host of Web2.0 technologies are available. Hence, I now feel more confident that an LMS can provide valid linkage between personalisation and open courseware, as intimated in my poster at last year's conference in Dallas.

I think we should try to envision how it would work for an academic. I imagine a Professor accessing a LMS and going straight to their personal area, in which they have inter alia options to create, review and share content. For Oxford users it means using MyWebLearn, which makes available all the tools necessary to author a course. Sharing the material can be carried out literally in a few steps:

Log in.
Go to the resource you wish to make public
Click on the link 'View Access' at the bottom of the page.
In the following page go to the pull-down menu 'Allow..' and select 'Public' to 'look at' this page.
Click on the [Add] button to enact.

This simple mechanism has already been used to some extent in WebLearn, evident in Google with a few thousand resources (pages) indexed compared with fewer than a hundred pages from another institutional VLE with the same name! However, this process only enables the materials to be put in the open. From the academic's perspective, there needs to be added to this the means for specifying the licensing. Assuming a suitable policy and process were in place, then options could easily be added. Overall it needs to be very easy to use, ideally as easy as contributing to a blog.

On the other side of the coin, materials published this way as courses need to satisfy certain organisational and structural requirements - the content should be sourced from departmental areas, which need to be planned and designed into the system. Also, to be discoverable they need to be indexed with suitable metadata; and interfaces need to be provided that pull together all the relevant information in a meaningful way. We can achieve this by mapping to institutional structures, e.g. the LMS can automatically insert meta data about department, so that subsequently presenting the courses on offer as a whole, can be achieved by aggregation, say. Here I think we can learn from Warwick blogs, an institutional blog hosting service in which staff and students are able to write freely and connect with others. However, they have linked in with their institutional NDS LDAP directory, so that you can browse blogs based on department and even module of study. WebLearn already uses the institutional map in that it is hierarchical in structure, with the top two levels controlled centrally as far as departments and colleges. However, once at that level, areas are managed locally, i.e. content creation has been decrentralised, allowing natural growth.

The issue of quality control should already be handled in the processes of preparing the courses at the institution; what is being provided is largely a snapshot of the materials that were used in live courses. Whatever the processes, I think it is important that the decisions about releasing such content are devolved as much as possible and that the mechanisms for effecting it are as easy as the illustration above. I understand that for OCW(2) processes are being developed for Sakai to make publication a smoother process, so perhaps the production of Creative Commons licensed content may be an option in future, though I wonder how devolved it is and whether it revolves around MyWorkspace. Also, until Sakai has hierarchy, in comparison the technicalities of generating such materials appear far easier in Bodington (and I suspect developing pipeline processes to go with them might be easier also).

If another editorial layer is needed, then that can emerge from peer networks. A number of years ago I came across the Hippias search engine, a service (now merged with Noesis) that as I recall had an editorial board of experts in Philosophy whose members each maintained their own Web sites. These sites contained links to other sites and the Hippias search engine would index all the pages at the end of these links, thereby building a trusted indexed collection. I think it's a very apposite illustration of how you can combine devolved human quality control with automation.

This is obviously work in progress and much is still open to debate, but from the view I've described above, I think the focus should very much be with the academics, devolving much of the decision-making and supporting them as appropriate. Technically, this means Web2.0-like approaches should be incorporated and so I expect many elements of ccLearn could play a major role in facilitating institution-oriented OCW.

I hope to talk more about personalisation and Web 2.0 in future posts...

All aboard? Reflections on the 7th Sakai conference, Amsterdam

pault — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 11:28:38 -0500

Oxford made a decision in Autumn 2006 to migrate to the Sakai VLE with the announcement of the Tetra collaboration. Since the completion of the academic year, we've been able to focus more on the task in hand. For myself, I decided the best way to quickly gain a feel for Sakai was to attend a Sakai gathering and conveniently the 7th Sakai Conference was recently held in Amsterdam, the first time the conference had been held outside the United States. I was primarily interested in sessions that addressed system migration, deployment and support, but also keen to hear about pedagogy and usability, leaving it to my colleagues to cover the more technical development aspects. I wanted to know what approaches were adopted to move to Sakai: organisation, resources, timescales, etc.

So was it a case of all aboard...?

