Planet Sakai

Two Camera Sony HD Interview Shoot – Lightweight / Travel setup

2012-02-05T16:35:57Z

This is the camera setup that I use for my IEEE Computer Computing Conversations column.

The contents of my two-camera HD Interview kit fit in a backpack (except for two sixty inch tripods). With this kit, I can travel with the full kit and a week of clothes in a backpack and small rolling carry-on case. I pack the tripods in the carry on case and they have their own cases that I use once I unpack to go to each interview shoot. I can comfortably carry the kit on a bus, train, public transportation, or taxi. A particular feature I like is that I do *not* look like a television crew walking around – I just look like a normal guy with a backpack that no one should pay any special attention to. Sometimes it is nice not to advertise that you are packing about three grand of video gear when you are walking around….

A key for this kit is that it is specialized for interviews and in particular aimed at traveling as light as possible. In particular, it is well suited for interviews in offices or conference rooms. It is self-contained and can be transported, set up, and operated by one person.

Here is a sample video using this setup http://youtu.be/IPxQ9kEaF8c using this kit, taped, December 16, 2011.

I will update this document as I add new equipment and gain more experience and add some “as packed” pictures as well in an upcoming blog post. I wanted to get this “initial equipment list” post out and then add to it later.

I will also talk about setup, lighting, and interview technique in upcoming blog posts.

Comments welcome.

Lowepro CompuDaypack Camera Bag

This is a great backpack, combining space for a laptop and normal stuff I need traveling with a bottom compartment for camera gear and lights. I can fit both my cameras, both my lights, and the power supplies for the lights, and shotgun microphone in the bottom compartment. I use the upper compartment for my 42-inch tripods and clamps as well as my laptop power supply. The space for the laptop works really well and I can carry papers, my iPad, a few copies of IEEE Computer Magazine or books as props, and all my travel documents with room to spare.

Packed this way, it does get pretty heavy. All the equipment is small but dense. So I need to carry it with both straps. In general the CompuDaypack is the perfect compromise for me and my kit *just* fits. I am very happy with it.

Sony HDR-CX360V

This is one of my HD cameras. It costs about $700. It is the lowest price Sony HD camera that does 24 frames per second progressive (24p). I prefer progressive mode for interviews since there is less motion and since an interview is pretty static, not needing ability to handle motion each frame is more like a picture. And since the destination of these interviews is the Web, I figure that I might as well let the camera do the de-interlace. I really like this camera. It is small, compact, and shoots great video. It also has a built in LED light that is surprisingly bright for hand-held filming.

Sony HDR-CX550V

This is my other HD camera. It costs about $1000. I wanted this camera because it has manual focus. But I find the manual focus hard to use because you just turn the knob and there are no stops. With a roll-focus move you want to know when to stop moving. And the focus knob is hard to get to without disturbing the camera and is very unnatural to use. So If I were doing this again – I would save the extra money and just get two HDR-CS360X cameras. This camera also has 64GB of memory – but I find that hte 32GB of the HDR-CS360X is more than sufficient. The CX550V does not have an on-camera LED video light. It has a LED flash – but it cannot be used while video taping.

Sony WCS999 Wireless Microphone

I really am a fan of wireless microphones in interview settings. I want my interviewee to feel like they are not strapped into their chair and can move around. So I really like this microphone. I am only using it at distances of about 5 feet or less and only using it for indoor applications. But is has good strong sound. The weakest aspect is the clip on the microphone. It is not the typical alligator clip – it is a little spring-thing and is terrible. It tends to move around and ends up with clothing noise. I cannot understand why Sony made this mistake.

3.5mm Stereo Male to 3.5mm Mono Female Adapter

Using this adapter makes sure that your mono microphone signals end up on both channels.

Audio-Technica ATR-3350 Microphone

I use this microphone as a backup if something goes wrong with my wireless microphones.

Sony ECM-HGZ1 Shotgun Microphone

I use this microphone for outdoor taping and use the microphone in “Gun/Shotgun mode” rather than Zoom Mode. I like it because it is powered by the hot–shoe and does not need any cables. It feels a little light but it is nice and small and fits nicely in my backpack.

Sony ECM-HGZ1 Foam and Standard Black WindCutter Set (WC03-HGZ1SET-STDBLK)

This is a rather expensive ($60) foam cover and wind cutter (a.k.a. Dead Cat) for the Sony ECM-HGZ1 microphone. I could not find any other option for a wind cutter and it is pointless to record outside without a wind cutter so I spent the money. It is a nice product and well-made.

Polaroid 42″ Travel Tripod

This little tripod folds up to a very small size and fits in the backpack. It uses a novel way to extend and store the legs. It only goes up to 42-inches – but it works great for interviews and travels very well. There are lots of vendors for this product and they all look completely identical except for the brand label on the item. You might find it searching for “Sima STV-42K” – I actually found these locally in a department store but they are chapter on Amazon. I carry two of these and use them either for lights or camera, depending on the setup. I use them either floor-standing or on a table.

Their only weakness is that they don’t last very long. The little spring loaded-balls that keep the legs extended fall apart pretty quickly. But they are so perfect for my travel kit that it is worth replacing one every few months. So I always keep an extra one in stock.

Sunpak ClampPod Pro

I also carry two of these clamps. Usually I use these for lights and they work very well to clamp a light to a shelf or a chair but they can hold a camera in a pinch.

Sony VCT-60AV Remote Control Tripod

This is the most amazing tripod ever. It is inexpensive and light and allows really smooth pan-tilt-zoom shots with the zoom controls on the handle. I use it both for B-Roll and for my primary camera in interviews. Note: The remote for this tripod only works with Sony camcorders – but it works really well. I only carry one of these tripods since I can only operate one camera at the same time. My secondary camera for interviews is locked down and slightly zoomed out.

I also have a generic 60-inch lightweight tripod with carrying case that I purchased at a local electronics store so I have two 60-inch tripods, two 42-inch tripods, and two clamp-on mounts. This combination allows me to deploy two cameras and two lights in most situations.

Switronix TL-50 Dimmable LED Light

I have two of these lights and they are an essential part of the kit. They cost about $200 but they are truly worth it. They are self-contained with built-in batteries and run for about two hours at full power. They are perfect for interviews since I can keep the lights within four feet of the interviewee. They have three filters to adjust the color temperature. I tend to use the orange filter for indoor filming and to reduce the eye-strain on the interviewee. The charger for this unit only works with 110V so I need the power-adapter (below) for international travel/filming.

