sean.keesler.org

Today I received an mass email from the chancellor at Syracuse University with a message about the university's approach to addressing the financial crisis. At the heart of the message was that the university will be cutting central administrative costs by $8 million this year and $11 million next year. If I interpret that correctly, IT budgets are going to come under close scrutiny at Syracuse, with a lot of pressure to cut out the fat where possible. I am sure many other colleges are already looking ways to jettison dead weight to make their IT departments float. I also would love to know how this will impact the funding of open source software adoption on campuses. I am particularly interested in how this will affect the adoption of Sakai by new schools.

I suppose it depends on the leadership in place at these schools and how they have positioned themselves with regard to the priority of "taking control of their IT destiny" as a strong strategic direction that they wish to (or MUST) pursue. For the bulk of schools who are looking to maximize ROI on their investment, they need to look carefully on how they will measure their investment returns. We know too well that open source software is not necessarily cheap. Sakai requires a sophisticated infrastructure to scale up to provide service to a large school and a skilled technical staff to maintain it. Switching from any one software to another is a very expensive proposition.

On the other hand, there are vendors who are poised to provide inexpensive hosting that may be compelling for schools that are looking to adopt an eLearning platform. You might think that using an "off the shelf", vendor supported solution would be counterintuitive to the whole idea of open source software. In the Sakai community the brightest lights usually shine on the biggest "innovations", but I think that when the rubber meets the road, the advantage of open source software comes when an institution can pinpoint its resources to address their highest priority support items. Time and time again I hear that the main reasons for many schools to move away from their chosen proprietary vendor is that they were not able to provide good support.

When you choose an open source vendor, you not only get that vendor's added value and support promises, you can also participate in that effort and eliminate your top support headaches by fixing local issues and contributing them back to the community. It is harder to articulate the value of the support tickets that you did need to field because you weren't waiting for the next major release of software or for a vendor response. Of course, convincing your local leadership that this is a better investment than completely relying on a vendor for everything may be a tough sell if they are simply looking at short term costs.

This week I took a trip to Blacksburg, VA for the Sakai regional conference. It was a low budget trip now that I am pulling from my own funds to come. The Red Carpet Inn is $54/night including tax and I spent about $100 in gas to drive the 18 hours from Syracuse, NY and back. My late registration cost $200.

The session by Virginia Tech on outcomes was really good and tied in directly with the Assessment Institute that I attended a couple weeks back. I think the experience I had at Syracuse with NCATE accreditation and the use of Sakai portfolios and Goal Management is hitting lots of other schools now. Schools like Virginia Tech and Indiana University that are exploring variations on the theme of Goal Management are building a free (not as in beer) system that integrates the student centered ideas of portfolios with the institutional perspective needed for long term sustainability and aggregation needed for program assessment over the long haul. Although Syracuse University is not actively involved in the development of those tools, I believe that the return on the investment that was made when the School of Education developed and disseminated the proof of concept GM tools has not come full circle yet. In a year or so, I bet that the community will improve upon this theme and a much more refined approach will be available for use by SU and other schools.

The presentation by TX State entitled "Bye, Bye Blackboard" was interesting as I felt it represented an interesting dichotomy that has popped up on the list a few times and will be highlighted by present financial strains that college IT departments will be feeling for a while. Texas State had been running an early version of Blackboard that was written in perl and had customized it for their local needs a great deal. The costs of licensing Bb for an upgrade in 2005 were going to increase from $5K to $55K per year. The rationale for investigating an open source solution was to allow them to continue to make their customizations (to innovate) and to simultaneously avoid the high license costs. However, the number of FTE needed to maintain Sakai and the weight of moving from perl to enterprise java development seems to have negated cost savings. I asked the presenters (the project director and some IT staff) if they could comment on the discrepancy between their implied goal of reserving the right to innovation versus what seemed to be an implementation that looked like a commodity service replacement. The IT staff member who had done the perl customizations admitted that they were not customizing their software as rapidly as they could in perl and that the staff were not able to turn on a dime and react to faculty requests in the way that they once could. Much of the talk revolved around training faculty to do the same sorts of things that they did in Bb in Sakai and maintaining the more complicated infrastructure to support Sakai. The development work they have done seems to be more targeted towards administrative work (migrating Bb courses to Sakai) and enterprise integration projects than towards the faculty and student end users at this point. I think that is natural and probably necessary, but the perception that Sakai is a great platform for rapid innovation and response to feature requests is a tough sell unless you throw a ton of resources at the problems. I really appreciated their attention to the different needs of their faculty as they encouraged their faculty to make the choice to move to Sakai. This is undoubtedly one of the nest Sakai success stories in the community, but it is filled with lessons we could all learn from.