Above is the luxury cruise liner, Silver Shadow, which was waiting for passengers to board. It was right next to the Moevenpick Hotel, the conference venue. In fact, it's designed to accommodate a little under 400 guests, about the number of participants at the conference, which rather suggests a dream future venue ... :-)

It's taken two or three weeks for my impressions to settle - I found the three days of the conference quite intense and took copious notes. I can say straightaway, however, that I felt there was generally a good sense of community, with a very constructive outlook across the various constituent communities, ranging from development through to pedagogy and research. Sessions were usually informative and presented well; there was a real sense of purpose and commitment It was consistent with what I've observed on the Tetra developers mailing list: although I'm not been involved in any Java coding myself, I have been seen how the Sakai developers have provided very helpful responses to the various queries raised by Bodington developers seeking to incorporate key functionality in Sakai. Furthermore, when some of these ideas were presented by my colleagues, Adam and Matthew, in their presentation on importing Bodington tool, they were greeted very positively - there is a willingness to learn. So I broadly concur with the encouraging sentiments expressed by Michael Feldsteain in his 'State of the Union' blog post.

There remain many questionmarks as expressed Ian Reid, whose responses were not so rosy: in wrapping it up, he perceived a number of weaknesses and for him fundamental questions remained unanswered. I can at least answer his first point about the product: there are certainly large scale deployments - e.g. at Indiana and Michigan. Further, many of the other points, such as the technical bias, are well known and as far as I can tell they are being actively addressed.

I have quite a number of concerns myself and among my colleagues may be the one who is most reluctant to migrate from our present WebLearn, based on Bodington, perhaps largely because I have spent so much time with it and naturally can get attached. My first query is what kind of system is Sakai? Is it largely an open source replacement for Blackboard or WebCT? At the culmination of the procurement process at Oxford in 2001/2002, we were left with a head-to-head between Blackboard and Bodington. There was a free vote and Bodington won very easily, largely because Bodington offered flexibility: in the use of terminology, in how it allowed areas to be set up, in who could do what in these areas, and in how users could navigate freely around the system. One could use it to augment existing teaching or research arrangements with little effort. WebLearn has subsequently grown organically - from the handful of resources in December 2002 to its present state of about 60,000 resources manually created and managed by thousands of users (staff and students) in the various colleges and departments. At the same time, Bodington also has many weaknesses - it's rather long in the tooth and has often been described as "clunky" - many of the tools are looking very dated and making changes can be very laborious.

Sakai was felt to be the most promising way forward, but as it stands there are serious limitations in its design. The name of Michigan's deployment itself hints at one of these 'CTools,' rather indicating a technical focus: indeed much of the talk at the conference was 'tools' oriented, but during the past year or two, in WebLearn, we've deliberately tried to move away from 'how does tool X work' to 'how to carry out activity Y [using the tools available]' with a recent project looking at activity-based use cases for WebLearn. Also, the course subscription model in Sakai will not be not sufficient (in theory, Oxford's undergraduates are at liberty to attend any lecture at the University); the role-based access control is more coarse-grained (in fact, Bodington doesn't have any fixed roles - they can be defined via group memberships), and the overall organisation of materials lacks hierachy. There are many other smaller issues - e.g. what about those horrible Sakai URLs?

There are many concerns, but there is reassuringly intense activity to address them and this is leading to mutual enrichment. So, a lot of discussion has flowed on the topic of groups; a new hierarchy service for Sakai might have a name component that will enable nice URLs etc. I also saw some good examples of how requirements are driving the development; how development goes through a proper processes of evaluation and many other encouraging signs, such as the use of the term of Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE), getting away from the systems-oriented language.

So, largely reassured, at this stage my biggest concern is more in terms of timescales and resources regarding a full deployment of Sakai: it's a question of when than if. Looking around, it seems fitting then to note Stanford's announcement on 21 June:

After a year-long pilot, Sakai went into full production at Stanford today, fully replacing our legacy home-grown system. We've taken a long, careful path toward deployment to assure a seamless transition to the new system. It is localized, integrated and well tested, and today we flipped the switch. This is a big achievement for us, fulfilling the commitment we made to ourselves, and to our collaborators at Indiana, Michigan and MIT three years ago when we started this project.

So it can be done, but a long road lies ahead and if we are to achieve this at Oxford for everyone's benefit, we really shall need all aboard!

CANS: Promoting Social and Collaborative Learning in Online Environments

catherine — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 09:06:32 -0500

CANS, or Context-aware Activity Notification System, is an innovative software development project that highlights the role of social contexts and personalization in online learning environments. Currently in use at the University of Missouri, in 10 online courses, CANS offers a way to increase the levels of “sociability” afforded by educational technology infrastructure, and to generate opportunities for collaborative learning.

