Sessions

Main Conference Web Site The main conference web-site can be found at http://sakaiproject.org/austin.

Conference Schedule The most up-to-date version of the conference schedule can be found at http://www.sakaiproject.org/austin/agenda.html.

Use this space to collaborate! The pages listed below provide a brief summary of each Session. They also offer a starting point for collaboration among participants, who can use Confluence to create additional pages (e.g., meeting minutes), upload attachments (e.g., presentations, documents), post comments, etc.

Sessions by Title

• Accessibility and Sakai - Accessible Tool Design – 009 — This is a presentation of Sakai accessibility concepts, implementations, progress and process, including Sakai accessibility tags and techniques, as well as challenges faced by Sakai designers and developers. The presentation will conclude with lessons learned and suggestions for how to make accessibility part of the development and QA process.
• A Distributed Tool Suite for Sakai - Enhancing the Collaboration Experience – 022 — The presentation will describe the reasoning behind our use of Sakai as the foundation of our e-Research and e-Collaboration activities. Also, we are going to describe the tool suite, some use cases and the technologies applied during tool development.
• Assessing the needs for a new VLE – 089 — The University of Twente (The Netherlands) has carried out a assessment of the needs for their VLE. We will present the process we are going through and will also present the results. We will also ask you for your valuable experiences regarding migrating from a commercial product to Sakai. We especially would like to share knowledge and best practices with our European collegues. Please stop by and talk to us! I will host a BOF session, during lunchtime on Thursday.
• Automated Testing in Sakai Development - Advanced Topics – 048 — Automated testing for code development has recently become a widely accepted addition to the standard tool set of developers. This workshop will show how automated testing can be incorporated into the development process for Sakai code by showing how an existing tool uses testing and how testing facilitates program modification.
• Automated Testing in Sakai Development - Introduction – 052 — Developing Sakai tools can be a daunting task, requiring extensive planning. However, that planning can be more flexibly integrated into the development process by using mock objects to facilitate test-first development. Learn how to jumpstart code writing and support high test coverage with mock objects.
• Beyond WebCT - tools to shape an autonomous and usable learning environment – 071 — Working closely with instructional technologists, instructors in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia have taken an active role in articulating, designin and directing the creation of flexible tools to turn the campus installation of WebCT into the pedagogical tool that meets their needs.
• Blazing a Trail - Analysis of an Ambitious Rollout at Indiana University – 070 — Indiana University strategically established ambitious goals to blaze a production trail with Sakai supplanting numerous legacy systems. Critical to the success of this effort was an aggressive migration timeline, alignment of numerous resources allocated to the project, an unyielding adherence to high quality production standards, and a passionate commitment to community source. Unique challenges faced and resolutions employed will be covered.
• Campus-Wide Community Source - Principles for Successful Implementation – 067 — The architects of OSP/Sakai adoption at Portland State will detail a large, urban university's journey with community source systems from idea to implementation. We will share our model for securing buy-in from administration, faculty, students and IT, and principles to enable a successful, wide-spread, and swift implementation.
• Carousel of Tools - MailTool
• CHAT 101 - Using Sakai Chat to Affect Teaching and Learning – 073 — How might a master instructor teaching an introductory course in Economics use chat as a tool to address the principals of effective education? This session presents experiences and date collected as the instructor employed chat at her site for online office hours, open forums, as well live chat during lectures.
• Configuring Sakai – 019 — Once you have Sakai up and running, there are many configurations that can be made to tailor Sakai to fit your particular institution. This session provides explanations of how System Admins can customize a Sakai installation.
• Course Management Tools for the Humanities – 072 — Course Management Tools for Humanities need to emerge from current pedagogical practices in the humanities disciplines, allowing changes in teaching practice to emerge organically. In addition, instructors want to use the kinds of media and communication resources increasingly familiar to them from their own lives, in a flexible, modular form.
• Creating a Sakai Graphic Institutional Identity – 016 — A hands on workshop to introduce participants to the Sakai "skinning" model.
• Creating OSP porfolio presentations – 054 — The presentation shows how to create a presentation template for the OSP 2.0 portfolio.
• Crossing the Frontier - Exploring Sakai Adoption On Your Campus – 018 — Using innovation diffusion theory, there are general strategies which you can apply to help Sakai gain acceptance on your campus. This session is about the specific approaches we used to begin and sustain a Sakai pilot at MU and the lessons learned which will assist your initial Sakai exploration.
• Designing OSP for Specific Purposes – 034 — Participants will walk through a step-by-step design process making the best use of OSP functionality for specific group purposes. Case studies will demonstrate how initial ideas emerge from the design and development process as interrelated OSP data structures (Forms, Assessment Matrices, Templates, etc.) to provide working solutions for educational processes.
