Planet Sakai

Extending the types of ACLs in Jackrabbit 1.x was hard. After, 1.5 where there was a reasonable ACL implementation, much of the code that managed this area was buried deep within inner classes inside the DefaultAccessManager and related classes of Jackrabbit 1.5/1.6. In Jackrabbit 2 as part of the improvement to the UserManager (I guess) [...]

I seldom blog about my oldest daughter Mandy - she is a bit of an online recluse so I have always respected her privacy. But somehow she found a prank call to Fashion bug in 2008 on YouTube where she...

Message from Dave Price:

Dear All,

In consequence of the OULS name change to Bodleian Libraries, SOLO,
OxLIP+ and OU e-Journals have been given new URLs. They are respectively:

1. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
2. http://oxlip-plus.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
3. http://ejournals.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

These new URLs are now in operation. The old forms will continue to
function until the .ouls.ox.ac.uk domain is withdrawn 1 March 2012 but
please start using the new forms and update your bookmarks, web pages
and documentation accordingly.

The OLIS Web OPAC URL – http://library.ox.ac.uk – remains unchanged.

Michael Korcuska made this presentation about the Sakai Project when he visited Universidad Polytechnica de Valencia in 2007: http://polimedia.upv.es/visor/?id=7f1f319b-7bd5-0b43-8b81-8bb5660d70a5

It’s been something like 9 months since my last blog post.  I can’t really blame it on Twitter, either, since I’m not really tweeting much.  I guess this year’s Hola Mohalla resolution will be to do “more blogging, more tweeting, make more noise”.

Anyhow, I’m at JASIG’s spring conference, presenting Matterhorn’s services, technologies, scope, and roadmap.  I’ve posted my slides as pdf and keynote files.

On Friday 5th of March we hosted an Assembly on how to create personas and how to do user testing.
During our project we learned a lot about these topics so we thought it would definitely be useful sharing it with other projects in this way.

The assembly was in fact a hands-on workshop with first a case study on how we went about creating personas and doing user testing, then some general theory with hints and tips if you want to do it yourself, and afterwards the participants got the possibility to try creating personas and doing user testing themselves.

Unfortunately, some people who wanted to come along couldn’t attend after all. We might organise another workshop in the future, as the people who could attend it, seemed to find it interesting.



An example - use case













Showing how to do user testing













Participants looking at information to start creating their own personas












Participants preparing for a user testing session, looking at wire frames












Trying out a behavioural axes exercise












Materials used during workshop
The documents below are those we used during the workshop. Feel free to have a look at them!
Couldn't attend the workshop while you desperately wanted to find out how to create personas or do user testing? No worries - these materials should give you a start on trying it out yourself.

> PowerPoint used during workshop

Persona materials
> Persona template – what information should go in your persona for sure?
> Examples of personas 1 – these are the personas we created during our project, here used as inspiration during the workshop
> Description of fictive users – you could use this set of ‘fictive users’ as set of data when creating personas yourself as an exercise
> Pictures which you can use when creating personas

User testing materials
> General list of tips when creating a set of questions for your user testing session
> Short example of a user testing session
> Example of a list of questions 1 – we used this during our first user testing session. You can use this set of questions as example when creating a list yourself.
> Example of a list of questions 2 – we used this during our second user testing session. You can use this set of questions as example when creating a list yourself.
> Paper prototypes and wire frames you could use when trying out user testing: Paper prototype green concept, paper prototype blue concept, paper prototype red concept, wire frames

Back at Thanksgiving, I bought a smartphone to replace my dino-phone. Since then, I realized how amazing it is to have all of that computing power in my pocket, and after attending the ELI Spring Focus Session webinar last week, it reinforced my belief that smartphones are going to rule the world in a couple of years. I think the first reason is because of their price. Being relatively cheap

This battle may stretch out for several years like the Blackboard patent dispute. If it does, Colleges and Universities will lose in the process. Like the Blackboard dispute, which was ultimately settled favorably (the patent was invalidated), it's easy to get drawn into the gory details of the dispute. Why? Because it has potentially dramatic consequences for all of us who care about driving more value out of IT for the good of education. Or does it?

This is the first in the series called "Nothin but Net" taped in 1997-1998 and produced by MediaOne Television. It is a move to a 30-minute format and better studio. The show focused on streaming audio with several interviews with Real Networks and the use of Real in teaching and distance education as well as a demonstration of encoding Real Video for 28.8bps modems. Warning: Ponytail alert.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224100I had a bunch of trouble getting a GNOME launcher to successfully execute (interestingly enough, the Eclipse/STS launchers mostly worked fine) – turned out it was related to JDK_HOME not being recognized by GNOME. I’d gotten accustomed to setting up my environment variables in ~/.bashrc and sourcing that into .profile – apparently GNOME looks in /etc/environment.

Will write up some more thoughts based on a few days usage in a bit. All better for now. Links:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224100
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=884580

Introduction

I have written code to make the management of adhoc groups easier, all in pure HTML (no RSF, no JSF, no JAVA). Using Entity Broker and JavaScript, I have introduced more contemporary methods to adding, removing and replacing user membership at group level.

Problem case:

Currently the UI for managing adhoc groups (Site Setup > Adhoc Groups) is clunky, unsearchable and very difficult to use for large groups ( > 100 members).