Recently, I interviewed two of the main architects of CANS, Chris Amelung and James Laffey, via email and took advantage of the medium to ask them some detailed questions about the present and future directions of the project. (Chris's responses are listed in black, and Jim's in blue).

Background

CH: Tell us a bit about the background to CANS. What was the original inspiration for the project?

CA: I initially developed CANS for my dissertation so, in the broadest sense, CANS was inspired by my need to graduate. But, of course, the story isn’t that simple. A lot of prior effort and thought inspired the design and development of CANS.

Several years ago, Jim and I worked on an open-source project called Shadow netWorkspace (TM), or "Shadow". Shadow was a collaborative network-learning environment designed and developed for online learning and collaboration. Our team, lead by Drs. Dale Musser and Jim Laffey, put a lot of thought into the collaborative features of the system. We had multiple group types with different levels of access permissions, an advanced structured discussion board, an online file system, email, chat, and so on. The system was great and quite advanced for its time; however, like Sakai of today, we quickly ran into usability problems.

It was difficult for users to navigate and find needed information. Our users were spending too much time trying to find the information they needed for learning and collaboration. Trying to navigate through all of the different files, discussion board posts, and chat messages (from instructors and students) was too difficult and time-consuming. We needed a better way. We needed a notification system to bring the information to the users.

I believe it was Jim who initially pushed for the idea of adding an activity notification widget to the main page of each group and course in Shadow. The idea being of course that as soon as a user enters a course, s/he would immediately receive a summary of recent activity for that class and have the ability to navigate straight to the desired artifact, thereby bypassing the complicated hierarchical nature of our LMS.

We built and integrated our notification system based on the desire to improve usability and access to information. On the surface it appeared that we had a system that worked really well. Unfortunately, we made a mistake that I think a lot of groups make when they think about activity awareness and notification. We coupled our system too closely with the core LMS. The notification system we built was integrated and embedded throughout Shadow and after a few months of activity and a few thousand artifacts, the notification system that was supposed to improve the user experience brought Shadow to its knees. Performance dropped to an almost unusable level.

I believe the notification system we developed had two fundamental problems. First, the system was too closely integrated with the core LMS. It simply requires a lot of processing power to generate appropriate activity notifications and, because of the tight coupling between the notification system and the LMS, the performance of the LMS suffered from the increased demands on the notification system. With CANS today, the notification system is decoupled from the LMS. All of the processing required to generate and deliver notifications, and the back-end database, is designed to run outside of the LMS on an entirely different server. Worst-case scenario: a user won’t receive a notification; but because of this decoupling, the user will always be able to use their LMS.

The second problem, and less obvious one at the time, was that we didn’t offer our users any way to customize their notification preferences. We assumed we knew what they needed and that was what they received. We knew this wasn’t the best solution, but it was the only one we were able to come up with at the time.

Users did want to change their notification preferences but because they weren’t able to configure their preferences in the first place, they didn’t have an opportunity to setup and learn how the notification system worked or what the information they were receiving actually meant.

After a few semesters of using Shadow, I was at the point where I was looking for a dissertation topic. We were intimately familiar with the benefits and challenges of activity awareness so it was a natural topic for my dissertation.

CH: Are there any specific fore-runner projects or tools that you are drawing on in the design of CANS?

CA: During my dissertation work, I evaluated and tested several different LMS and activity notification systems. Beyond our own prior work in Shadow, three projects influenced the design and implementation of CANS.

The first, and most influential, was Geraldine Fitzpatrick’s work on the Locales Framework. Dr. Fitzpatrick designed this theoretical framework “to enhance and support social world interactions” and developed a system called Orbit to evaluate the framework (Fitzpatrick, 1998). I drew many insights and inspiration from the Framework, the Orbit system, and another tool they developed called Tickertape.

The second project that strongly influenced the system architecture of CANS was called iScent - the InterSubjective Collaborative Event Environment (Anderson & Bouvin, 2000). The distributed nature of this system inspired the architecture of CANS. In addition to system architecture, iScent was an inspiration because it drew upon an interesting concept called “intersubjectivity” or “I know that you know that I know”. Not only would iScent notify users of relevant activity, but it would also notify the person who generated the activity. In other words, for each notification sent to a user, a notification about that notification would get sent to the originator of the activity – certainly an interesting idea that could strongly influence identity and collaboration in an LMS. While intersubjectivity isn’t being used in CANS today, it is something I hope to implement in the future.