240 To 110 200W Step Down Adapter

I need this adapter for international travel because the power supplies for the TorchLED lights are 110V-only.

Still in progress…

I should buy a couple of spare batteries. Most interviews are 40 minutes and the batteries have plenty of juice. But sometimes I shoot two interviews in a day with no chance to recharge and if the interviews go really well and go a little long I don’t want to sweat watching battery life drain down. Replacement batteries are so expensive so I will likely hold off for a bit.

Since I am experiencing problems with the WCS999 microphone, I have decided I want high quality audio on both cameras. I want a second wireless microphone and since I am a little unhappy with the microphone clip on the Sony WCS999 Microphone – I am looking at the very popular Azden WMS-PRO Wireless Microphone as a possible replacement. I also have ordered a replacement clip on Olympus ME-15 Microphone to see if it works with the WCS999.

Once I finish the evaluation, I will carry two of the same wireless microphones. As a Sony fan-boy, it bums me out that Sony made this little mistake on the WCS999 that puts me on this quest to find non-Sony equipment :)

Three new abstracts for talks

2012-02-05T14:46:24Z

This is a couple of abstracts that I wrote up and added to my page on speaking engagements

http://www.dr-chuck.com/dr-chuck/resume/speaking.htm

Sakai: Free as in Freedom

This presentation describes the experiences of building the open-source Sakai teaching and learning environment and community from the inside. Sakai was founded by the University of Michigan, Indiana University, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Sakai project was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and over 100 Sakai partner schools and companies for over five million dollars over a two year period.

The project was very ambitious with an almost impossible schedule for delivery. Almost nothing in the project went according to the plans and yet today, the Sakai software is in enterprise production use at nearly 300 schools world wide with three million daily users and a ten percent market share of top-100 universities worldwide.

This is the story of the successes and failures and challenges and recoveries along the way as well as the laughter, joy and sadness as the project went forward from the perspective of the chief architect and later executive director. The book “Sakai: Free as in Freedom (Alpha)” describes this period of the Sakai effort.

Experiences Teaching a First Programming/Technology Course at the Graduate Level

The University of Michigan School of Information master’s program has a programming requirement (www.si502.com) for all students regardless of whether their major is Human Computer Interaction, Social Computing, or Library and Information Science. With a typical enrollment of 70% women and almost no prior programming technical experience for the typical student, this class provides unique challenges in the design and teaching of the course. The course features a textbook specially designed for the course (Python for Informatics: Exploring Information). The course is much broader than most first computing courses and includes topics like database modeling, SQL, HMTL, CSS, XML parsing, security, web scraping, internet architecture, and others in addition to the programming component of the course. The course moves back and forth between programming and conceptual topics throughout the semester. One of the goals of the course is to empower and encourage students to take additional technology courses such as web site design and development. The presentation will describe the course and describe the results of the course to date.

Workshop: Building Learning Tools using IMS Learning Tools Interoperability

The IMS Learning Tools Interoperability standard (www.imsglobal.org/lti) greatly reduces the effort required to integrate an externally hosted learning tool into nearly all of the mainstream learning management systems (Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle, Canvas, Sakai, OLAT, and others). IMS Learning Tools Interoperability uses the OAuth protocol to send identity, course, user, and role data to the external tools. External tools can do roster transparent provisioning and single sign on using LTI as well as return grades to the calling learning management system. LTI allows those who would build innovative tools for teaching and learning an unprecedented simplicity in plugging their tool into any number of different learning management systems. This workshop will introduce the standard as well as demonstrate freely available sample code to simplify the building LTI compliant tools in PHP. Participants will develop and integrate a simple tool into Canvas, Sakai, Blackboard, or Moodle as part of the workshop.

OER Funding: Ask the Right Questions

2012-02-04T22:05:47Z

By Michael Feldstein

David Wiley writes:

You have to admit that some of the things the publishers are working on are both cooler and better than almost everything that currently exists in the OER space. Can you name a single OER project that does assessment at all (and I don’t mean PDFs of quizzes)? Can you name one that does diagnostic assessment or handles mastery in any meaningful way? We’ve narrowed the entire field of OER down to CMU OLI, Khan Academy, and possibly Thrun’s new stuff. Now, can you think of one of these three that openly licenses their assessments and the engines they run them on? No.

Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers. To the best of my knowledge there is no one really working on next gen OER – OER that are interactive, simulative, really rich with multimedia AND combined with OAR that drive diagnosis, remediation, and adaptation. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER. And believe me – if it took $100M to get the field to where it currently stands in terms of relatively static openly licensed content, it will take at least that much investment again over the next decade for the field to do something truly next gen.

Because this stuff costs so much to do, if no one steps up to the funding plate the entire field is at serious risk. Much has been written about 2012 being “the year of OER.” Let’s hope it’s not the year OER peaks. We need brains, energy, and funding on the next gen OER/OAR problem NOW. [Emphasis added.]

I have long argued that for-profit companies are neither the mortal enemies nor the white knights of education. In this particular case, given the heavy lift involved in funding this sort of effort relative to the resources available in the academic and philanthropic communities—and David is in a position to know—I think it is important to think about for-profit entities in roles that are potentially cooperative with rather than in opposition to OERs. We should be asking the following questions:

What sort of commercial ventures could prosper in an ecosystem where quality educational resources are abundant and free rather than scarce and expensive?
Specifically, what sorts of ventures could make money ethically by adding real value in the context of abundant and free educational resources?
What are the barriers preventing those ventures (either existing or yet-to-be-formed) from helping to create such an ecosystem?
Who are the right people and what are the right institutions to forge the relationships that could foster such an ecosystem?

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When It Comes to Content, Say “Yes” to Wrappers But “No” to Containers

2012-02-04T20:32:15Z

By Michael Feldstein

Scott Leslie has a good post up ruminating on the moving target of open textbooks which reminded me that I have long intended to write a follow-up to an exchange that he, I, and Rob Abel had in the comments section of a post a I wrote a while back. Scott lamented that the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges was releasing its open course content in IMS Common Cartridge format, which seemed to him to be not so easily accessible or universally usable as one might like. I wrote in response,

Fundamentally, I don’t believe in cartridges. I don’t believe in forking a copy of a digital resource and stuffing it into another system. It’s bad for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the implementation challenges that Scott ran into with Moodle (although it’s fair to say that some LMSs handle CC import better than others). Common Cartridge made more sense 5 or 10 years ago, but it’s late to the game and is ultimately destined to be eclipsed by in-place APIs, including but not limited to IMS LTI. (By the way, I’m not so sure it’s such a good idea to let Google own our integration API either.)