• Developers - How To Get Started in Sakai – 021 — Zach Thomas from Texas State will demonstrate setting up a development environment, engineering best practices, and how to make sense of all that code.
• Easy User-Centered Design - From Idea to Implementation – 033 — How can you start to involve users in the design of new tools in your CLE? The Grad Tools team did it by talking to our users. It sounds simple, and it is. Come hear how we did it and take away ideas for doing UCD on your next project.
• eLearning Tools for ePortfolios – 053 — We describe 2 novel eLearning tools: Interactive Concept Discovery Learning, and Meaning Equivalence Reusable Learning Object (MERLO) that encourage learners to interact directly with the conceptual content. Results of evaluative implementations demonstrate enhanced learning outcomes and provide demonstration of mastery of learning and formative assessments of learning processes for ePortfoilios.
• eScience Panel – 201 — coming soon...
• Fall Pilot - Lessons Learned – 020 — A panel of implementors from Texas State and Rutgers share their experiences from their Fall pilots of Sakai.
• Goal Aware Tools – 025 — Syracuse University's School of Education is proposing a series of "goal aware" courseware and portfolio tools. We will present the need, our development effort, plan for the next year and a vision of tools that are aware if institution, instructor and personal metadata and student progress toward stated outcomes.
• IMS Tools Interoperability Framework - Overview – 024 — An overview of the IMS Tools Interoperability Framework and how it enables a wider range of tools to be deployed into the Sakai environment. The emerging IMS Common Cartridge standard will be discussed as well, focusing on the integration of tools and content.
• Increasing Faculty Participation in Sakai and OSP – 059 — Faculty have been instrumental in setting the the Open Source Portfolio's priorities and in developing its functional requirements so that the resulting system serves their needs in the classroom. This session will examine the case for faculty involvement in Sakai and OSP, barriers to meaningful participation, and strategies for engaging interests of faculty members.
• Integrating Library Technologies and Sakai – 055 — This session will provide background on existing and emerging library technologies to support improved access to licensed information sources, such as OpenURL link resolvers and metasearch tools. Participants will discuss technologies used at their home institutions and how these technologies might be used to help provide access to licensed digital content within Sakai.
• Introduction to the Sakai Community – 221 — People new to the Sakai community or those wanting to gain a better understanding of the community processes should plan on attending this session. This sesssion will include a discussion about Jira, Confluence, the Sakai Collab environments and, if time permits, we may also be able to help people with laptops set up Jira/Confluence and Collab accounts.
• Is Linking Thinking? Web Pedagogies and Tools for Teaching and Learning – 098 — This panel will focus on practices of Web pedagogy that have helped drive the development of home grown tools for teaching and learning at Harvard, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What has driven these schools to build their own applications? How have these institutions balanced pedagogical needs with the architectural forces that often drive instructional application development? The panel will demonstrate existing tools that panelists see as being of particular value at their institutions and discuss how Sakai may play into their future.
• Is There an OpenCourseWare in Your Future? – 081 — In 1999, MIT decided to share its course materials openly on the Internet. Today, MIT OpenCourseWare has over 1100 courses freely available. But OpenCourseWare is no longer just an "MIT" thing. Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Harvard, and many others are also doing OpenCourseWare. Is there an OpenCourseWare in your future?
• LAMS and Sakai – 219 — TBA
• Leveraging WSRP in Sakai Tools – 062 — This session will introduce the WSRP protocol and features and present the current state of implementation of Sakai WSRP producer. It will cover the basic steps to develop and test WSRP-friendly tools. Finally the list of identified WSRP enhancements to current codebase will be discussed.
• Loosely-Coupled Sakai – 013 — The 2005 Sakai Gradebook and Section Info projects successfully met specifications within their target dates with a relatively small number of reported bugs. However, some of the teams' practices varied considerably from earlier Sakai tool development efforts.
• Marist Institute for Data Center Professionals Pilots Sakai as Part of NSF – 028 — Faculty and students who have experienced Marist's current course management system, UCompass Educator, will use Sakai over an 18-month online educational experience to determine the advantages and shortcoming of Sakai and assess its efficacy for IDCP education. This is a first step to the full migration of Marist's on-line programs to Sakai.
