The Mother e-Learning List
Since it's December, it's time for lists! Here's the big daddy (or mother, if you like) of some great e-Learning blog posts from 2009. Good stuff in here:
http://www.elearninglearning.com/wpblog/top-elearning-posts-2009/
Since it's December, it's time for lists! Here's the big daddy (or mother, if you like) of some great e-Learning blog posts from 2009. Good stuff in here:
http://www.elearninglearning.com/wpblog/top-elearning-posts-2009/
For those who have interest the Simonides Memory Palace code can be checked out from:
https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/simonides/
Please direct all feedback or questions to simonides.help@nyu.edu
For those who attended the NYU presentation at the Boston conference ("Alternatives to OSP: Making Portfolios Flexible and Fun"), I'm happy to let you know that we've completed our testing with Jackrabbit, so we should be getting ready to release this code soon! I just have to write a README and tweak a few other things.
I'll send an email to the dev list when it's out there and we'll probably have something in the newsletter too.
I also know that our esteemed colleagues are doing some demos of the tool for those who didn't see it at the conference, so let me know if you're interested in that.
Although a session/panel/discussion on this is scheduled for later today, I wanted to capture some thoughts from the BOF yesterday on Sakai 2->3 migration.
The old idea of "hybrid" mode is still going strong - in fact, it's really the only idea going for transitioning users from one to the other. We're still operating on the idea that we can run Sakai 2.x "headless" and show Sakai 2.x tools inside of a Sakai 3 container. However, my concern is that at some point, there has to be some mapping and migration from a Sakai 2 tool to a Sakai 3 tool.
User data that relates to a particular instance of a course in a particular semester is not so important - although we have an obligation to retain that for a certain period of time. The data that really does have to be migrated to Sakai 3 tools is what Lance called the "structure" of the course. By that, we don't mean the particular layout - which would obviously be pretty different in Sakai 3 - instead we mean the content, but also the assignments, and the forum topics (although not the posts themselves), etc: anything an instructor would need to bring over to teach the course again to a new group of people.
Could we migrate this data piecemeal based on Instructor course copy? That is to say, when an Instructor is ready to teach a course in Semester B, and they want to copy old content from Semester A (we already have this metaphor in Sakai and Blackboard), the course copy process will migrate any tools to their Sakai 3 versions if those tools are available. For the other tools, Sakai 2 versions will be nested inside.
And then, when the Instructor is ready to teach Semester C, she initiates another course copy (from B->C), and now any remaining Sakai 2 tools are now migrated to their Sakai 3 equivelents (which are now available).
Did you know that influential conservative Judge Richard Posner was, for a time, involved in the Microsoft Anti-Trust case an an independent mediator? When reading Ken Auletta's World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies, I was struck by how Judge Posner took time and effort to truly understand the technical aspects of the case, as well as the social and economic effects of the case's possible outcomes. Here was a man, I though, who was able to "get it" despite the fact that he wasn't on the cutting edge of technology.
However, a recent post on his blog (yes, he has one) has thrown all that into question...
I have just learned that the official tag for this year's Blackboard conference is #BbWorld09.
What is the official Sakai tag? #Sakai2009? (Since we're one conference a year now, and it's good to be Y3K compliant.)
Update: Looks like the official tag is #sakai09.
Finding how to launch the Java Console on the Mac is a little non-intuitive. Go to:
Applications > Utilities > Java > Java Preferences
Advanced > Java Console > Show console
Restart Safari, and when you load an applet, it should pop right up.
Take a moment to think about, or even blog about, a women in technology that inspires you. If you can't think of one, the Anita Borg Institute has some suggestions.
Recently, my heros are this girl scout troop that entered a LEGO robot competition, even though their troop leaders didn't know anything about robotics. It's a cute article, even though you have to read it in their silly interactive book format.
If you ever wanted to swap out Jackrabbit for another JSR-170 compliant content repository (like Xythos) in Sakai 2-6-x, here is how you do it.
Special thanks to Ian Boston, Seth Theriault, Kevin Wiggen and Julian Reschke.