The third project that influenced the development of CANS was called Groove. It was a desktop notification system built by Microsoft. Unlike the other systems, Groove ran independently from a browser and was designed to put the data analysis and work required to generate activity notifications on the user’s computer instead of on a shared server. The influence of Groove on CANS can be seen in our Desktop Awareness Widget work (EyeOnSakai).

CH: The design of CANS draws on Dourish’s concept of “embodied interaction”. Can you give our readers a brief explanation of this?

JL: First, let me recommend Paul Dourish’s book, “Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction” as an excellent foundational book for those involved in design and development. The term “interaction” refers to how work (teaching, learning, producing, playing, etc.) gets done and the term “embodied” points us to an appreciation for the role of context in how work gets done. The lessons we drew from Dourish’s exploration of these topics was to stop thinking so much about how to optimize users' experience with the physical computer or software and to start thinking more deeply about how computation can optimize users’ interaction with their work. By thinking about computation rather than the computer we can envision new processes to support work which are embedded in the workflow of teaching and learning…. and new representations to help users make sense of the interaction.

So by mapping how activity information fits with teaching and learning processes we can try to deliver or insert that information at the time that it is relevant and helpful to the teacher or student and in the way that it is most helpful.

Similarly by understanding how activity information is used in teaching and learning processes we can think about how to represent it in the most meaningful ways. For example, sometimes information is most salient to a decision when you have tables of numbers or graphic representations for seeing a birds eye view of activity; at other times we need more detail about who did what when, or maybe we want to see how one set of activity information compares with another, for example how does my level of activity in a course compare with the average user, or with the instructor.

So the major take away from Dourish’s book for us was to focus on how computation supports the work of teaching and learning and how to include contextual information as we try to help the user derive meaning from the interaction. Of course we still have much to learn about how to do that well….or the best ways to accomplish the display, timing and delivery of appropriate information.

Architecture and Functionality

CH: CANS has been designed to work with any network-based app capable of generating / receiving XML. Is your vision for CANS that it will find its most “natural” home in LMS / VLE / VREs, or did you design it for use in other types of online community as well?

CA: I believe educational environments are a natural fit for CANS and because our group is primarily interested in educational technologies, it just fits. However, I believe it can and should be used with other online communities. For example, I have been working with a social networking site, for entrepreneurs, that is already using CANS and we’ve started working with a software development company that specializes in business technologies.

The interesting thing about CANS and activity awareness in general is that it isn’t just about education. It really affects all aspects of online life. Whether its education, business, entertainment, whatever; awareness about what others are doing is very important and relevant to our daily lives, even the virtual ones.

CH: Are there specific institutional systems / infrastructure that CANS needs to interface with? (authentication, student information, etc.)

CA: Integration with institutional systems is important when it comes to administering a CANS-enabled system beyond more than a few hundred users. CANS currently doesn’t interface with any authentication or user information system, but that is something we plan to implement within the next 12 – 18 months.

CH: What do you see as being some of the most important educational implications for bringing more “presence awareness” into an asynchronous or semi-synchronous learning environment?

JL: Let’s think about “presence awareness” in two ways here. First that I am present and represented, and second that I am co-present with others. I’ll try to keep this short, but we need to appreciate that education is a social activity….as humans we want to be social, as learners we are guided and shaped by social interaction and the behavior of others, as learners we are also not just learning to do or know something we are learning to be someone, as members of a social unit (class, school, etc,) we are interdependent and benefit when trust and social capital are present. Of course being social is not the end in itself, because while being social can be motivating, guiding and build social capital it can also be distracting or detrimental to the educational objectives. The goal in our work with Sakai is to build an information and toolset so that educational leaders and teachers can manage presence (activity awareness) so as to bring the benefits of the social nature of learning to bear in their enterprise and courses. So in a way we want CANS to enable Sakai educators to implement their theory of social learning in their local context.

However, if you read our FIPSE proposal we make the case that (1) too often online learning fails to engage and sustain students because it lacks a sense of social enterprise, (2) too often online learning fails to implement social affordances that are present in F2F learning, such as social navigation and modeling in learning, and (3) too often the tools available for collaboration among students are so cumbersome that collaborative learning becomes turn taking or division of labor rather than real collaboration so that students do not get the value and instructors see this way of teaching as too hard. In this sense we see the current social aspects of Sakai and CMS in general as being so limited that we just want to enable more and more natural social experiences.

User Experience and Development

CH: Let’s talk a bit about the benefits of being keyed into the Sakai community. Sakai’s strengths are often noted as its flexibility, its robust technical framework and its open source, community development model. What, for you, are the benefits of participating in the collaboration? What are the challenges?