Unsurprisingly, Rob Abel, as CEO of the IMS, took issue:

If there is agreement that CC helps with the issue of content in an LMS then, well in your scenario the content is inside the publisher “LMS” (or equivalent).

Can I tailor it? Can I put things in there – like a syllabus – and get it out? If I’m the student and I create something in there can I get it out? Can I mix and match with other publisher materials? Can I archive that mixing for next term? Can I share what I did with my faculty peers who might want to learn from it? Can I create assessments in there and then use them somewhere else or just put them somewhere so that I can use them in the future?

Common Cartridge – or something like it – helps solve those issues. Fits right into the topic of openness. But, most importantly, in the digital education age we need to make digital education easy for the faculty and the students. Otherwise there won’t be a digital education age

Perhaps a mixture of OER and publisher proprietary stuff might be a solution. IMHO, some stuff needs to be tailored, remixed, moved in, and moved out. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a publisher platform or an LMS. Faculty want their stuff. Students want their stuff. Publishers need to help them, not thwart them.

I said that the binary choice Rob was offering up wasn’t the right one and promised to elaborate in a future post. Here, at last, is that response.

Let me start by reviewing an argument that I have made here before, which is that there should only ever be one copy of a learning resource except under very limited and specific circumstances. In this era of iframes, you can embed content pretty much wherever you want. By keeping the single canonical copy at one URL and surfacing it where it is needed (as opposed to copying it), you both maintain access to the most updated version from the authoritative source and preserve the ability to do in-depth usage and learning analytics. Who is using this content to learn what in which contexts? If you have a thousand copies of the same resource floating around, you can’t effectively aggregate this data (especially if you don’t know whether or how the content has been altered in those copies). There are only two circumstances under which it makes sense to make a second copy of a web-based learning resource: (1) you want to cache it locally for access in offline or bandwidth-constrained environments, or (2) you deliberately intend to fork the content and create a new version of it. And the first case should be addressed as a caching problem rather than a copying problem.

We have a number of formats today that are designed to take web-based resources and organize them for a particular type of consumption. Common Cartridge is one such format. It provides the content wrapped in metadata so the LMS knows where to put it. EPUB and the .ibooks derivative are other examples; they pull together disparate web-native resources into a book-like sequence and user experience. That’s fine. I have no problem with it. My problem is when those resources are copied and stored locally for no good reason. If you want to use one of these formats as a metadata wrapper to surface the remotely stored content within a context and user experience that makes it most useful, then yay. Use iframes or some similar technology and wrap them in the metadata you need. But don’t make local copies of the resources unless you have good reason to do so.

I would argue that efforts like the one by Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges should make the OER content available in canonical copies on their servers as plain old web pages and then provide cartridges that include pointers to those copies. Since one of the values of OERs is being able to remix, then maybe Common Cartridge should be extended to include an option to pull down the remote resource for local editing, constrained by the particular machine-readable license of that remote content. (I actually have an idea that would allow remixing but still maintain the “chain of custody” to the original resource for the purpose of learning analytics, but that’s another post for another time.) But the decision to download should be a deliberate one, not a default one, and all resources should be available on the naked web and not locked up by default in some metadata container that you have to crack open if you want access to the content.

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When It Comes to Content, Say “Yes” to Wrappers But “No” to Containers by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

IMS Learning Tools Interoperability: What’s New and What’s Next?

2012-02-04T04:00:07Z

This is an abstract I prepared for the 2012 Blackboard Developer Conference – BbDevCon. We shall see if it gets accepted.

IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 1.0 now has very broad market adoption and has been in Blackboard since Release 9.1SP4. Blackboard has added LTI support to building blocks, making it very simple to add LTI to a building block. Developers can plug externally hosted learning tools into Blackboard and the rest of the marketplace with a few lines of PHP. Now that the low-level LTI “plumbing” is in place, what will we do with it. This talk looks at the tools that are available in the marketplace that support IMS LTI and show them plugged into Blackboard. We will introduce and describe IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 1.1 that includes support for returning grades from external tools back to the grade book and demonstrate this. This talk also looks at ways to quickly build and host tools that function as LTI Providers and plug those tools into Blackboard. This talk also looks at the next release of IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 that includes even simpler provisioning and installation of tools, expanded grade/outcome services, and improved ability to import and export classes with links to dynamic content and services hosted on the web.

OAE Progress and Public Instance

2012-02-03T14:52:35Z

None

off

In November and December last year, several stakeholders in the Sakai OAE Managed Project, including Indiana University, the University of Michigan, UC Berkeley and New York University committed to a substantially increased collective investment in the project. Others recommitted, and the first Sakai Commercial Affiliate to join the project, rSmart, committed to make a contribution to development, beginning between March and July 2012. This is the first such commitment to OAE from a Sakai Commercial Affiliate. The financial commitment to Sakai OAE is now greater than the original Mellon Foundation grant to the initial Sakai Project.

This is all great news for the Project, and great news for the Sakai Community. It is also a testament to the work of the first year of the project in realizing the OAE vision.

What does this change? Firstly, and most obviously, it gives the project access to additional development resource. As the project ramps up, this translates into more rapid and richer development. This will not be instant; it takes time to bring new resource on board and up to speed. It will, however, be noticeable after March, when the ramping up process will be substantially effected. Secondly, there have been some adjustments to the governance structures of the project. A new Project Council will oversee a further OAE investment drive, and act to ensure the Project is resourced effectively. The Steering Group, with rSmart as a new member, continues to provide Project direction, the User Reference Group ensures that the project remains design and mission led, and the Technical Reference Group provides a vital conduit to institutional technology perspectives.

The Open Academic Environment Project team continues to work hard on the next release - 1.2 - which is due on or before 24th February 2012. Meanwhile, to whet your appetite, and let you try out the environment, an OAE community instance is available at

https://oae-community.sakaiproject.org/

This will soon be joined by the OAE Widget Library. Watch out for news of the launch.

The OAE Project is on a solid footing, and is making significant strides forward. There is still room for additional investment and collaboration to expand and enrich the project further. If your institution is interested, please contact Ian Dolphin or David Goodrum at the addresses below.

