http://www.elearninglearning.com/wpblog/top-elearning-posts-2009/

https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/simonides/

Please direct all feedback or questions to simonides.help@nyu.edu

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.

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).

However, a recent post on his blog (yes, he has one) has thrown all that into question...

More...

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.

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.

Special thanks to Ian Boston, Seth Theriault, Kevin Wiggen and Julian Reschke.

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Yesterday Essex County College in Newark, NJ was our gracious host for another NYC Regional Meet Up. Essex, Rutgers, NYU, NYU School of Medicine, and CampusEAI were all well represented. We had a chance to talk about a variety of topics, specifically tools, adoption, and content authoring. We also looked at different Sakai sites and spoke about how different organizations have different approaches to using Sakai for teaching and learning in their respective environments.

The subject of portfolios did come up, and we discussed at length the types of use cases for portfolio functionality. Apparently both Rutgers and LaGuardia are doing some type of portfolio work, and NYU is interested. Perhaps we may have a portfolio-centric meetup at some point.

Jason and I also gave a recap of the Paris Conference and covered some of the trends that came out of it. It was great to see both new and known faces, but one of the things I was especially impressed about was variety of experience represented. There were, of course, Developers and Instructional designers, but also quite a few Faculty and Librarians!

If you're interested in particpating in the NYC Regional Sakai Group, please subscribe to the mailing list by joining our site on http://collab.sakaiproject.org (you may need to create an account first).

I was happy that we could articulate (at least partially) the tension between content creation that is structured (and probably based on templates) and content that can be organized any which way ("wild wild west" content authoring). These approaches to content authoring are really more of a spectrum and a potential feature would have to be able to satisfy needs all along that that spectrum.

I liked the idea that we could both accommodate the ability for system-provided templates and also allow users to promote their created pages to templates.

I was also happy that while sequencing and tracking were articulated as important, everyone seemed to agree that neither were crucial for a first implementation.

I was also ecstatic to learn that the groundwork is being laid for Sakai to be aware of content/items/entities inside of tools (like discussion thread, assignments, etc.) in order to accomodate the need to place them on a page and treat them like any other piece of content in Sakai.