NYU Sakai 3 Vision Statement
DRAFT
NYU is currently working on a 2-year charge to roll out Sakai 3 as one of the primary applications in a next-generation-IT academic framework for faculty and students. Sakai 3 will serve as one of the primary locations for the academic community (faculty, students, researchers and staff) to connect and collaborate. NYU's intended use of Sakai 3 is fairly inline with the vision outlined in the Sakai 3 whitepaper(Sakai 3 Proposal v08.pdf on the Sakai Wiki Roadmap page) and the direction manifested in the Sakai 3 R&D environment. However, there are some aspects of NYU's intended use of Sakai 3 that, while not necessarily out of line with larger Sakai 3 vision, are worth highlighting. See the NYU Sakai 3 Roadmap to learn more about NYU's development priorities and interests through 2012.
NYU's Use of Sakai 3
1. A Focus on Collaborative Spaces and Special Interest Sites
NYU's initial implementation of Sakai will focus on project, research and special interest sites (e.g. study abroad, chess club, performance groups, etc.), collaborative spaces for students and faculty, and student portfolios/advising sites. It will be a hub for academic/professional networking and research and educational collaborations. Every user will be given a personal networking site, which he/she can allow others to join. As a global university, with a need to maintain connections and share instructional resources and research data across continents, having an online space that supports this form of academic networking and collaboration becomes even more vital. While faculty may choose to use Sakai 3 in support of teaching in individual courses, the initial implementation of Sakai 3 at NYU will not attempt to support functionality traditionally associated with course sites (i.e., gradebook, testing and quizzing).
2. Non-Hierarchical Portfolios and Assessments
Within Sakai 3, NYU seeks to provide an alternate conception of portfolios and assessment that stresses flexibility in how data is gathered, measured, and presented. A traditional e-portfolio tool, such as the Sakai 2 Open Source Portfolio, defines an electronic portfolio as a location to exhibit finished work that has been selected by students to fulfill predetermined measures that have been set by administrative bodies. The student portfolios/advising sites that will be supported in Sakai 3 at NYU will offer an alternative to traditional student portfolios in a number of ways. The portfolio structure will enable students to perform critical thinking, analysis, and synthesis within their own personal online work space, organizing their learning in self-determined organizational schemas. Faculty and advisors will participate in these learning processes and review the outcomes, acting as non-authoritative guides. Academic advisors will have direct access to student work and their progress, completed across programs and schools. Anything that can be traced within the portfolio system can be a means for spontaneous assessment (blog posts, discussion threads, etc.). The portfolio will track and encourage innovative clinical and internship experiences. This approach to portfolios will allow for a robust set of data for advising and assessment that can be spontaneous and flexible.
3. Multiple Repository Integration
To avoid creating another silo of content, a primary focus at NYU is to connect Sakai to its central repositories. Within the two-year charge, NYU expects to integrate with Xythos, DSpace, a video and audio streaming service provider, and selected Library-curated media collections. Xythos provides free-form file storage and sharing to members of the NYU community. DSpace underpins the Faculty Digital Archive, a highly visible repository of NYU faculty digital scholarship annotated with metadata. A streaming service will be selected during the charge. In addition, the best approach for integrating institutionally curated media collections, library-licensed databases, and data set repositories will be identified, and a set of these repositories will be selected for implementation. NYU is working under the assumption that there will never be one all-encompassing file repository that would enable simplified permissions for any media used within Sakai. However, the currently scoped means of resolving the user experience and the permissions management for this multiple repository integration is based on Sociable (a personal and community resource manager), and on External Groups Management (see details below).
4. External Groups Management
A common source for permissions is needed in order to effectively integrate multiple repositories with Sakai and to reduce barriers to other institutional resources, such as the student information system. NYU will select and implement a group management toolkit, such as Grouper, as a shared source of group data. Sakai and LDAP will be able to provide group information to the toolkit as well as receive from it. Systems integrated with Sakai will integrated with the group management toolkit where a common understanding of groups and permissions is required. See Groups and Permissions
NYU will look to the users & groups work already underway on Sakai 3, contributing where possible and avoiding duplication of effort.
5. Academic Cloud
Inherent to a focus on collaboration and sharing is the need to support cross-institutional data and resource sharing for researchers and faculty. Most researchers and faculty, as well as the students of today's culture, do not work in institutional silos; instead, their peers and collaborators are located around the world at multiple institutions. For NYU, as a global-networked university, the need for technology to bridge various boundaries is only heightened. Specifically, there is a clear need for an academic cloud(i.e., a cross-institutional data infrastructure that facilitates sharing but ensures that academic data is academically owned, managed, and preserved). It is NYU's belief that a Sakai system that can accommodate cross-institutional data sharing will be aptly placed to function as an instrumental player within such a cloud. The building of any infrastructure is costly and labor intensive, requiring vision and a long-term commitment. For non-profit institutions, it can be enticing to believe that corporate entities, which have access to great resources, might assume the responsibility for building our world's knowledge infrastructure. In for some case, this may be very true. However, the value of higher educational institutions inheres not only in their dissemination of current knowledge, but also in their commitments to academic freedom, and the related creation and distribution of knowledge. While corporate entities are by no means the enemy of higher-education institutions, their ideals and commitments are entirely different, with their primary responsibility being to generate revenue. This cultural distinction is too large to ignore. Academic technologists and scholars cannot simply trust that their needs will happen to lie along the same road as the pursuit of profit; they have a responsibility to participate in the building of this millenium's knowledge infrastructure. In addition, an academic cloud is of particular value to a global-networked university like NYU.
The full vision for how cross-institutional data and repository sharing has certainly not been resolved at NYU, and of course it cannot and will not be resolved by NYU alone. Therefore, as part of the two-year initiative to establish Sakai at NYU, NYU will identify the appropriate partnerships and consortiums that have already formed at other institutions to address similar issues and will pool our collective knowledge to help define a long-term solution for how cross-institutional data and resource sharing can be achieved (for NYU and others). In addition, within the 2 year charge we expect to allow non-NYU community members controlled access to ALEX under a guest scholar status; our implementation of Sociable (a personal and community resource manager) and External Groups Management will need to support these use cases.
6. Sociable (a personal and community resource manager)
NYU does not expect to have a 1:1 integration (i.e., full functionality replication between systems such as file upload, metadata creation, system searches, slide show creation, etc.) with all of the repositories and licensed databases that will be made readily available within Sakai. NYU will instead focus on the development of a personal resource manager/tagging service that will be tightly integrated with Sakai. This tool, which we are referring to as Sociable, will provide each individual user central storage of a record of any resource (web site, pdfs, images, bibliographic entries in library databases, datasets, discussion threads, Sakai site pages, blog posts, etc.) that he/she has located among the multiple institutional repositories available or from the internet. A person can then tag their resources and/or create more formal metadata, and Sociable tool will be able to import metadata based on pre-created templates for resources that were added from centralized repositories. In addition, Sociable will extend the academic collaboration that is being established within the Sakai environment, with a community sharing of tags. The tags from "Experts" on certain topics could be identified. Community groups could share by using tags. The possibilities have been identified in other uses of social tagging systems and will be extended by an academic environment that is not siloed by media or resource types, or organizational goals. See Sociable for more details.