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'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.

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.

I'm sitting on our porch swing on a hot Saturday morning. My kids (2 and 5 years old) just ate their pancakes and are playing in the sprinkler and plastic pool. It's going to be a hot one and I probably need to break down and put the air conditioners in the windows today. For the first weekend in quite some time, I am probably not going to work…on anything…on portfolios, Sakai, coursework, side projects…nothing…I'm going to spend some family time.

Last month I finished my long-in-coming master's degree in Information Management at the iSchool at Syracuse. My eight-year stint at Syracuse University supporting students and faculty is complete. I did all that I could to make my recommendations for next steps and close the projects associated with the grants that funded the Living SchoolBook.

I don't have a "real job" right now, at least not in the sense that I really wanted or planned for. Without getting into the details, I am currently paying the bills working on a couple of Sakai/OSP and Drupal related projects out my home. While I enjoy working with the Sakai and OSP community and software, there are issues with doing this sort of work as an independent consultant.

First of all, a lot of what makes working with an open source project a very rewarding experience is the opportunity to "get in the game" and participate in the "upstream discussion". When employed by SU, I was encouraged (and paid) to participate where I could and to help shape the direction of the software in a manner consistent with our objectives. As an independent consultant, I feel that I still need to participate and not be a "free rider" on the community of professionals that work so hard to make this useful software. However, I recognize that I will rarely be paid to engage in these conversations and I do so at my own short-term loss…one less beach trip for my family in exchange for my personal gratification and credibility in this meritocracy-driven community.

Second, there is all of the "meta-work" associated with managing your own micro-business. Filling your own business pipeline, creating invoices, learning the business tax rules and all of that sort of stuff is more time spent not DOING anything that adds value to any project or my quality of life. I hardly even know what I am talking about here…I am so green…

I am passively pursuing an option for more "stable" employment in the community, but part of me asks (Letterman-style), "Is this anything?" about the whole Sakai/OSP self-employment idea. I wonder what sort of demand there is for someone like me to provide consulting services to schools looking to engage in agile, short-term projects around the OSP tool suite.

It strikes me that with the right people in the room, a small, devoted team could make great strides in an OSP project in just a 1 or 2 week sprint if they had just a little "leg up" and just-in-time "support". I could provide that "leg up" and help a small team to make something useful quickly, document ideas for new enhancements and features…and LEAVE when they want me to. The transaction costs within a small team are much less expensive than between that team and me, so knowing when to leave (and for schools to know when to tell me to leave) is an important decision that an institution would need to make in order to ensure that they were getting the biggest ROI on the project.

I think that these sorts of sessions could spin-off a lot of documented examples and material to contribute to the community library (the OSP community's emerging body of knowledge around deployment strategies and data structures). I could play a role in documenting projects I am involved in and ensuring that they are contributed for others to use.

Keep in mind, this is not necessarily something I believe is sustainable as a business model long-term; however, given my current situation, I would be willing to discuss how this model might work (or not) for individual institutions. This sort of short-term employment would simultaneously add value to the community and (I believe) be a low-cost way to start getting productive with OSP with real, tangible results that we build together. If this is something you think you want to talk about, let me know.

One of the most significant uses of the Goal Management work that we did at Syracuse was the RIEPS (Rhode Island Electronic Portfolio System). RIEPS is a product of the collaboration between rSmart, IBM and RINET (Rhode Island Network for Educational Technology). RINET reminds me a bit of the NYS BOCES system and has created a technology and social infrastructure for the Rhode Island School districts to support the goal of meeting standards across the curriculum without degenerating into a high stakes testing situation. The RINET team is hosting the first Sakai conference from with a K-12 focus to share what is happening around the country with K-12 Sakai. This is a different audience with slightly different needs from the higher education community and its cool to see them coalescing as a group. I am here to co-present a higher education perspective to this primarily K-12 audience and to see how K-12 is using (and wants to use) Sakai and OSP.

Michael Korcuska introduced the idea of P-80 and introduced himself by giving his brief biography from elementary school, through high school and then on to college and beyond. He emphasized the commonality and overlap between the needs of K-12 and higher education. There is a common thread and a continuity through life. He mentioned that open source software (like Sakai) is no longer considered "bleeding edge". He made the point that for K-12 systems with very tight budgets, an open environment that does not differentiate features and functionality based on price is a key factor that districts need to consider when making a choice about an LMS. He showed a clip of Father Guido Sarducci's "Five Minute University" (its out there on YouTube) to illustrate the difference between the learning that might occur in an environment of high stakes testing versus the deep learning that happens in collaborative learning environments.

He drew a chuckle when he suggested that the teachers in K12 get involved in the Sakai community by participating in the lists, checking out the wiki and coming to the Sakai conference in Paris this summer (hahahaha!). Remember those tight budgets?

I spoke with Bill Fiske, who has been involved in training teachers in Rhode Island. I asked him how the implementation of the Sakai course management and portfolio system had an impact on the culture of the classroom. He said he believed that teachers still measure their own success each day on their perceived success as presenters. He stressed that the emphasis needs to shift to how well the students did today.

Responses to the question, "What do I want in my collaborative Learning Environment?"

A session was held where the K-12 community was asked what their expectations of Sakai might be. Steve Foehr took notes...here is what he passed on to me:

• Professional social networking tool
• Good content management tools
• Flexibility – build from a variety of learning models
• Interoperability with other tools
• Ability to pull out tools when useful to purpose
• Allow equal access
• Engaging to students
• User friendly, opportunities for professional development
• An environment that replicates what happens in a classroom.
• Remove the walls between educators
• Breaking down the distinctions between learning and accounting for learning
• Equalize technology skills among teachers
• It’s not more work, it’s different work
• How do we manage performance issues when we get big?
• Seamless access to each user’s data, the data you own.
• Multiple loci of control.
• One to two minute videos to show how we use Sakai.
• Showcase of best practice.

Michael Korcuska pledged to get the complete list up on the K-12 wiki.

K-12 issues for coalescing effort

During an afternoon panel discussion a few strategic areas were suggested around which the K-12 community could begin coalescing.

1. Student portfolios
2. Professional development
3. AP courses and credit recovery (making up courses for students that fail a class)