JL: Well like most folks we are users of Sakai and want it to be better. We also like being in a community of folks who want “better.” As mentioned in the answer to question 1 we built a cool system called Shadow netWorkspaceÔ a few years back. It was open source but we never got traction with sufficient user communities to sustain it. Perhaps it was a little ahead of its time. We took over a year “teaching” our university admin and lawyers about open source before they would allow us to use the GPL. We really liked the project and learned a lot from it….but we did not have the return of knowing that an accomplishment with the system would lead to thousands of instructors and 100’s of thousands of students having better teaching and learning experiences. Those outcomes are salient and tangible within Sakai. Also, while we were learning a lot we were pretty much learning in a closed context. With Sakai we see the opportunity for learning across the community in ways that are really exciting.

As a challenge….just the complexity of keeping up with all that is going on…well of course we don’t do that, but the thought is daunting J How do all the pieces fit together not as a product for course management….that while not trivial is pretty straightforward. Rather how do all the pieces fit together as an innovation in teaching and learning that really impacts education and our vision for education.

CH: In terms of the user experience, I note that many teams in the Sakai collaboration are currently making great efforts to improve look-and-feel, navigability, and general user-friendliness of Sakai. How could CANS contribute to the user experience within Sakai?

CA: I applaud the efforts of these teams and look forward to their contributions. I know Sakai will improve because of their work. However, I believe that “look-and-feel” and navigability can only take us so far. I think its time for a fundamental shift in thinking when it comes to the advancement of Sakai and other LMS.

Sakai is a great information repository for online coursework. It stores information and offers a nice set of tools for navigating to, sharing and accessing information. I realize it does do more, but looking back at the history of LMS, it’s pretty obvious that things really haven’t changed that much. We still have the same basic set of tools and features as we did 5+ years ago. And in the Internet life-span, five years is a long time.

To initiate the next revolution in LMS, I believe that we, as a community, must turn our attention to activity awareness, notification systems, and the idea of working both in and out of the LMS. We need to be working on tools to deliver the information users want, when they want it, how they want, and where they want it. Why force a user to login to Sakai and navigate X-levels deep to read a discussion board post when you can deliver that message to the user on his or her cell phone only when its about a topic of interest?

We need to start approaching LMS development like the PC market is starting to treat the Internet and mobile devices. Like the PC, the LMS is your core system that stores all your information and has a core set of tools where you do focused work when you want. But all of your mobile devices and other components of the Internet (ex. mashups) are connected to the LMS. Not only do you receive awareness information on these devices but you also have simple, light-weight ways to interact with the LMS. For example, you receive a notification about a new urgent discussion board post on your cell phone and you use that phone to post a reply back into the LMS. Don’t make the user load and navigate through the entire LMS.

I believe CANS can contribute to the user experience by helping with the delivery and presentation of this information.

CH: In July 2005, Chris Amelung posted on Sakai Confluence: “As a user navigates through Sakai, he or she is navigating through various social contexts.” If, as Chris maintains, “A social context is a place where user actions and interactions can occur”, then I would agree with him that “pretty much anything in Sakai can be considered a social context (the entire community, a work site, a discussion board, a discussion board post, a resource, a folder in the resources, even a user or group of users)”.

(Ref: http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/ARCHIVE/Use+Cases+-+DG+Collaboration )

What then is the meaning of “presence”, for a user who finds him or herself located in multiple nested or interdependent social / systems contexts? Or, to put the question another way, at what level (or levels) does “presence” gain significance for the user?

CA: This question can’t be answered easily because ultimately I believe it’s up to the user to define when/where presence gains significance. Generally, however, I think its safe to say that the users most nested social context has greatest significance at any given time.

For example, if a user is posting a reply to a discussion board post (context 1), within a discussion thread (context 2), within the discussion tool (context 3), within a course site (context 4), within Sakai (context 5) that discussion board post is the most significant context for that user at that given time. If another person posts a reply to that message while the user is writing his or her own reply to that post, it’s probably an important enough event that the user should receive a notification that actually interrupts their workflow. In contrast, a notification within the site (context 4) may just show up in the user’s periphery and a notification in Sakai (context 5) doesn’t show up at all.

So, I think a user is “most present” in his most nested social context because that context defines the current context of interest.

This whole model of nested contexts and associated levels of presence can be broken when users choose to define other contexts (sites, artifacts, users, etc.) and associate personal priorities to their contexts. In other words, users may want to define all messages posted by Instructor X as a context that is always important. So the instructor’s presence in Sakai is always significant to the user no matter where the user is or what s/he is doing.