Contact the Open Academic Environment Project:

Steering Group Chair - David Goodrum, Indiana University -goodrum@indiana.edu
Sakai Foundation - Ian Dolphin, Executive Director -iandolphin@sakaifoundation.org
Project Co-Leads - Anthony Whyte - arwhyte@sakaifoundation.org & Nico Matthijs - nicolaas@sakaifoundation.org
User Reference Group Chair - Lucy Appert, New York University - lga2@nyu.edu
Technical Reference Group Chair - Owen McGrath, UC Berkeley - owen@media.berkeley.edu

Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform

2012-02-03T14:13:01Z

By Phil Hill

Along with others, I have written several times over the past 12 months here, here, here and here about the significant changes occurring in the educational LMS market. In my opinion, when we look back on market changes, 2011 will stand out as the year when the LMS market passed the point of no return and changed forever. What we are now seeing are some real signs of what the future market will look like, and the actual definition of the market is changing. We are going from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market.

What I mean by ‘enterprise LMS’ is the legacy model of the LMS as a smaller, academically-facing version of the ERP. This model was based on monolithic, full-featured software systems that could be hosted on-site or by a managed hosting provider. A ‘learning platform’, by contrast, does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing – multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS).

The 2011 EDUCAUSE event captured the zeitgeist of the changes, as it seemed most of the buzz at the conference centered on new LMS solutions and paradigm changes. Instructure made their debut at the conference, Pearson’s OpenClass was announced, Blackboard announced a new move in open content focused on CourseSites, and Cengage demonstrated their MindTap platform. Rather than slowing since EDUCAUSE, we have seen several additional announcements in the past three months.

CourseKit was released as a free learning platform targeted at faculty adoption.
Apple’s iTunesU app was announced alongside the iBooks / Author textbook offering, extending iTunesU as an iPad-based learning platform.
Facebook made a move within its higher education roots, starting a pilot program with Groups for Universities.

In my post from last summer, I characterized the changes we were starting to see, but with all of the recent changes, I think it would be useful to extend the first two trends mentioned.

The question is, what will the LMS market that is emerging from these changes look like? No one can know for sure what will happen over the next 3 – 5 years, but I do think there are some key trends that are worth understanding.

The market is more competitive, with more options, than it has been for years. Instructure is a real player that has shown that it can win against established LMS vendors with big wins in Utah and at Auburn. LoudCloud has new clients at CEC, Grand Canyon U and an unreported win at a public state university. BrainHoney won at BYU. Pearson LearningStudio has major wins at Arizona State and Columbia online programs. Desire2Learn has roughly doubled in size in the past year. Moodle and Sakai, including through providers such as MoodleRooms and rSmart and Unicon, continue their impressive wins in the market.

In terms of market competitiveness, we are seeing even more offerings than mentioned in August, including a new class of “free”. Pearson’s OpenClass, Blackboard’s CourseSites, CourseKit, Apple’s iTunesU app, and Facebook’s Groups all join NIXTY as free learning platforms. We have not had the time to see the market share changes based on these new offerings, but if nothing else, there are even more choices now.

Related to the above, there is a trend towards software as a service (SaaS) models for new LMS solutions. The SaaS model offers some compelling advantages in terms of deployment time and ability to mine and report transactional data that might not be possible with other approaches. SaaS is not a panacea, but this is a growing trend in the LMS market.

The trend towards SaaS could perhaps more accurately be described as the default model now for new offerings. In the LMS market from just short two years ago, the default model was enterprise LMS. The only exception was Pearson’s LearningStudio (the artist formerly known as eCollege.com). Today, every single new offering mentioned above is SaaS-based. Apple’s iTunesU app is a mobile app, but the content is served from a behind-the-scenes SaaS platform.

Perhaps more significantly – there has not been a new enterprise LMS created since around 2004. Yes, each legacy LMS provider has major new releases available, but the one exception you could argue is that Sakai 3 is a new LMS and not just an upgrade from Sakai 2. Other than this exception, every new LMS solution to enter the market in the past two years has been based on a learning platform. I doubt we will see any more enterprise LMS solutions created given the cost-benefits of creating SaaS offerings.

Another trend that is becoming apparent is that many of the new offerings are not attempting to fully replace the legacy LMS, at least all at once. Rather than competing with all of the possible features that are typical in enterprise LMS solutions, the new platforms appear to target specific institutional problems and offer only the features needed. Perhaps inspired by Apple’s success in offering elegant solutions at the expense of offering all the features, or perhaps inspired by Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation model, the new learning platform providers are perfectly willing to say ‘no – we just don’t offer this feature or that feature’.

My colleague Jim Ritchey has written about the changes that SaaS models are starting to have in the higher education ERP market, put in context of the Datatel+SGHE merger. His key point:

Therefore the challenge for the vendors is how to get the ERP, with its slow development and implementation cycles, to provide the solutions to the new needs of the institution.

In the LMS market, the new answer to this question – how to adapt and respond to new institutional needs – appears to be based on learning platforms.

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Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

Deprecate Solr Bundle

2012-02-02T23:18:33Z

Before that scares the hell out of anyone using Solr, the Solr bundle I am talking about is a small shim OSGi bundle that takes content from a Social Content Repository system called Sparse Map and indexes the content using Solr, either embedded or as a remote Solr cluster. The Solr used is a snapshot from the current 4.0 development branch of Solr. Right, now thats cleared up I suspect 90% of the readers will leave the page to go and read something else ?

So Solr 4 works just great. The applications using Sparse Map, like Sakai OAE , have a high update rate and are adding to the index continuously. The bundle queues updates and processes them via a single threaded queue reader into the index which is configured to accept soft commits and perform periodic flushes to disk. The Solr instance is unmodified from the standard Solr 4 snapshot and we have had no problems with it. Provided the cadinality of the fields that the application indexes are not insane, and the queries are also achievable there are no performance issues with queries being the sub 10ms that we have all become accustomed to from Solr. Obviously if you do stupid things you can make a query in Solr take seconds.

There are however some issues with the way the bundle works and certainly when deployed into production into a real cluster there are issues. No one would seriously run the Sparse Map with this Solr bundle on a single app server node for anything other than development or testing, so the default Embedded Solr configuration is a distraction. If your not writing code with the intention of deploying into production, then why write the code? Life is to short, unless your an academic on track to a Nobel prize. When deployed, the bundle connects to a remote Solr master for indexing with one or more Solr slaves hanging off the master (polling not being pushed to). There are several problems with this configuration. If the master goes down, no index updates can happen. This doesn’t break the Solr bundle since it queues and recovers from master failure with a local write ahead transaction log or queue. It does break the indexed data on the master since anything in memory on the master will be lost, and only those segments on disk will get propagated to the Solr slaves when the master recovers. This is a rock and a hard place. 1s commits with propagation cause unsustainable segment traffic with high segment merge activity. Infrequent commits will just loose data and destroy data propagation rates. The slaves, being read only are expendable provided there are always enough to service the load. Thats sounds like the definition of a slave, I would not like to be one, but then I wouldn’t know if I was.

