Sakai Conference: Using CANS
University of Missouri-Columbia
Courses taught online with no f2f, School of Information and Learning Technologies.
Issue – when you're online you don't know what students are experiencing. "reading" events versus "doing something". Feel a void between me and everyone else when they enter the system.
Existing notification systems – either overwhelming or super smart that crumbles under own weight.
Context-aware Activity Notification System – link between network based system, research tool
External notification. Widget? Email digest. Checks tools and tells you what has happened. Could be going to cell phone et cetera.
Can also receive notifications – eg feeds
Very cool.
Notification manager.
The future – a more social Sakai.
How does it work. Social Context – what are they doing. CANS on own server – communicates with Sakai – xml between the two. CANS captures events. Could work with anything opensource. Works outside of Sakai so doesn't impact Sakai. CANS maintains it's own event and notification data.
Yahoo Widgets but could be dashboard.
CANS is a research tool because it allows exploration and analysis of user actions.
Social Visualization – to create intuitive depictions of social information for social purposes (Judith Donath, MIT).
Mondrian – not open source, but it is free.
Showed the visualization of the data coming out of CANS using Mondrian – very interesting.
Sakai Conference
Partnership of Indiana University and University of Michigan Libraries. Purpose is to integrate library resources with Sakai.
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sakai/
Lots of people in the room and I’m sure they’re not all librarians 
Build Twin Peaks Navigator into a functional library database search and linking tool – use library federated search and link resolver tools to connect to multiple sources
Better integration of library content – involve librarians for creation of subject research guides by librarians and/or faculty – particular to a course, list of recommended resources, databases, constrained search boxes.
Usage scenarios – from librarians, who cares about it. Instructor / Librarian / Student perspectives.
Not just the resources tool, but integrate with anything – eg, add citations to the wiki tool.
http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=11108111@N00&tags=sakaivancouver06&format=rss_200 (sorry iWeb doesn’t let me (as far as I can figure out) embed a feed)
Faculty Support Options for . . .
Panel: Foothill CC – one f/t trainer
Model for faculty training. Train the trainer, now have 9 faculty, have gone through the training and have taught with it one term. They are all faculty. Hold training every two weeks. “overload” – they enjoy it. Online training – two weeks long, goes through all the tools. 25 to 30 for each session. It is open to outsiders.
Some people like online, others prefer onsite training. Two full days – wasn’t working, informaiton overload. Split into 4 Fridays, they are attending (split 2 hours demo / 2 hours hands on) Group tools.
They use Sakai for the training. When they sign up they get access to the training site and a “practice” site. For faculty that have “graduates” they become members of a user group site. Facilitators check daily. Set up forums for best practice in T&L.
Indiana University – large migration. Move 90,000 users from the old system to the new one (yikes). Given faculty option of opting out of Sakai. Faculty do things because they have a need. Also help faculty make choice of when to move. When they opt out – there’s a form – asks them why they opt out. Biggest reason is functionality. Opt out on the basis of bad information. 16 percent “did not want to change”. Hope to get faculty to the place where they see the need. Lots of mis-information out in the faculty. 1600 contacts with faculty about Sakai in the last year.
ittraining.iu.edu/oncourse/
University of California
faculty not advanced around instructional technology
Pilot Sakai for 05/06.
Technical underpinnings of Sakaibrary
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Sakaibrary
Originally uploaded by karendothunt.
Partnership of Indiana University and University of Michigan Libraries. Purpose is to integrate library resources with Sakai.
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sakai/
Lots of people in the room and I’m sure they’re not all librarians
Build Twin Peaks Navigator into a functional library database search and linking tool – use library federated search and link resolver tools to connect to multiple sources
Better integration of library content – involve librarians for creation of subject research guides by librarians and/or faculty – particular to a course, list of recommended resources, databases, constrained search boxes.
Usage scenarios – from librarians, who cares about it. Instructor / Librarian / Student perspectives.
Not just the resources tool, but integrate with anything – eg, add citations to the wiki tool.
http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=11108111@N00&tags=sakaivancouver06&format=rss_200 (sorry iWeb doesn’t let me (as far as I can figure out) embed a feed)
Faculty Support Options for . . .
Panel: Foothill CC – one f/t trainer
Model for faculty training. Train the trainer, now have 9 faculty, have gone through the training and have taught with it one term. They are all faculty. Hold training every two weeks. “overload” – they enjoy it. Online training – two weeks long, goes through all the tools. 25 to 30 for each session. It is open to outsiders.
Some people like online, others prefer onsite training. Two full days – wasn’t working, informaiton overload. Split into 4 Fridays, they are attending (split 2 hours demo / 2 hours hands on) Group tools.
They use Sakai for the training. When they sign up they get access to the training site and a “practice” site. For faculty that have “graduates” they become members of a user group site. Facilitators check daily. Set up forums for best practice in T&L.