This underlying message resonated with what some Sakai implementors have been saying on the list. It struck me that Luke Fernandez's comments about discussing Sakai design in terms of Bb and Moodle were telling in the sort of Bb service replacement that many schools are expecting from Sakai. At this point Sakai may be behind the curve on meeting these expectations for those schools, but will quickly be moving forward to change the paradigm. Michael Korcuska's demo of the ideas that are coming out of the Sakai 3.0 UX work are evidence to that.

There was an OSP BOF at the end of the first day. Since the BOF was my bright idea, I ended up doing some demonstrations of the OSP tools and reviewing the documentation that was available on the wiki. In general I think it was well received. For the most part, I think that the schools that are interested in OSP are not interested in large vendor contracts to set up and run their portfolio implementations. I think that the model for giving schools a "leg up" and then letting them do their own work is more in keeping with many of the committed Sakai schools. I also received positive feedback on building community documentation into a consulting job. I made sure that I credited Weber State for funding the development of the community documentation that is on the wiki and encouraged others to talk to Janice Smith and I if they would like help with their own implementation and/or would like to fund further documentation efforts.

I attended the Assessment Institute in Indianapolis this week, thanks to Serensoft who sponsored my trip. As a staff member at Syracuse University who supported our ePortfolio project, I was curious to see how ePortfolio projects were handled at other institutions and how they used technology to support program and student assessment.

During the pre-conference workshop on ePorfolios, Bret Enyon asked the attendees to list one word that described ePortfolios for them. Here is the list:

integration(2), assessment (2), opportunity(2), committees, excitement, connections, learning, discovery, authenticity, technology, time, motivating, comprehensive, possibilities, clueless, value, frightening, emerging, important, developing, open source, experiment, innovation, responsibility, self-awareness, late, showcase, accountability, convincing

He asked everyone to rate their colleges portfolio engagement on a 1-5 scale (5 - college has system up and running full bore, 3 - good plan, 0 not at all). Here are those self assessments:

5 - 0
4 - 3
3 - 3
2 - 9
1 - 15

This left me with the feeling that the demand for ePortfolios is still a bit in the distance, but that some folks are getting ready to implement systems to support their assessment work. As someone who does a bit of independent consulting, I'd like to see more 3's and 4's, but it will probably be a couple years before the "movement" really takes off.

The Higher Education Opportunity Act that was enacted in August has placed the responsibility for setting learning outcomes and accounting for those program outcomes squarely on the shoulders of the higher ed institutions. The act will be revisited in five years to see how things are going. Sharon Hamilton sees this as an opportunity for Higher Ed to show what they can do and to craft a system of multi-institutional accountability that serves their own needs. During one of her sessions she believed that institutions working together to define sets of mutually agreed upon outcomes would serve as a means to accept and place transfer students. An agreed upon measure of student outcomes may be a more useful tool than an assumption of equivalency between classes from different institutions. Panelists agreed that teaching and learning needs to be transformed from a series of transactions to an ongoing discussion around student achievement.

The keynote speaker (Felice Nudelman from the NY Times) highlighted Epsilen (a tool that the NY Times has funded) as an example of a platform for social networking, Web 2.0 and life-long learning that would support a such a transformation. Some panelists received a round of applause after emphasizing that improving teaching and learning will not occur _because_ of tools, but because of the planning and design of the curriculum and assessment of student learning. Yet, the technology seemed to be the catalyst that enabled much of the work that was presented.

There were several presentation tracks for this conference, but I stuck to the ePortfolio presentations. I was completely surprised by the Institutional Portfolios that were presented by IUPUI and Portland State. The work that went into these inward looking self-studies of the entire university were impressive and not necessarily supported by a "portfolio system" and was largely the effort of 1 or two people to collect, process and disseminate their findings for comment.