JL: Additionally we may find that workflows can also define context. So for example knowing what comes next in a workflow or knowing who is to act next upon an object may allow us (or more likely instructors or group leaders) to specify associations and sequences as defining new contexts beyond the way contexts are presently defined.

CA: One of the advantages of CANS is that we’re putting the power of customization in the hands of the users. The challenge that we’re working on right now is to develop intuitive interfaces that allow users to manage their notification preferences without overloading them with too much information or too many options.

CH: How do you deal with the question of “representativeness” when designing for users of CANS? How do you put together CANS use cases? Do you use personas?

JL: I am always confounded by the issue of designing for innovation in that current practitioners can’t imagine what it would be like to work differently and I can’t imagine what it is like to do their work. Our approach is to rapidly prototype so that we can engage users in thinking what it will be like to work with the new tools. So we first prototype with stories about working differently using personas and scenarios, and then try to rapidly move to mockups of how it might be. When I worked at apple we often stated the need too “fail fast.” You want to learn what will not work fast rather than holding on to a design concept for a long time only to realize late in the product development stage that something is not going to work. So we rapidly prototype through narratives and mockups and try to get a small number of folks to critique each stage so as to find the losing ideas and get rid of them. Our next phase is to take our “better” ideas to a broader community for critique and commentary. We’ll be doing that on our cansaware site and hopefully all the readers will check out and comment in our user experience section of the site.

Future

CH: VR tools and services are often touted as the next logical step in terms of presence / synchronous communications for education. Tools such as Sloodle (a mashup that allows students to blog to Moodle from within Second Life) are blurring the boundaries between individuals, systems, and synchronous / asynchronous communications. Do you have an opinion on this? How do you see CANS fitting into this new emerging landscape?

CA: I think I already touched on this point in a previous question, but I find “blurring the boundaries” as critically important to the way users work and learn today. I believe we can use CANS and other awareness systems to link these systems with the LMS so activity that occurs in Sakai can be sent as activity notifications to the 3D environment and visa-versa.

CH: What are your plans for CANS in the future?

CA: Well, there are many and most of them are related to our current FIPSE grant. In the near future, we’ll be developing better tools for administering CANS, we’ll be developing tools to integrate activity notifications within the Sakai interface, and we’ll be improving our email digests and Desktop Notification Widgets. As already mentioned, we want to start integrating CANS with institutions’ user account and authentication systems, and I personally have a strong interest in working with cell phones and PDAs.

JL: In addition the FIPSE award enhances our ability to work with the Sakai community in learning about how activity awareness and notification mechanisms influence teaching and learning practices and outcomes, as well as hopefully engage others in making Sakai and LMS in general more powerful in supporting the social nature of learning.

CA: I’d also like to explore geographical awareness through services like Google Maps. Of course, I have other plans too, but I’ll save that for the next interview.

Before I sign off, I’d like to stress the fact that CANS is more than just an activity notification system. It’s also a tool for researchers to use to study the impact activity notifications have on user actions and behavior. It can do this because not only does it record the activity that occurs within a LMS, but it also records the notifications that get generated and delivered. From these data, one can study the actions occurring in Sakai and also study the impact those notifications have on future actions. In the future, I hope we can build tools and interfaces to not only make users more “aware” and “present", but also to assist the researcher in this important area of study.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to send them to me at chris@cansaware.com or visit http://www.cansaware.com for additional information.

CH: Thank you both very much. For me, this has been an engaging and stimulating discussion. I hope it may encourage readers to begin to explore some of the opportunities and benefits of adding more “social” elements to online learning environments.

Wikis and DRM @ Tools of Change

mpasiewicz — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 16:08:28 -0500

The morning keynotes hinted at the [d]evolving state of DRM. Hopefully Bill McCoy will touch on his interest in Social DRM at his session tomorrow. Michael Jensen, Peter Brantley, and Ale de Vries hosted an interesting session on DRM too. In my estimation, they mostly talked around the idea of DRM and the problems one can encounter when approaching the topic. I got a late question in regarding the music publishing model and the potential for using performance rights organizations to introduce an new form of renumeration for the book trade. I approached the same topic with Brewster Kahle in our interview from 2005. I can understand why he'd be apprehensive, but I can't fathom why publishers and authors aren't all over this concept. Peter Brantley entertained the question and seemed to suggest that we might one day see a system like this ... where the Google's, Amazon's and Microsoft's of the world might have to pay a royalty to "perform" page views of the content ... similar to how radio works. 'Definitely makes me want to give Gerry's interview with Peter a second listen.