Solr, in this configuration, wasn’t really designed for this type of load. If we indexing new documents at the rate of 1 batch an hour then Solr in this configuration would be prefect. However the updates can come through at thousands per second. So although it works, its fine, but when it breaks it will break and leave the index in some unknown state. The problem is rooted in how the indexing is done and where the write ahead log or queue is stored. Its fine for a single instance since the write ahead log is local to the embeded Solr instance but no good for a cluster.

Other approaches

There are lots of ways to solve this problem. It was solved in Sakai 2 (CLE) search which treated segments as immutable and sent them to a central location for distribution to each app server. Writers on each app server wrote to local indexes and on commit the segment was pushed to a central location where the segment was pushed to all other app server nodes. The implementation was less than perfect and there were all sorts of timing issues especially when it came to merging and optimising. That code was written in 2006 on a very old version of Lucene (1.9.1 IIRC). So old it didn’t have commit, let alone soft commits and it was only used for relatively slow rates of update supporting non critical user functionality. Its in production many Sakai 2 schools. Every now and again a segment gets corrupted and that corruption propagates slowly over the whole cluster with each merge and optimise. Eventually full index rebuilds are needed which can be carried out when in full production but are best done overnight when the levels of concurrency are lower.

At the time we had considered using the DB based IndexReaders and IndexWriters from the Compass project. These were readers and writers that used a DB BLOB as the backing store. Lucene depends heavily on seek performance, and doing seek over a network into the DB blob, doesn’t work. The IO required to retrieve sections of the segments to pull terms is so high that search speed is a bit low (British understatement, stiff upper lip and all that). After tests those drivers were rejected for the Sakai 2 work. It might have worked on an Oracle DB where seeks in blobs is supported and you can do some local caching, but on MySQL it was a non stater.

The next approach is that used by Jackrabbit. The Lucene index is embedded in the repo. Every repo has a local index with updates being written directly to all index sychronised across the cluster. Works well on one app node, but suffers in a cluster since ever modification to the local index has to be serialised over the entire cluster. Depending on the implementation of that synchronisation it can make the whole cluster serialized on update. Thats ok if the use case is mostly read as it is with the Enterprise Content Management use case, but in a Social Content Repository the use case is much higher update. App servers cant wait in a queue to get a lock on the virtual cluster wide index before making their insert and inserting a pointer into a list to tell all others their done.

Since 2006 the world has not stood still and there have been lots of people looking at this space. LinkedIn opensources Zoie and Bobo that deliver batched updated into distributed indexes and then build faceted search from those indexes. Although these would work for a Social Content Repository my feeling was the quality of data service (time it takes from a content item update to the index presence) was too high and required lots of discipline in the coding of the application to ensure that data local to the user was published directly to the content system rather than discovered via the search index. The area of immediate impact of data for LinkedIn is well defined, the users view of their profile etc so that QoDS can be higher than where an update might have to instantly propagate to 100s of users. The types of use cases I was targetting with the Sparse were more like Google+ where groups take a greater prominence. Except in Education, the group interaction is real time which pushed the QoDS down into the second or sub second range. So Zoie was ground breaking, but not enough. The work on this application, now Sakai OAE, started in 2008 when there was nothing else (visible) around. We started with SLing based on Jackrabbit and use its search capabilities, until we realised that a Social Content Repository has to support wide shallow hierarchies with high levels of concurrent update the Enterprise Content Management model is deep narrow hierarchies with lower levels of concurrent update. See this for detail

Roll forwards to 2010 when we pulled in Solr 4 which was just about to get the NRT patches applied. It looked, bar the small issue of cluster reliability that it was an Ok choice. And now were up to date 2012 and the world of distributed search has moved on and I want to solve the major blocker of reliability. I don’t want to have to write a distributed index as I did for Sakai 2, partly because there are many others out there doing the same thing better than I have time to. I could use SolrCloud, although IIUC that deals with the cloud deployment of Shards of SolrSlaves rather than addressing the reliability of high volume updates to those shards.

Terms, Documents or Segments

What to shard and replicate. The ability to shard will ensure scalability in the index, which turns the throughput model from a task compute farm into a parallel machine using the simplest of gather scatter algorithms (my PhD and early research was numerical parallel solutions on early MPP hardware, we always looked down on gather scatter since if never worked for highly interconnected and dynamic problem sets, sorry if thats offensive to MapReduce aficionados, btw gather scatter is the right algorithm here). The ability to replicate, many times, will ensure that we don’t have to thing about making hardware resilient. But what to shard and replicate. The Compass IndexReader and IndexWriter DB implementation proved that inverted indexes need high seek speeds to minimise the cost of scanning segments for terms. Putting latency between the workings of the inverted index and its storage was always going to slow an index down and even if you made segment and terms local to processing, processing queries on partial documents (shards of terms) creates imbalance in the processing load of a parallel machine and dependence on the queries. The reason for less than perfect parallel speedup on numerical problems in 1990 was almost always due to imperfect load balance in the algorithm. Pausing the solution for a moment to wait for other machines to finish is a simple bottleneck. Even if sharding and replication of partial documents or terms balances over the cluster of search machines, the IO to perform anything but the simplest query is probably going to dominate.

So I need an index implementation that shards and replicates documents. Its 2012 and a lot has happend. The author of Compass Shay Banon (@kimchy) went on to write ElasticSearch with a bunch of other veterans. It looks stable and has considerable uptake with drivers for most languages. It abandons the store segments centrally model of Compass and Sakai 2 and replicates the indexing operation so that documents are shaded and replicated. Transporting a segment over the network after a merge operation, as Solr Master/Slave does is time consuming, especially if you have everything in a single core and you merged segment set have become many GB in size. This looks like a prime contender for replacing the search capability since its simple to run, self configuring and discovering and ticks all the boxes as far as scaling, reliability and ease of use.

Another contender is Lucandra. Initially this was just Lucene on top of Cassandara. It implemented the IndexReader and IndexWriter inside Cassandra without segments eliminating the need to manage segments but also loosing most of the optimisations of memory mapped data. Unlike the Compass IndexReader and IndexWriter that wrote segments to DB blobs the structure of the index is columns and rows inside Cassandra. Not dissimular from the Sparse Map Cassandra driver that indexes by writing its own inverted index as it goes. There are some performance gains since if you put the Lucandra class into the Cassandra JVM the data is supposedly local, however Cassandra data is replicated and shaded so there is still significant IO between the nodes and the solution may benefit from Cassandras ability to cache, but will still suffer from the same problems that all term based or partial document sharding suffers from. Poor performance due to IO. When Lucandra became Solandra a year later in the authors reported the performance issues, but also reported a switch to sharding by document.

