Home
Lead(s): Former user (Deleted)
One of the things that Sakai lacks is a simple way to present content to a student in a manner consistent with an approach to pedagogy defined by a teacher. Sakai tools are heavily focused on collaboration (chat, discussion, wiki, etc.). There are some tools, such as Melete, Samigo, and the Resource Tool, that present content, but they are large applications aimed at accomplishing specific tasks.
The Sousa Project has been inactive since 2008, largely due to the underwhelming response from the Sakai community. However, the code is still in contrib and available for anyone to use. If you are interested in using Sousa, get in touch with me. With a bit of funding, we could resurrect Sousa and put it back into operation. - mjn 8/2013
The Sousa project is aimed at creating simple, sequenced content for delivery to a student. It is based on the idea that content should be managed by the Content Hosting Service, thus giving users complete access to it via the Resource tool. Sequences are saved in XML files, and eventually will have an export mechanism that will zip up a sequence with its content items. It can be thought of as a learning construction kit that's easy to extend and flexible in its use.
You might be interested in Sousa History and how this came to be.
See also Resource View project and Content Authoring project
Download the 2.5.x-1 code.
Sousa Video Update (rtsp://video.cpm.jussieu.fr/Archive/visio/sakai/st080701_4.rm) | Video of presentation at the Ninth Sakai Conference in Paris, France, July 2008. Video Demo |
Application requirements, suggestions, and ideas are collected in these pages. Sousa Scorecard | |
The conceptual aspects of the application are described here. Content Notes | |
Descriptions of how to setup and use Sousa including screen shots, etc. Sousa Page Examples | |
Technical documentation and design. Other Tools   RT Integration | |
Development Notes and Sousa To Do. See also Sousa Ideas and Sousa Bugs |
What's in a Name?
This project has gone through several name changes. Originally it was just the Sequencer project, but that didn't distinguish it from other sequencer applications in Sakai like Melete and SCORM. The "Page Object Content Sequencer" was more descriptive, but people were a bit put off by the similarity of POCS to Pox when pronounced. Feedback at the Eighth Sakai Conference suggested that a better name was needed. After some discussion and thought, the name "Sousa: the Page Object Sequencer" was selected. Sousa is a reference to John Phillips Sousa, the American composer of marches and band music. The wish is for an application that would "line them up and make them march".
The Sequencer project also owes a debt to the UC Berkeley Gallery Tool, since that served as the conceptual basis for Sousa. Some of the inspiration for this work came from Learning Structures
The Lessons Tool
People interested in Sousa should also look into the Lessons tool developed by Chuck Hedrick at Rtugers. The Lessons tool sprang from the same desire that drove Sousa: a need for simple content authoring and delivery in Sakai. Chuck has indicated that he wants to keep Lessons very simple, so it is unlikely to have the broad support for multimedia that Sousa has. He also favors a simple, linear sequencing model whereas Sousa was designed to support several different kinds of sequencing.