Next up was a delightful presentation by Asheesh Birla of Thomson Learning. He talked extensively about Thomson's use and interest in wikis. They started using wikis a few years ago for internal project planning. He suggested that 80% of the contributors we from junior employees ... an interesting dynamic that may have introduced wider participation, but might also be a generational issue. He also shared some thoughts on his use of ActiveCollab (an open source tool similar to BaseCamp) for both project management and editorial collaboration. They're on their third pilot using the system and appear to be writing custom code to adapt the software for their needs.

He also talked about the value of moving metadata creation farther upstream in the process and how ActiveCollab/wikis helped facilitate that process. Birla suggested that in some ways, print is more economic than electronic counterparts because rights clearance has proven a very expensive process.

He shared a few thoughts on Thomson's use of wikis in the learning context as well. He cited an example where wikis were use to facilitate international pen pals aimed at supporting learning for foreign language classes. Has anyone else heard about this or similar techniques?

Apparently they're investigating Lucene as well. Finally, he hinted at some work on some semantic web applications and expressed an interest in ELGG, but there weren't many details of about that activity.

Towards the end, I was able to get in a question about the impact of the Pearson/ECollege deal. He suggested that activity may actually accelerate work tying tools like wikis and content together to support learning (and assessment). Both Sakai and Moodle were explicity referenced as potential avenues of interest for Thomson.

I'll try to elaborate more later as the next session is getting started now.

IT Collaboration: A Preview of Findings from the 2007 ECAR Study

ckeller — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 08:56:04 -0500

This ECAR research bulletin addresses a unique strength of higher education: its commitment to sharing ideas and promoting open access to knowledge. These values shape IT in higher education as well, as evidenced by many high-profile collaborations such as the Internet, Internet2, and open or community source applications such as Sakai and Kuali. Institutions work with one another on a broad range of projects and services including wide area networking, shared data centers, or disaster recovery. Some institutions share staff, while others outsource their IT operation to a fellow institution. Using findings from the 2007 ECAR study on IT collaboration, this bulletin explores the challenges that suggest that collaboration may become an even more prevalent strategy in the future.

Sakai in Amsterdam

catherine — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 08:43:39 -0500

Very quiet in the office this week... Almost all the developers, and a good chunk of everybody else, are away at the 7th Sakai Conference in the Netherlands.

From the conference homepage, I found a nice use of Sakai Confluence, to help conference attendees do travel planning and find out where to spend their free time (when they're not attending BOF sessions :-) )

CMC and Whitman: Migration to Sakai and Beyond

drupal — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:00:11 -0500

Claremont McKenna College aims to migrate hundreds of courses and over 150 active instructors from WebCT to Sakai within a year. Whitman College has successfully completed its yearlong pilot and conversion from Blackboard to Sakai. Both schools have worked closely with faculty volunteers and have developed tools to address technical migration issues. The schools will share the different stages of their implementations, methods used, challenges, and successes.

The Sixth-Largest Sakai Implementation in the World Tells All

drupal — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 15:50:54 -0500

According to the SakaiProject.org Web site, based on user counts, the Appalachian College Association (ACA) LAMP initiative is the sixth-largest production implementation of Sakai in the world. This session will tell all about how a consortium of 35 small, private Appalachian colleges built a successful learning management and collaboration system.

Uses and Abuses of Personas

catherine — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:50:10 -0500

I've been following the debate on the Sakai Pedagogy list, about personas and their shortcomings.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with this term, 'personas' are generic user profiles, similar in many respects to the consumer profiles used by marketing organisations. They are employed as a tool for systems analysis, the aim being to design and build more usable systems, by understanding the needs and intentions of the people who will use them. The process of creating a set of personas normally involves an iterative process of research / evaluation, whereby individuals' unique 'needs and intentions' are grouped into normative sets.

The problem is, they don't work. Their chief benefit is also their greatest shortcoming: personas are inherently generic. They are not tools for personalisation.

The other issue is that personas encourage systems analysts / software designers to build systems around institutional roles, instead of activities. Why!? Organisations change. Organisational and institutional roles have a tendency to mutate, shift, and/or vanish, and people may change roles within an institution - once, or several times. Changing a customised system once it's built is expensive and time-consuming.