• MIPS - Migration, Implementation, and Pedagogical Strategies – 023 — Details PSU's Fall pilot for implementing Sakai and Melete, including specifics about how to migrate courses from WebCT, use of a digital repository to serve module content, and plans to move from pilot to implementation with over 2,500 courses serving 22,000 students in the next 6-8 months
• New Tool Development as Process and Product at IU - Lessons Learned – 038 — This panel session highlights recent development on Message Forums, Roster, and Post'Em. Broadly leveraging resources across the university, a taskforce developed requirements, designs, and initial coding. Results were iterated with the development team for refinement. Panelists will share process, products and experiences from these intense collaborations yielding Sakai tools to meet pressing local needs.
• Open Source Licensing 101 and the Educational Community License – 061 — The presenters will help prepare participants to understand open source licenses, and in particular discuss the Educational Community License (ECL) from the perspective of a Lawyer, University CIO, and commercial support company President.
• OSP 2.1 - A Functional Overview from 30,000 Feet – 060 — An overview of OSP 2.1 will be presented so the OSP community knows what functionality to expect in the upcoming build. In a roundtable discussion, panelists will answer questions about functions and features and will lead a discussion about the proposed organization of element, form, and wizard trees in OSP 2.1.
• OSP Development - Integrating View Technologies into Sakai – 015 — OSP 2.1 is currently in development as an integrated set of tools targeting the Sakai 2.1 platform. OSP has a variety of front end view technology requirements. This presentation will focus on some of the view technology choices we have made and how they fit into the Sakai tool framework.
• Panel of Sakai Implementers Pilots Planned Starts
• Panel Session - Sakai Performance Profiling, Testing and Tuning – 076 — Sakai Performance Profiling, Testing & Tuning: Discussion of Performance profiling, testing & tuning. Discussion topics: creation of a performance test environment; why a performance profile should be created; how to create a performance profile; how to construct tests; load tools; experience using LoadRunner at UM; how to tune Sakai for performance.
• Panel Session - Sakai QA Process – 074 — Discussion of overall Sakai QA process with panel of active QA WG members.
• Pie in the Sakai - Realizing the Promise of Enterprise Sakai and OSP at PSU – 043 — PSU brings unique insight to open source adoption. With a track record of over ten years in portfolio use and online course delivery, our implementation scale includes 25,000 students. If you are looking for models of institution-wide implementation we will provide you with specific steps applicable to your university.
• Project OSlOA - A Strategy for Institutional Innovation – 063 — Project OS|OA provides a strategy for developing a networked community of scholars and students across the University of Toronto interested in piloting and evaluating next generation teaching, research and administrative OS|OA applications. The paper reviews the experience of building an OS|OA community across traditional departmental boundaries and considers how this strategy may transfer and generalize to other institutions.
• Project Sponsors Vision for the Future Ira Fuchs
• Promoting Effective Use of Open Technology - OSP Implementation Case Studies – 029 — This panel will address how documenting and sharing institutional, faculty, and student experience with open educational technologies can promote the innovative and effective use of tools like Open Source Portfolio and Sakai. Implications for building and sustaining a vibrant knowledge community of practice will also be discussed.
• Release Engineering for Sakai – 044 — Writing complex open source software is complicated, releasing that software in a form that is useable, stable, reliable, and configurable is a different and complex task. This discussion will quickly present a few different release scenarios and will then have a conversation about the merits of these and other approaches.
  • discussion notes
• Remote AuthZ Integration with Sakai – 046 — Exploring mechanisms and strategies for ensuring high-performance and low-latency synchronization with Sakai AuthZ data structures across serialization boundaries.
• Repository Integration With Sakai Using the Open Knowledge Initiative - Twin Peaks – 099 — With Sakai 2.1, there is a tool for doing federated searches across data sources exposed through the O.K.I. Repository interfaces (OSIDs).
• Results of the Sakai Tool Development Exercise – 007 — Results of the The Tool Development Exercise are presented along with recommendations for future Sakai work projects.
• Riding the Fork - Technical Considerations of a Dual Sakai 2-OSP 2 Pilot – 068 — Anticipating the integration of Sakai/OSP code in 2006, Portland State is running two pilots during this academic year: Sakai 2.0 and OSP 2.0/Sakai 1.5. Learn how Oregon's largest university is managing the technical infrastructure of these dual pilots, planning for an unforked future, and entering the OSP development process.
• Sakai Architecture - 200 — This talk will cover the Sakai architecture. Topics include the goals of the Sakai Architecture, Component based expansion in Sakai, Tool and API design within Sakai, Sakai presentation approaches, Sakai poortal approaches including iFrames, WSRP and JSR-168, Sakai web services, IMS Tool Interoperability, Skaia Provider structure, and Sakai production configurations. This talk is a technical introduction to Sakai.