There will be more out there, but these examples show that the close source community implementing large distributed indexes on a document based shard and replicate approach is the right one to follow. (Hmm isn’t that what the 1998 paper from some upstarts titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale HypertextualWeb Search Engine” said ? The authors of Solandra admit that it still looses many of the optimisations of the segment but rightly point out if your deploying infrastructure to manage millions of small independent indexes then the file system storage issue become problematic which is where the management of storage by Cassandra becomes an advantage. As of September 2011 I get the impression that ElasticSearch is more mature than Solandra, and although everyone itches these days to play with a new tool in production (like a column DB) and throw away the old and reliable file system, I am not convinced that I want to move just yet. Old and reliable is good, sexy and new always gets me into trouble.

I think, I am going to deprecate the Solr bundle used for indexing content in Sparse Map and write a new bundle targeting ElasticSearch. It will be simpler, since I can use the write ahead transaction log already inside elastic search, its already real time (1s latency to commits and faster than that for non flushed indexes). I have also found references to it supporting bitmap bloom filter fields which means I can now embed much larger scale ACL reader indexing within the index itself. A post to follow on that later. Watch this space.

ANU launches myANU, the staff and student portal

2012-02-02T03:16:20Z

The Australian National University has launched myANU, the staff and student portal, based on uPortal 3.2.4 from Jasig.

https://my.anu.edu.au

Complementing this launch, ANU are also releasing the ANU Secure Login service, based on the Central Authentication Service (CAS) 3.4.10, also from Jasig.

I have been the architect, evangelist and lead developer on both of these projects since late 2009. As anyone in the University community knows, the wheels turn slowly, however it is a fantastic day to have both of these projects finally out the door!

Congratulations also to my development team, David Clarke and Osama Alkadi and previous developers Denny and Jiang Chao as well as the testers and BA’s involved. And not forgetting all of those people in the community I have bugged on email and IM!

myANU, together with CAS, will pave the way for a truly integrated online experience for staff and students of the Australian National University, well into the future.

More posts to follow about what services we are offering through the portal. Stay tuned!

Basic LTI Portlet 1.3.0 released

2012-02-02T03:11:16Z

I am very pleased to announce that the Basic LTI Portlet has had an update and is released as version 1.3.0.

This is a portlet that implements the IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability specification and allows you to render any Basic LTI enabled application inside uPortal (or any other JSR-168 compliant portlet container). Possibilities include Sakai tools, Peoplesoft components, tools from other LMS’s, collaboration and learning tools, blogs, forums, wikis, the list is endless.

This release includes additional adapters for connecting to Noteflight and Chemvantage, an improved Basic LTI launch when using uPortal, as well as some other minor UI improvements.

This portlet is running in production in the Australia National University‘s portal, my.anu.edu.au, based on uPortal 3.2.4.

For downloads, configuration, screenshots and all other information, head to the Jasig wiki:
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/PLT/Basic+LTI+Portlet

Sakai connector portlet 1.4.0 released

2012-02-02T03:09:07Z

I am very pleased to announce that the Sakai connector portlet has had an update and is released as version 1.4.0.

This portlet allows you to render tools from your Sakai environment inside uPortal. It is completely configurable, and each user can choose a tool from any of their Sakai sites to display in the portal. It uses a combination of web services and and implementation of the IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability specification to connect you to Sakai from within uPortal.

This release includes an improved Basic LTI launch, as well as an improved editing UI for when multiple connector portlets are on screen at once.

This portlet is running in production in the Australia National University‘s portal, my.anu.edu.au, based on uPortal 3.2.4.

For downloads, configuration, screenshots and all other information, head to the Jasig wiki:
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/PLT/Sakai+connector+portlet

WebLearn podcast is supremely popular!

2012-01-27T13:03:31Z

Rev Dr James Robson ‘Supporting Tutorials: WebLearn’ is the most popular podcast on Oxford Podcasts this week and has had 60 likes on YouTube.

Revd Dr James Robson is a Winner of the OxTALENT 2011 Award for ‘Best Use of WebLearn to Support a Course or Programme of Study’.

Starting with IntelliJ IDEA on Mac OS X 10.6.8

2012-01-26T23:09:17Z

Now that I’m finally editing OAE code in this dandy IDE, here’s what I wish I’d done first:

Go to “Settings” / “Keymap” and select “Mac OS 10.5+”. Otherwise your muscle memory will become bruised very quickly.
When you create a Project, go to “Project Structure” / “Platform Settings” and explicitly set your chosen JDK. Otherwise you will be inundated by bogus warnings.
Once you’ve got your umbrella Idea Project, add Maven code to it like so:

Go to “New Module…”
Select “Import module from external model”.
Browse “Root directory” to the directory with the base POM. (There are other ways to import Maven-based projects, but this is the one which didn’t drive me mad.)

Add two lines to your “.gitignore”:

.idea
*.iml

WebLearn report: Oct 2011- Jan 2012

2012-01-25T14:56:08Z

Period: Oct 2011- Jan 2012

Software

New WebLearn was upgraded in Jan 2012 – it now stands at v2.6-0×10. For more detailed information please looked at the relevant blog post:

https://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/adamweblearn/2012/01/new-weblearn-was-upgraded-on-10th-january-2012-to-version-2-6-ox10/

We will move to Sakai 2.8 at Easter.

Improvements & Bug Fixes

The owner of a template can be changed. This is the most frequently requested feature enhancement and will effectively allow the authoring of Survey Templates to be a collaborative process. Templates can now easily be passed from user to user.
When a template is a copied, an annotated duplicate of each individual original question now appears in the owner’s question bank
Events from merged calendars are now part of the ‘subscribe’ (Private URL) link
One can subscribe to a calendar via the synoptic view of the schedule
There is a publicly accessible Graduate Training WebLearn site containing most courses (link from front page)
Training on this site can now be categorised according to the Researcher Development Framework

Two-factor authentication (2FA) went live on 24th Jan, users must register to use 2FA sites and sites can only be created via the Examinations and Assessment team. It is now possible to use SAML2 to protect a WebLearn site with an extra “password” which is sent to a registered user as an SMS. Work has been undertaken to ensure that there are no “back doors” into such a site, eg, webDAV access has been disabled.