Indiana University – large migration. Move 90,000 users from the old system to the new one (yikes). Given faculty option of opting out of Sakai. Faculty do things because they have a need. Also help faculty make choice of when to move. When they opt out – there’s a form – asks them why they opt out. Biggest reason is functionality. Opt out on the basis of bad information. 16 percent “did not want to change”. Hope to get faculty to the place where they see the need. Lots of mis-information out in the faculty. 1600 contacts with faculty about Sakai in the last year.
ittraining.iu.edu/oncourse/
University of California
faculty not advanced around instructional technology
Pilot Sakai for 05/06.
Technical underpinnings of Sakaibrary
Sakai Implementation: Planning
Originally uploaded by karendothunt.
Implementation plan session. The picture is of Wende Morgaine of Portland State.
Look at your campus culture – think of a story of something that has changed on campus, what are the “continua of change”. Examples, grass roots versus top down.
Then what are your compensation strategies. Compensate for what’s stopping the change.
Trojan horse – eg. bringing in OSP for one program, and start using Sakai for something else.
Ideas – using OSP for student advising, student orientation
Who needs to be on the implementation team?
faculty
IT resource someone who can translate from IT to people
marketing and communication
project manager?
sponsor? (someone from the top)
portfolio expert (if you’re going with OSP) (one is not enough)
how about someone responsible for faculty training?
IT issues
open-source
community source model, shift mind-set away from “it is someone else who is in charge of making it better”. There is no “they”.
Cost
won’t save you money
Bernard Golden (book) Succeeding with Open Source
project maturity (mature example, Apache webserver)
dealing with upgrades and data migration
speed of development
OSP – more important to take baby steps – get the architecture issues right to begin with.
If you’re going to contribute code – running to stand-still because the community is moving so fast.
One interesting thing about being in this room is finding yourself in a place with people that think like you. Phew, I’m not crazy.
Google Toolbar
We were talking about spelling yesterday. And filling in web forms. One useful tool I’ve been using for a while is the Google Toolbar – now with a spellchecker. Robust, available for many browsers – http://toolbar.google.com
Sakai training
Today Ruth Dahl and I did the first faculty training for Sakai (actually Ruth, from the Centre for Innovation and Learning, did 90 percent of the work). We scheduled 2-hours, but there are so many tools, 2 days would have worked better! One suggestion is for 1 course release for faculty to learn the system. Not a bad idea!
Cognitive Overload
Last week I attended a conference down the road at University of Manitoba. There was a mention of the issue of cognitive overload. I had viewed an online tutorial held in the COPPUL repository (https://dspace.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/1601) that was over 5 minutes long. I had felt (not based on any research – just my own reaction) that these “viewlets” (built with Qarbon’s ViewletBuilder in this case), should be short and each one should only try to cover one or two points. One reason is that most people don’t really want to learn how to use “a databases system” – they want to figure out how to make it work to solve a problem.
Why they should be short – cognitive overload. Research to back to up – Multi-media based Worked-out Examples: Learning Computer Applications by using On-Screen-Videos
“The starting point to improving the effectiveness of video tutorials is the lack of transfer and passive receptive attitude while watching videos. To accomplish this, the tutorial must be divided into small, meaningful blocks. This segmentation of the solution of a worked-out example has been very successful in other learning formats (e.g. learning of solving probability problems (Catrambone & Holyoak, 1990)). Knowledge transfer can be fostered by making sub-goals in solution procedures salient either by visually isolating them or by assigning a label. The tendency of learners to learn the solution procedures as a fixed chain of steps that has to be applied as a whole is counteracted, and they are enabled to reassemble the meaningful building blocks while solving new problems.
Cognitive Overload
Last week I attended a conference down the road at University of Manitoba. There was a mention of the issue of cognitive overload. I had viewed an online tutorial held in the COPPUL repository (https://dspace.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/1601) that was over 5 minutes long. I had felt (not based on any research – just my own reaction) that these “viewlets” (built with Qarbon’s ViewletBuilder in this case), should be short and each one should only try to cover one or two points. One reason is that most people don’t really want to learn how to use “a databases system” – they want to figure out how to make it work to solve a problem.
Why they should be short – cognitive overload. Research to back to up – Multi-media based Worked-out Examples: Learning Computer Applications by using On-Screen-Videos
“The starting point to improving the effectiveness of video tutorials is the lack of transfer and passive receptive attitude while watching videos. To accomplish this, the tutorial must be divided into small, meaningful blocks. This segmentation of the solution of a worked-out example has been very successful in other learning formats (e.g. learning of solving probability problems (Catrambone & Holyoak, 1990)). Knowledge transfer can be fostered by making sub-goals in solution procedures salient either by visually isolating them or by assigning a label. The tendency of learners to learn the solution procedures as a fixed chain of steps that has to be applied as a whole is counteracted, and they are enabled to reassemble the meaningful building blocks while solving new problems.