Course portfolios were presented where faculty members voluntarily documented where in their syllabi they were addressing values in the program, examples of student work and a narrative for each course. Fellow faculty in the program would evaluate each course and provide feedback to the instructors on how to improve. Number one recommendation seemed to be to make the outcomes of the class more transparent to students through the syllabus. Number two seemed to be that the faculty didn't understand their own statements of expectations of students.

Self assessment was briefly mentioned in two presentations, but was not the main focus of the conference.

I just created a few screencasts about the Open Source Portfolio. Hopefully this documentation (funded by Weber State University) will help others understand how to use the OSP tools in Sakai.

I start by introducing how to setup a worksite in Sakai, how to import data structures from the community library and how to recreate a teaching "Best Practice" from another university as a way to jump start the portfolio discussion in just three screencasts.

See the complete docs here

Setup a demo site

Import and export a form

Recreate an Existing Portfolio Best Practice from the Community Library

I've been working with a small team at Weber State to give them a quick "leg up" on some of the "ins and outs" of the OSP tools so that they can move forward with an initial implementation of their own matrix and portfolio template. I asked Vicki Napper if I could quote her, because I think she really nails a problem that the OSP community has.

She said (in reference to the built-in ambiguity of the tool suite):

"Should the term open source mean ...without an opinion about use? I don't think so. Open source's power is that many people are thinking about common problems...but they need to document why they chose the solutions they did and why it works for them."

I think its telling that (given the popularity of ePortfolio's in education circles today) OSP doesn't have many adopters nor contributors. The charge ahead is largely lead by a few large institutions. I stopped for a second and told her my opinion:

"Its rather amazing that their isn't some "out of the box experience" isn't it? Not even a "basic portfolio" that lets you throw together a few pages. The community of schools that have been building it have been very cautious not to pigeon-hole the software into one or two uses. None of us like it, but are unsure what common portfolio experience "other" schools would find most useful. This would require a research (maybe even a marketing) budget to discover what "other people" want. Keep in mind that the schools throwing resources into OSP are ALREADY using it to support THEIR portfolio processes and any resources they have for OSP are spent on that activity...not on the kind of research that would likely benefit newcomers. Of course, they are open to new ideas, but often the effort required to participate in the discussion is a barrier to the input of new ideas."

I'm feeling empathy for Nathan Pearson as he tries to get his head around the basic functionality of OSP, its application and history. I think Nathan has the newcomer's perspective in mind in his UX effort.

I wonder what sort of research effort should go into this before Sakai 3.0? It would seem an ideal project for a UX group to take on as a purely exploratory piece....and not just from current users, but from potential users that are frequently turned away by the traditionally high barriers.

I've been reluctant to put much "personal" stuff on my personal page, but I'm having a change of heart. When I was growing up, it seems that all we did on summer weekends was to go fishing on Oneida Lake. My parents had a 16 foot, fiberglass MFG boat whose open bow I became intimately familiar with over years of weekend fishing trips. Inevitably, this would mean hours and hours of sitting on one one side of the boat drifting east with the prevailing wind, facing the sun to the west with our faces catching the full effect of the sun, magnified by the reflection from the water. I remember intensely closing my eyes and being rocked by the waves with monofilament line wrapped around my index finger, waiting for the slow and steady tug of a walleye or the sudden jerk of a silver bass or yellow perch. The open bow seemed to shrink as I grew up and tried to make my space on the boat more comfortable by stuffing life preservers around me. I swore the seats got harder each year. I'm sure I must have complained a lot about the monotony. I forget...too much sun.

I also remember catching SO MANY fish. I suppose that if you have 7 lines hanging off the side of the boat (my parents occasionally would use two poles each) and spend an entire day on a lake drifting across productive areas, its hard to imagine NOT catching a lot of fish. However, I've never seen anyone else come out of that lake with fish like we did on Saturday nights. We would fill coolers full of perch and haul stringers of big walleye out of there every weekend. We reached our limit EVERY TIME. At least that's my story...and I'm sticking to it.

I recall doing this as a family. We all sat in the car for that hour long drive, we all fished, we all learned to put the worms on, take the fish off and hold them out for pictures (hold it out straight to the camera...so it looks BIGGER). It amazes me how our photo-shy family seems to have albums and albums of pictures of us behind fish...but little else. About the only thing we didn't all do was make the bologna sandwiches that sustained us. That was a job that mom did. She made sure we were all fed and slathered in sunscreen so that our pasty Irish skin wouldn't blister in the sun. We all ate at the same greasy spoons at night, too. For many years we ate at a bar at "Doug's-Rent-A-Boat" on the south shore. One year my parents bought me a t-shirt from Doug's that had a drawing of a big jumping walleye. I kept the shirt until just last year.

