New Discussion

See also Portfolio-related vignettes for community discussion on functionality we want to preserve and functionality we want to add in Sakai 3.0.

In preparation for 4-27-09 and 5-4-09 meetings, go to Portfolio-related vignettes to enter your thoughts on current and future OSP functionality.

Relevant notes from 2009-03-23 and 2009-03-30 OSP Community Calls
Available time was used for productive discussion of IU enhancements for Sakai/OSP 2.7.

Relevant notes from 2009-03-16 OSP Community Call

Sean reviewed the changes to the vignettes page with the group and suggested that a next step would be to come up with a strategy for introducing this to the Sakai3 working group. Noah mentioned that there is a weekly UX call that could be used, but that the main conversations for Sakai3 are small conversations over Skype and the Sakai 001 bridge with Nathan and a small group of developers. This group is under a lot of pressure to release a version of Sakai 3 for Cambridge/GeorgiaTech and we are unlikely to have an impact on its direction.

Perhaps a good strategy for interacting with the Sakai 3 WG would be to do so in concert with the T&L group. We recognize that there is a barrier between how we think. Lynn had mentioned last week that they are primarily focused on course/project sites. It may be that the readiness of the OSP tools is a barrier (in which case, we should talk with them soon to ensure that this is not the case in the future). Nancy mentioned that Matthiew Plourde attends the T&L calls and she would ask him for a recommendation on how the T&L group is interacting with the Sakai 3/UX group and report back next week.

Relevant notes from 2009-03-09 OSP Community Call

Towards the goal of identifying the things that OSP does that we want preserved and extended in 3.0, Jan listed seven thing that we do (Select, Reflect,Tag, Associate, Evaluate, Share, Report) on the Vignettes page. The group added the word Guide as the first item on the list. The question arose whether the term Tag covers defining a controlled vocabulary for outcomes/goals with associated rubrics and the like (Structuring of goal sets). Tag v. Associate: both have to do with drawing connections between your object and a concept. Free tagging is going to be done for 3.0, but we'll have to contribute to get controlled vocabularies/goal management. There are things that will be built by the Sakai community, and things we'll need to add. Vignettes page was modified to have two new columns, one for what the Sakai community is likely to contribute anyway, and the second for input we need to have. David Goodrum's post is a good model for us for speaking to the larger community. Flow (workflow) was added as the last category. Clay Fenlason has done a lot of work relevant to workflow. We should define the user experience we'd like users to have (learners and mentors)

Relevant notes from 2009-03-02 OSP Community Call

Where is there money? What is the largest critical mass we can get together to actually do something? Portfolio-related vignettes page has some ideas related to goals. Three items there have to do with meta-tagging, and two with user experience. If we are going after grant money, we should be thinking in terms of a new vision for 3.0. Preferably something more flexible than the current system. Ros Orgel will find out what happened with the grant proposal that was put together by Bret Eynon, Melissa Peet, and Darren Cambridge, but it may not have been very Sakai-oriented. John Moore and Eddie Watson at VA Tech would be good to talk to in order to understand the Mellon perspective.

LaGuardia has a decree from on high that they are to use Blackboard, which is hindering their ePortfolio work. Noah Botimer pointed out that the new IMS work should make integration with Blackboard feasible, allowing for mash-up of content, plugging in modules, etc. Blackboard and Pearson are leading the initiative.

Steve Foehr from RINET talked about moving from a K-12 perspective to K-20, where goals mapped in school can be carried over into the university. They are working with URI and Rhode Island College. Rhode Island College is interested in Sakai as a means to meet their accreditation needs. They have used a system called True Outcomes that had some issues (and is pretty much at the end of its life), but one of its strengths was its reporting system.

Jan noted that many new people looking at Sakai are particularly interested in Goal Management, but they all have different approaches. Noah pointed out that we know a great deal more about tagging and Goal Management than we did even a couple years ago. What solutions are out there? Has anyone come up with a solution that meets our needs? We should do a survey of current solutions: IDEAL, Task Stream, Chalk and Wire, Angel, Desire2Learn.

Regarding Sakai 3.0, it is important for the people working on 3.0 to know that we exist and are thinking about future directions. We should write up a list of things that should be met in 3.0 and make a project plan for it. What makes us the same, what makes us different (e.g., out permissions)? We should describe what we have and what we want for the future in ways that others can understand. We should cross list the write-ups that Jan will be posting on Community Ideas for Future OSP Releases with the vignettes page, and link to both from the standing agenda page.

Mark Zaldivar at VA Tech may be taking stewardship of the Goal Management tool. It would be good to get a developer from VA Tech on the call.