Training and Guidance

The revamped WebLearn Guidance Site went live just before Christmas. We are planning several new courses:

WebLearn: Assessment and Feedback
Plagiarism: Turnitin Fundamentals
Plagiarism: Interpreting Originality Reports using Turnitin
Plagiarism: Information skills for students
Plagiarism: Tackling and managing plagiarism in the internet age

Projects

The Student Enrolment System II finished at Christmas.

The OXAM Migration project formally finished at Christmas – the software is currently undergoing user acceptance testing. This replicates and improves upon the incumbent OXAM service and is now deployed within WebLearn.

The Nexus-WebLearn integration project has made slow progress, next on the hit list is insertion of (Tutorial) sign-up events in personal calendars.

The WebLearn team has now started work for the Blavatnik School of Government (BSG) as part of their project to provide their students with an iPad App interface to their learning material.

The OxCAP Phase I project was successful and now OxCAP Phase II has started (in January) and will run until March 2013. This is a JISC funded initiative to expose data (as a public XML feed) about graduate training courses at Oxford. OxCAP II addresses local needs: we will develop an internal protected feed, a new WebLearn tool which will allow a search of all graduate skills training courses at Oxford to be performed, a Share Point site for entering courses data and a JavaScript library to allow basic searching on institutional websites. This project offers a solution to a problem that students (and staff) have been demanding for a while now; this project has the explicit backing of the PVC for Education and the Registrar.

Staff

A new member of staff, Roger Pearson, will started work in the WebLearn team on Nov 1st. He is working on the “assessment and feedback” project known as SIPA, he will be reviewing and developing our support of Turnitin, investigating GradeMark and PeerMark (which will also be piloted), and recommending improvements to the WebLearn Assignments tool.

A new Java developer Colin Hebert has now started, he will also work on the SIPA project but will initially do general WebLearn and BSG development work.

Upcoming

Improvements to Sign-up tool
Site templates facility – it will be possible to base a new site upon a selection made from a choice of templates each tailored for a specific situation and each containing their own help and guidance.
Integration of the Behaviour Composer and Epidemic Game Maker (modelling tools) into WebLearn using IMS Basic LTI (see: http://m.modelling4all.org/)
Move to Sakai 2.8 (incl. collapsible LHS menus, academic network creation, improved WYSIWYG editor plus lots more)
Sign-up tool enhancements (categories, change organiser, auto create groups, prevent withdrawing when closed, better export)
Formal announcement of OXAM database of past exam papers service.

Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award 2012

2012-01-20T13:52:50Z

None

off

Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award Competition Opens

The Sakai Teaching and Learning community announces the official opening of the 5th annual Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA) competition. The award recognizes innovation and excellence in technology-supported teaching, academic collaboration, and student engagement.

Entries are accepted in the following five categories, and may be implemented in Sakai CLE or Sakai OAE.

Higher Education: Face-to-Face
Higher Education: Fully Online or Hybrid Course
Primary & Secondary Education (K-12)
Portfolios
Project Sites & Other Uses of Sakai

Entries are now being accepted on the Open Ed Practices site www.openedpractices.org/twsia . Open Ed Practices serves as a repository for new entries and for submissions from past winners. The site also provides information for entrants on how to enter the competition, including award entry categories, the rubric which is used to judge entries, a definition of innovation and a series of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the entry process.

The closing date for entries is March 2, 2012. Winners will be notified in early May 2012 and may have their expenses paid to Atlanta, Georgia to present their winning entries at the 13^th annual Sakai Conference June 10-15, 2012.

To apply for the award, and for more information, please go to www.openedpractice.org/twsia.

Understanding the ‘unresolved constraint’, ‘missing resource’ message from Apache Felix

2012-01-19T18:40:19Z

It’s pretty common while developing an OSGi bundle that your imports and exports won’t quite match what you need or what exists in the server you’re deploying to. This can show up as NoClassDefFoundError, ClassNotFoundException or as log output in a stacktrace from bundle resolution. Hall, Pauls, McCullough and Savage did a great job of covering NCDFE and CNFE in “OSGi In Action” (chapter 8), let’s take a look at figuring out what the bundle resolution stacktrace is telling us. (I make nothing from the sales of “OSGi In Action” and suggest it to anyone interested in OSGi.)

Just like learning to read the stacktrace from an exception in Java is key to debugging, so is true about the dependency resolution messages from an OSGi container. Below is the output from Apache Felix when it encountered a missing dependency required by a bundle:

ERROR: Bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Error starting slinginstall:org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr-1.2-SNAPSHOT.jar (org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Unable to resolve 124.0: missing requirement [124.0] package; (package=org.apache.solr.client.solrj) [caused by: Unable to resolve 84.0: missing requirement [84.0] package; (package=org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite) [caused by: Unable to resolve 86.0: missing requirement [86.0] package; (&(package=com.google.common.collect)(version>=9.0.0)(!(version>=10.0.0)))]])
org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Unable to resolve 124.0: missing requirement [124.0] package; (package=org.apache.solr.client.solrj) [caused by: Unable to resolve 84.0: missing requirement [84.0] package; (package=org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite) [caused by: Unable to resolve 86.0: missing requirement [86.0] package; (&(package=com.google.common.collect)(version>=9.0.0)(!(version>=10.0.0)))]]
    at org.apache.felix.framework.Felix.resolveBundle(Felix.java:3443)
    at org.apache.felix.framework.Felix.startBundle(Felix.java:1727)
    at org.apache.felix.framework.Felix.setActiveStartLevel(Felix.java:1156)
    at org.apache.felix.framework.StartLevelImpl.run(StartLevelImpl.java:264)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)

What you have here is a stacktrace with a lengthy message. The important part of the stacktrace for us is the message.

ERROR: Bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Error starting slinginstall:org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr-1.2-SNAPSHOT.jar (org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Unable to resolve 124.0: missing requirement [124.0] package; (package=org.apache.solr.client.solrj) [caused by: Unable to resolve 84.0: missing requirement [84.0] package; (package=org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite) [caused by: Unable to resolve 86.0: missing requirement [86.0] package; (&(package=com.google.common.collect)(version>=9.0.0)(!(version>=10.0.0)))]])

This message is pretty simple but the structure is common for nastier messages (i.e. deeper resolution paths before failure). Let’s pull it apart to see what’s happening in there.