Current UI:

 

Solution:

I propose this UI:

 

Features:

1. Facebook-like name picker (auto completer),
2. Paste multiple usernames,
3. Easily select users by filtering based on their last names eg: Type "a" to show only those that begin with "a", "ab" for those that begin with "ab", and so on...,
4. Remove individuals by a one-click action,
5. most importantly; be able to UNDO your last action.

View the screen cast

Download a high quality version at: https://vula.uct.ac.za/access/content/public/help/video/group%20manager%20cast-0.m4v

View the streaming video online: http://meeting.uct.ac.za/sakai-group-manager/

Technical: How to implement this in your sakai 2.6.x instance

1. Update your EnityBroker using the patch at: http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-17471
2. Get the html/javascript code: svn export http://source.cet.uct.ac.za/svn/sakai/uct-skins/trunk/library/content/uct/groupHelper groupHelper
   
3. Copy the groupHelper folder into your sakai /library/ folder so that it is accessible via a url like this: {server}/library/groupHelper/adhoc_group_selector.html
4. Use the Web Content tool in sakai to drop this into a site. Ensure you have the content path set to: {server}/library/content/uct/groupHelper/adhoc_group_selector.html?site=${SITE_ID}      Sakai will substitute ${SITE_ID} for the actual site ID at runtime. The code needs this parameter to work.

FYI, ONLY if the ${SITE_ID} parameter does not translate to a proper site ID as expected, do this:

• Add this property to the Site in the Admin Tool > Sites: iframe.allowed.macros=${SITE_ID}

That's it.

Drop a comment for any questions/issues/suggestions.

 

 

A news item was published about the University of Delaware Learning Management System Committee spring meeting on Feb. 23. The LMS Committee is a 41-member University-wide committee whose members are ambassadors to their departments regarding the use of Sakai@UD

Deputy Provost Havidán Rodríguez ... spoke about how Sakai enhances teaching and learning and allows increased communication between students and faculty. The good news, according to Rodríguez, is that no courses remain on MyCourses (WebCT) for the spring semester. This puts the project four months ahead of its original deadline.

Mathieu Plourde, IT Client Support and Services, elaborated on the Sakai@UD project timeline. This spring, there are 1226 Sakai@UD courses, representing 40 percent of all University rosters. Following Plourde's talk, Kathy Pusecker, associate director of the Office of Educational Assessment, thanked IT Client Support and Services for their support of the recent e-portfolio grant process. Twelve projects were awarded grants to deploy e-portfolios that will enable students to reflect on their work, showcase their best artifacts, and allow the University to gather data on the achievement of our general education and programmatic goals. The ultimate goal is to make portfolios a tool that the entire University community can use.

The meeting also featured presentations by three faculty members who use Sakai@UD to enhance their students' learning in interesting ways.

Alan Berg, Anthony Whyte, Jean-François Lévêque, and I finished our final two presentations at the EuroSakai Valencia 2010 conference today. The overall theme of these presentations was "Get Involved". The presentations are What is Sakai QA and 10 ways to make a good Sakai release (my apologies to the attendees but 8:30am is just too early for a session). I hope that our main point got across and I hope we provided helpful information for those brave enough to attend.
A few highlights for those who could not make it:

• Alan did another Mexican wave
• I (and others) was still half asleep during the morning session
• Jean-François made a lot of food related jokes
  
• lolcatz were involved
  

Our major theme was "Blood and Treasure" (stolen from Anthony Whyte). If you have assets (people) then you have blood to contribute. If you are looking for ways to get involved please consider these opportunities. If you answer yes to any of these questions, or even if you don't, you may want to sign up to participate in one of these teams.

• Sakai Maintenance Team - are you a java developer? an SVN wizard? want to learn more about Sakai codebase? do you love issue management and/or JIRA? do you like to write unit tests?
  
• Release Management - are you a master of subversion? do you have a passion for merging code? are you running a 2.*.x branch in production?
  
• Quality Assurance - can you use a web browser? do you like trying every little thing in software? are you tired of hearing complaints from users after you upgrade?
  

The other primary and very critical way to get involved is with treasure. If you have some money you can spend on open source and/or Sakai then you have treasure. Consider putting this money into foundation dues or buying into commercial support. Check out the end of the What is Sakai QA presentation for a few options to get involved when you have money but no people (or if you have money AND people).
One final point from our talk. If you are involved, thank you. If you see others who are involved, please thank them.

Extension for proposal submissions for the 21010 Sakai Conference, please submit by March 15

We have received multiple requests to extend the deadline for proposals for the 2010 Sakai Conference in Denver, June 15-17. Although the Conference Program Committee has now begun to review and evaluate submitted proposals we will continue to accept additional submissions for an additional two weeks, through March 15.

Please review the Proposal Guidelines at: http://bit.ly/9RWnUj

To submit a proposal fill out the online form: http://bit.ly/9ALf9v

We have received multiple requests to extend the deadline for proposals for the 2010 Sakai Conference in Denver, June 15-17. Although the Conference Program Committee has now begun to review and evaluate submitted proposals we will continue to accept additional submissions for an additional two weeks, through March 15.

Please review the Proposal Guidelines at: http://bit.ly/9RWnUj

To submit a proposal fill out the online form: http://bit.ly/9ALf9v