Relevant notes from 2009-02-23 OSP Community Call

The second half of the meeting was spent discussing a vision for the future. We need to be more ready to contribute to ideas on Sakai 3.0 long before meetings at the July Sakai Conference in Boston. There was discussion of coming up with a small project, like the Portfolio tool reworking, that we could do as a group and have some confidence that the task would be completed. There was also discussion of more "blue sky" ideas. Jan Smith noted that many new clients are clustering around Schools of Education, and are interested in features that were present in Goal Management. In addition, we talked about making use of the Sakai 3.0 Portfolio-related vignettes.

• The first subject we focused on was the general idea of tagging with goals. The ability to create goal sets and make them available to users. What are the first few things we would like users to be able to do? Just as groups transcend sites, goal sets should. Some sets might be available to everyone, some just to a group, some even individual. Goal Management is a good place to start a project, because there are no issues of backwards compatibility. Josh Ryan at AZ State has done a lot of work on this in connection with the IDEAL Project being done in conjunction with the AZ Dept. of Ed. This is a pool of questions that are each associated with one or more goals. The questions can be browsed and used by teachers in tests. The questions are in an external data store, but the browser is a Sakai contrib tool. We could learn something from them about how to deal with large goal sets.
• Another possible focus is rethinking what matrices and wizards do. Michigan and IU, for example, have had some discussion of rewriting the tools to complete their integration.
• There was also discussion of social networking in Sakai: ways to get students to look at each other's portfolios, tagging, finding friends. This is important to LaGuardia.

New Proposals

Finer Grained Matrix Permissions (CRIM)

We have a project that involves peer reviews on document within portfolio.

We wish to use OSP (Open Source Portfolio) as a framework to implement those needs.

The challenge we face is that each participant can be potential reviewer for each other participants for specific documents that are confidential.

Also, we want each participant to be able to invite other participant from a list of participant for commenting their work for a particular personnal document.
So we want to restrict access and permission for specific document to a list of participant.

Briefly, the user stories are:
As a participant/creator, I want to create a personnal (private) document (in a matrix cell)
As a participant/creator, I want to invite (give access/permission) other participants to comment/review my personnal document.
As a particpant/reviewer, I want to read the document (now that I have access/permission) and write my comments in a document for the creator to see.
As a participant/creator, I want to read the comments written by the participant reviewer.

As far as we understand, we cannot restrict access for a document for a specific list of participant with OSP. (Are we right on this? If not tell us how to do it!)

So we plan to modify OSP to give access/permission for a document to other specific participants by letting a participant chosing from a list of the participants.

Again, confidentiality is very important for us. The personnal documents must have access/permission restricted by the owner/creator participant to only participants he chooses.

Do you have any suggestion about strategy we can use to handle access/permission (group? realms?) and how to implement it?
(We can handle the modifications of the user interface without any big problems.
We would need pointers to elements of solutions for the access/permission side.)

Item-Level Review Workflow (Rutgers)

Rutgers is preparing a campus-wide portfolio. We have a very decentalized structure. So there's not a single office helping students and using it for assessment. Rather, various people will be asking students to make entries in their portfolio, and reviewing them:

• first year seminars
• college life people
• courses
• departments
• college staff doing assessment

This makes evaluation using a rubric difficult, because without some additional code, we would mix evaluations done by very different people for different purposes. Each program may want to review the
items they have assessed. In general we want to assess individual items (forms), not cells.

I've added a new review workflow that keeps track of who the assessment was done for. Internally it is a single table. It points to an item, a review, a group within the site, and a reviewer. Next to an item in a cell, I've added a new command, "submit for review". When a student selects that, they get a list of all groups they in, with the people in that group who have review permission. The student then submits the item to a specific person. (The problem is that a student may well be in more than one group that is using the portfolio.)

Reviewers have a listing of all items that have been submitted to them for review (and a separate listing of items they have previously reviewed). I believe this gives us enough data that we can produce reports for a course or a program on items they have reviewed.

Tabled Proposals

Scaffolded free-form portfolios

• Do a rigorous feature by feature analysis of the two models of portfolio templates and freeform portfolios
• Consider a a single, comprehensive solution that fits all of the needs
• Replace "design-your-own-portfolio vocabulary
• Step 2 in the process of building a freeform portfolio should redirect to the filepicker helper

*This topic needs more information/detail*

Assignments/Matrix/Wizard Integration

Should the "Auto-populate a wizard/matrix page based on assignments" enhancement (SAK-10832) be formally released? Currently sakai.properties needs to enable this feature by setting "osp.experimental.assignments=true".

*Tabled until 2.5 has seen more use and/or Indiana's assignment/matrix linking feature is ready for review*

Reviewed Proposals

see Reviewed Community Ideas for Future OSP Releases