My family loves all of this. When we get together, I like to tell them if I've been fishing, where I went, what I tried and what I caught and I like to hear what fishing they've been up to too. I made one of my infrequent calls home last night after coming home from fishing with my 2 year old son, Alex. He wasn't home, so I left a message. I wanted to tell Dad about the 15 1/2 inch largemouth we caught off the shore of Cazenovia Lake. I wanted to tell about the little piece of state land that I never saw before on the east shore and how the sun reflected off the lake and onto Alex's face as the sun descended in the west.

In my "spare" time, I've been doing some volunteer work for Project Watershed, a 501c(3) group that promotes water quality awareness and education in schools in and around Syracuse. A look at their map of sampling locations gives a good impression of the area they cover.
I was introduced to Project Watershed on my first day at the Living SchoolBook and I attended bi-monthly board meetings for the group on and off for my entire eight years there. I enjoyed the intermingling of environmental science, education and the web. Now I am helping them redesign their site for the fourth time since I've been affiliated with the group. I am using Drupal once again for the site. Some of the goals of the project are obvious, while others are slowly emerging out of our discussions:

• redesign the site to reflect its new funding source (the Izaak Walton League of America) and give it a fresh new look
• rearchitect the message and information to best address its target audiences of teachers, student and adult monitors and the general public
• present a single site for accessing both descriptive information and water quality data (in the past a separate database and site were used to manage and display the oodles of data that the group has collected over the past 10-ish years)

One of the biggest challenges of the project will be to display the water quality data that the group typically collects during its sampling events. I've been storing them as normalized data in a separate database, but to do something analogous in Drupal will be a project in itself. I am wondering if I should just leave the data in the existing database and just display it with a custom Drupal module.

I recently have begun working with a small team at Weber State University. Their School of Education is interested in moving forward with an OSP implementation. My proposal to them included:

• an OSP overview
• informal training of the tools they need to complete their project
• documentation of those tools on the public Sakai wiki

This approach will benefit the team involved in the immediate project, their successors and the entire Sakai community. We’ve allocated about 15 hours to writing an overview of the tools and how to use the “Forms” and “Portfolio Template” tools. The effort will be largely guided by Weber State’s needs, but I believe that any newcomer to OSP will find the documentation we write to be useful.

UPDATE: See the following confluence pages:

• Interactions between OSP tools
• Template-Based Portfolio Projects
  • Introduction
  • Staffing and Skills needed
  • Suggested Project Activities
  • Iterative development Until Deployment
  • Explore the tools
  • Template and Form Development for Template-Based Portfolios

I also contributed a related FAQ to openedpractices.org to clarify how to us the data structures in the community library.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was interested in doing a bit of freelance consulting for OSP. A couple people asked me if I was available/interested in doing work outside of OSP for Sakai in general. Of course, I am. The Reports tool (now core, like the rest of the OSP tools suite) seems to blur the boundaries between OSP and Sakai. In a nutshell, the reports tool allows someone to define SQL based reports that can be run against the live database or a set of data warehouse tables (you may have noticed a bunch of tables named "dw_xxxxx" in your instance). To complicate matters, much of the data related to portfolios are stored in XML on the file system and are therefore unavailable to the reports tool unless converted. The system is powerful, but poorly understood by the community and sparsely documented.

I have set up an account and a project at fundable.com to see what sort of interest the community has for this effort.

The Sakai Reports tool documentation needs improvement.

Many schools deploying OSP as a portfolio system want to use custom reports to aggregate data for institutional purposes. The reports that the community has included in the OOTB experience have little to do with the type of data that schools would actually want to report about. Building custom reports for your institution makes a lot of sense, but very few schools have been successful at it because they just don't know how.

I would be interested in investigating and writing related community documentation in Sakai confluence if anyone is interested in funding my independent effort to do so. My initial guess is that I will probably need to also document the job scheduler and the data warehouse in order to successfully move the documentation forward. While it is difficult to promise a "complete package" will result from my effort I feel that a few good interviews and some time devoted to understanding and disseminating the capabilities (and limitations) of the report tool functionality would benefit the entire Sakai community.