2008 Fellow Reports

Preliminary Reports

Alan Berg

I am in the midst of writing the official Sakai book co-authored with Michael Korcuska. This effort involves the writing of 100,000 words and interacting with around 50 members of the Sakai community. I have donated one working day of my own time and the University of Amsterdam donated 2 days per week.

Further, I have also supported a Software Engineering Master student, Johan Flint during his study of Sakai code quality. His defence of the thesis is in March. I expect to publish one or two papers on this subject later with Johan Flint and Charles Severance.

I am in the midst of negotiation tutoring of two more Software Engineering students. However, that effort has not been finalized. I wish to pursue the analysis of code quality and the automation of processes. However, due to the focus on the book I have only a minimal amount of time to do so.

I have been in discussion with UPMC (Paris) about collaborating on building a uPortal 3 to Sakai connection. This work is at an early stage.

I am also involved as a QA server admin. However, currently the work does not take much time up.

In the coming months, I hope to finish the book and back to automating processes.

Nuno Fernandes

• Development of SiteStats 2.0: a lot of changes have been made to accomplish what instructors typically desire. Most desired features are now available from start page and a lot of new features have been added. This have been the main goal over the last months;
• Participation on Sakai the community, as time permits:
  • Reporting of new bugs
  • Fixes/patches for existing bugs
  • Localization of 2.6.x
  • QA 2.6.x (as possible)

David Horwitz

Current Activities:

• Branch Manager for 2-6-x; includes involvement in the 2-6-x release process (including calls and discussions.)
• Branch Manager for 1.0.x kernel and component owner for K1 components.
• Hosted Anthony Whyte on his visit to South Africa (he stayed in my house.)

Currently starting a project to port the polls services and tools to K2. The aim is to be a public "first user" and blog the experience so that the community can get more information on what is involved in the move. The project will be blogged at http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/daves-blog (syndicated on planet sakai) and already the first post is up:
http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/daves-blog/2009/04/04/paddling-in-k2-pool-part-1-preparation. Completion to some extent depends on the speed at which the K2 project matures.

Beth Kirschner

I've continued my work supporting the OSP ePortfolio effort by leading weekly conference calls between at least eight institutions, facilitating requests, implementing/resolving enhancements and bugs. In the past 6 months, the ePortfolio group has leveraged Nathan Pearson's design work to revamp the portfolio tool, accept patches and fix numerous problems.

I've also continued my work with Sakai localization, facilitating requests, updating confluence pages, and leading internationalization workshops at the last Sakai conference. In the last 6 months, I've checked in two or three dozen bug fixes and translations including:

• Updates to Swedish, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese translations
• New Basque and Traditional Chinese translations

Maggie Lynch

The past year has been challenging in terms of budgets and system integration schedules in Sakai. OHSU has integrated webconferencing and iTunes U with Sakai. Our work on a federated digital repository has been waylaid, and our work on Portfolios is still in trial. Consequently, my primary focus has been documenting the implementation of pedagogy within the Sakai environment, assessing course materials and faculty performance, and challenging faculty to look at alternatives to their current teaching strategies.

Specifically I have accomplished the following:

• Last year I was an integral part of developing the Rubric used in the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award self-evaluation process. I have also encouraged other institutions to use this as a way to evaluate good course design on their campuses. We have incorporated that rubric as a formative evaluation tool for exemplar courses at OHSU.
• I have also been part of a team of nursing faculty who developed a literature review document on teaching and learning best practices in nursing, including extensive sections on Distance Education, Collaborative Learning, and Deep Learning. This document is in the process of publication with national distribution options.
• I presented at and participated in the Virginia Tech Conference focusing on pedagogical practices in the Sakai Community.
• I have been evaluating and revising my past pedagogical work, as well as creating quick handouts for faculty in table format to assist them in making determinations around pedagogical strategies and types of technology to incorporate in their online learning courses. These are linked below and shared through the OpenEd Practices site.
  • Online Learning Tools and Strategies to Consider for Active Learning
  • Online Course Evaluation
  • Online Instructor Evaluation

As other resources become available, I will post them to the OpenEd Practices site.

Stephen Marquard

Current activities:

Tackled a number of development tasks in the Sakai code:

• Improved Search service by upgrading to a newer version of Lucene (2.2), updating a number of content digester and addressing some scaleability issues. Work is ongoing.
• Helped to improve the Chat tool by fixing a number of reliability issues, and reviewing and committing code contributions. Currently doing some further work on Chat aimed at eliminating internal tool iframes, and implementing some entitybroker support.
• Fixed some issues in the code base which were holding up the 2-6-x release, including completing work and testing delayed event notification.

Advocacy work has included:

• Organized Sakai South Africa workshops in March 2009, to discuss future directions focusing on Sakai 3, and joint work amongst Sakai SA institutions.
• Presented Sakai to an e-learning workshop at SITA (the State IT Agency) in December 2008.

If time permits, I plan to pursue a JMS implementation of the events service in the 2.x (K1) code base, building on previous work by Thomas Amsler and Aaron Zeckoski.

Final Reports