ERROR: Bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Error starting slinginstall:org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr-1.2-SNAPSHOT.jar

This very first part tells us that an error occurred while trying to load the org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solrbundle. Nice start, but not quite the crux of the matter. Let’s keep reading.

org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Unable to resolve 124.0: missing requirement [124.0] package; (package=org.apache.solr.client.solrj) [caused by: Unable to resolve 84.0: missing requirement [84.0] package; (package=org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite) [caused by: Unable to resolve 86.0: missing requirement [86.0] package; (&(package=com.google.common.collect)(version>=9.0.0)(!(version>=10.0.0)))]])

Phew, that’s a lot of text! This is the heart of what we need though, so let’s break it down to make more sense of it.

(
    org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr [124]: Unable to resolve 124.0: missing requirement [124.0] package; (package=org.apache.solr.client.solrj)
        [
            caused by: Unable to resolve 84.0: missing requirement [84.0] package; (package=org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite)
            [
                 caused by: Unable to resolve 86.0: missing requirement [86.0] package; (&(package=com.google.common.collect)(version>=9.0.0)(!(version>=10.0.0)))
            ]
        ]
)

What are those `[number]`s in the message?

The numbers in the message tell us the bundle ID on the server.

Unresolved Package Name	Bundle ID Where Resolution Failed
org.apache.solr.client.solrj	124
org.sakaiproject.nakamura.api.lite	84
com.google.common.collect	86

Once you pull apart the message it becomes more obvious that it has structure and meaning! The structure of the message tells us that bundle 124 depends on a package from bundle 84 which depends on a package from bundle 86 which is unable to resolve com.google.common.collect;version=[9.0.0, 10.0.0). The innermost/very last message tells us the root of the problem; the dependency resolver was unable to find com.google.common.collect at version=[9.0.0, 10.0.0). Now we have somewhere to start digging.

How To Fix This

I suggest one of the following steps:

Add a bundle that exports the missing package with a version that matches the required version
Change the version to match an exported package already on the server

In this particular environment, com.google.common.collect;version=10.0.0 is what our server has deployed. The descriptor above specifically blocks any version not in the 9.x.x range. We generate the OSGi manifest by using the Maven Bundle Plugin which uses the BND tool to generate the manifest. In BND version > 2.1.0, the macro for versions was changed. Our solution has ranged from rolling back to bnd version=2.1.0 OR define the macro differently. The results are the same; the version segment in the manifest header becomes com.google.common.collect;version>=9.0.0 which finds our bundle of com.google.common.collect;version=10.0.0.

Notes about environment

The above message and stacktrace originated from a Sakai OAE environment which is built on Apache Sling and thusly Apache Felix. We use an artifact ID that is the root package of the bundle (org.sakaiproject.nakamura.webconsole.solr). This has the side effect that our bundle names look like package names in the message but gives a very clear naming convention.

Supporting Tutorials Using WebLearn

2012-01-19T18:02:42Z

The tutorial system lies at the heart of Oxford’s educational experience, to further this practice LTG have produced a video case study entitled WebLearn: Supporting Tutorials.

Supporting tutorial practices through the use of technology can enable both tutors and students to interact with each other and relevant content, before and after the tutorial sessions. Revd Dr James Robson is Senior Tutor in Theology at Wycliffe Hall. He has used WebLearn for tutoring and supporting his students in their learning and formation.

For more information, look at the LTG case studies blog.

Revd Dr James Robson is a Winner of the OxTALENT 2011 Award for ‘Best Use of WebLearn to Support a Course or Programme of Study’.

Sakaiger Eraser

2012-01-19T02:10:01Z

Sakai OAE Course in Mandarin Chinese

2012-01-18T16:16:33Z

Teaching Award Opportunity for 2012

2012-01-13T21:11:47Z

Instructors making innovative use of CourseWork, Stanford’s course management system, are encouraged to apply for the 2012 Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award. This award goes to an instructor making exceptional use of Sakai (the system upon which CourseWork is based on) in the following five categories

Higher Education: Face-to-Face
Higher Education: Fully Online or Hybrid Course
Primary & Secondary Education (K-12)
Portfolios
Project Sites & Other Uses of Sakai
Learner Support

Last year Dr. Niem Huynh of Texas State University won first place in the face-to-face higher education category for her World Geography course. While students learned about and created different types of maps individually, a major goal of the class was the development of teamwork skills; Sakai played a large role in facilitating team research, communication, presentation, and feedback.

The 130 students formed small groups research on how their personal diet and fuel consumption compared to people in their selected countries and based on climate data, predicted the issues these countries would be facing in the form of a fictional newspaper from 50 years in the future. They also did first-person research on health issues in their local communities and documented these in videos shared. They used the Materials tool to share links and media for their research and Mailtool to communicate amongst themselves. They used the Wiki tool to share their media-rich reports with the rest of the class. Teams left feedback for each other about their projects using the comments feature within the pages. Students gave the wiki projects positive rankings for engaging them (3.54 our of 5); students commented that they found these projects a fun, bonding experience and more interactive than writing a paper.

Visit the TWSIA Web site to learn more about the award and view the winning applications applications. You can also see Huynh’s presentation at the 2011 Sakai conference

Applications for the TWSIA must be made electronically by March 2, 2012 at the TWSIA Web site. Winners will have the opportunity to present at the 2012 Sakai Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Please leave a comment below to let the CourseWork team know if you are applying so we may offer support. Your comment will be read, but not published.

Planet Sakai

Two Camera Sony HD Interview Shoot – Lightweight / Travel setup

Three new abstracts for talks

OER Funding: Ask the Right Questions

Possibly related posts:

When It Comes to Content, Say “Yes” to Wrappers But “No” to Containers

Possibly related posts:

IMS Learning Tools Interoperability: What’s New and What’s Next?

OAE Progress and Public Instance

Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform

Possibly related posts:

Deprecate Solr Bundle

Other approaches

Terms, Documents or Segments

ANU launches myANU, the staff and student portal

Basic LTI Portlet 1.3.0 released

Sakai connector portlet 1.4.0 released

WebLearn podcast is supremely popular!

Starting with IntelliJ IDEA on Mac OS X 10.6.8

WebLearn report: Oct 2011- Jan 2012

Period: Oct 2011- Jan 2012

Software

Improvements & Bug Fixes

Training and Guidance

Projects

Staff

Upcoming

Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award 2012

Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award Competition Opens

Understanding the ‘unresolved constraint’, ‘missing resource’ message from Apache Felix

What are those [number]s in the message?

How To Fix This

Notes about environment

Supporting Tutorials Using WebLearn

Sakaiger Eraser

Sakai OAE Course in Mandarin Chinese

Teaching Award Opportunity for 2012

What are those `[number]`s in the message?