I believe systems should be built around tasks and activities. People don't visit a website or fire up a program in order to perform a role; they want to complete a task. Here's a 5-second test: try looking at the website of a local university. How many institutional websites divide information and hide it away according to roles? ('For Staff'; 'For Students'; 'For Alumni'...) Yet the tasks and activities that each of these groups will need to perform are, in many cases, more alike than they are unalike. This way of structuring information inevitably leads to gross inefficiencies and significant duplication of information across various 'gateway' sites.

Personas can be a useful way to think about the different types of people working within an organisation, and they can be a useful way to group tool / systems users. But I believe their days are numbered, because the type of organisation (and organisational culture) they are designed to support is on the wane. The use of personas ultimately reflects an approach to systems design that is outdated. Organisations are gradually becoming looser and less structured, and their members want the ability to retain control of the tasks they have to perform. They want to have their information delivered in a way that is meaningful to them.

Important Announcement: EDUCAUSE-Sakai Statement on Blackboard Patent Pledge

cluckett — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 10:31:55 -0600

Since early November 2006, EDUCAUSE has been engaged in ongoing discussions with Blackboard regarding their assertion of patent rights and the concerns raised in a letter to the Blackboard leadership [PDF 38.9 KB] EDUCAUSE President Brian Hawkins sent in October on behalf of the EDUCAUSE Board of Directors. Other groups, including The Sakai Foundation, have also been engaged in discussions on this matter.

Today, February 1, 2007, Blackboard announced a non-assertion pledge that directly emanates from these discussions. The boards of directors of EDUCAUSE and The Sakai Foundation have agreed to and have issued a joint statement [PDF 41.2 KB] about this pledge.

Blackboard Patent Reexamination: Response from the Sakai Foundation

catherine — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 04:34:18 -0600

To update my post on the Blackboard patent, here is some more detail on the requested reexamination of the patent claim and the Sakai Foundation's response.

As Paul Erickson notes (thanks, Paul!), the news initially started bubbling up when the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced that it has formally asked the Patent Office to reexamine and ultimately cancel all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent on e-learning systems.

The request has demonstrated the very real sense of unity and common purpose among the educational open source software community. It was filed on behalf of the Sakai Foundation (sakaiproject.org), the Moodle Community (moodle.org), and the ATutor Community (atutor.ca).

In their press release, the Sakai Foundation refers to the "the surrounding fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) being spread by Blackboard", and states: "We, the Sakai Foundation, consider the Blackboard patent to be a prime example of a bad patent in the area of educational software. It is a threat to open source developers, providers and users of educational software."

Joseph Hardin, Sakai Foundation Board Chairman, comments: "Blackboard would have done well to heed the recent recommendations of the Educause Board by placing the patent in the public domain and dropping all litigation. Since Blackboard has refused to follow these recommendations, we have taken steps to render this patent toothless."

An Interview with John Moore

mpasiewicz — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 10:12:43 -0600

In this 12 minute recording, Virginia Tech's John Moore touches on a range of topics related to Sakai and shares some thoughts on patents, and a very interesting "smart dorm" project.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

An Interview with Brad Wheeler

mpasiewicz — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 10:12:31 -0600

In this 15 minute recording, we'll sit down with Indiana University CIO, Brad Wheeler. Listen in as he takes on the issue of patents, cyberinfrastructure, open source as a professional development exercise and the role of librarians in research.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

An Interview with Janet McCue

mpasiewicz — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 13:36:02 -0600

In this 22 minute recording, we'll hear from Cornell University's Janet McCue. Listen in as she touches on topics like research computing, social software and much, much more.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

An Interview with Rob Abel

mpasiewicz — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:55:58 -0500

In this 26 minute recording, we'll hear from Rob Abel, CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium. Listen in as Marliu Goodyear hosts a discussion about standards, course packs and more.

An Interview with Al Essa

mpasiewicz — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:23:32 -0500

In this 18 minute recording, we'll hear from Al Essa, Associate Vice Chancellor & Deputy CIO at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. Listen in as he shares some thoughts on the Spellings report, patents, and Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.

An Interview with Ted Dodds

mpasiewicz — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:19:30 -0500

In this 13 minute recording, we'll hear from Ted Dodds, CIO at the University of British Columbia. Listen in as he shares some thoughts on a community source student services system.

For more information, visit:
http://educationcommons.org/projects/display/CSSSS/Home

An Interview with James Dalziel

mpasiewicz — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:10:28 -0500

In this 16 minute recording, we'll hear from James Dalziel, Director of the Macquarie ELearning Centre of Excellence. Listen in as he shares some thoughts on patents, open source and LAMS.

For more information about LAMS, visit
http://www.lamsfoundation.org