• Sakai Austin Conference Welcome
• Sakai for the Little Guy - Implementing Sakai with Limited Resources – 080 — Sakai is viewed as targeting enterprise deployments, with large budgets, users in the tens of thousands, and large numbers of supporting staff. However, Albany Medical College has been running a successful production deployment of Sakai with approximately one staff member and a very small budget. Find out how we did it.
• Sakai Foundation Requirements Process – 041 — This session will be a report-back from the Requirements Process working group on the proposed Sakai Foundation requirements gathering, review and prioritization process.
• Sakai is Oncourse CL at Indiana University – 026 — This panel session discusses Indiana University's implementation of Sakai, Oncourse CL (collaboration and learning) and provides an update on the recent implementation work at IU. Representatives from IU's implementation team will discuss the communication, support, documentation, and training strategies taken in managing this wholesale migration to IU's instance of Sakai.
• Sakai Section Info Tool - Managing Course Sites in 2.1 and Beyond – 065 — The introduction of the Sakai 2.1 Section Info tool marks the first step towards site management tools that support complex enterprise course data. We will review its major features, design choices, limitations, related tools and future directions.
• Sakai Technical Update – 205 — This talk will cover new changes since the 2.0 release. This will talk about framework changes, new tools, provisional tools, new processes for release, and look forward towards the 2.2 release and beyond.
• Section Info - Supporting Standalone Application Development – 011 — Sakai's new grouping and sectioning capabilities were built using a phased development approach which can be used as a model for adding new capabilities to the Sakai framework in the future. This presentation will demonstrate how the new Section Info tool and Section Awareness API were developed, and describe a possible roadmap for moving new features from a "middleware" model to inclusion in the Sakai framework.
• Something Wiki This Way Comes – 078 — Wiki is an OSP system that we currently use in our writing program at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. I will present how Wiki is used as a tool for teaching writing, as a tool for collaborative learning, and as a course management system to deliver online courses.
• Supporting Sakai - Lessons from the University of Michigan – 017 — Sakai has been in use at the University of Michigan for the past 3 years, serving tens of thousands of customers. Hear the in and outs of supporting a large scale Sakai deployment from the folks who answer the phones and respond to the email.
  • Session Notes
• Taking the Sakai Style Guide to the Next Level – 066 — The Sakai style guide (SSG) has been a useful design tool in helping the community work toward designing consistent, predictable and usable Sakai tools. However, anyone that has used the SSG understands that its use is not without problems. This round table discussion is meant to explore the community's use of the style guide to help guide its future direction. If you have used (or tried to use) the SSG in any capacity, please join us in our effort to make the guide increasingly useful to the Sakai community.
• Tests and Quizzes-SAMigo – 210
• The Library and Sakai – 051 — The PSU Library supported the implementation of Sakai by creating appropriate materials and resources that address the needs of distributed learning students as well as faculty who teach courses in Sakai.
• The Light Bulb Moment - Student Portfolios as Academically Transformational – 042 — Although portfolios are an excellent practice with a rich history in academe, their pedagogical value can be lost when their function as programmatic/institutional assessment tools is made primary in the classroom. At Portland State University, OSP/Sakai has given students back the power to collect and reflect on their own work.
• Transition from high school to college writing - Transition from OSP 1 to OSP 2 – 040 — In 2005, teams of high school and university writing instructors created rubrics with which to evaluate the writing of high school seniors planning to attend college. Forty-one students, distributed among a suburban high school and two urban schools submitted preliminary essays and then final essays based on feedback and exchanges conducted within OSP 1. Overall, student writing improved (p<. 05) approximately .5 points on five point assessment scales in categories derived from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory - ideas and content, organization, word choice, voice, sentence fluency, and use of conventions. In our follow-up, we will construct parallel matrix, reflection, and reviewer tools in OSP 2 to compare this rubric to one based on state of Ohio writing standards, and extend the populations served by four of 26 colleges entering a statewide pilot of OSP/Sakai in 2006. This session will present the findings of our pilot and demonstrate how we will extend our work based on the new functionality available in OSP2.
• Tulane, Katrina and Rita – 037 — A 30 minute presentation on the effect of Huricane Katrina on the New Orleans campuses.
• UC Merced - Implementation experiences – 101 — We will discuss our efforts in launching Sakai at UC Merced. This will include our use of Sakai, uPortal, UBC Webmail and CAS.
• Usability and social ability in Sakai – 039 — The Context Aware Notification System (CANS) being developed to integrate with course management systems notifies users about the activity of other members. A usability protocol was undertaken with Sakai comparing activity and awareness in Sakai before and after awareness mechanisms were added.
• User Support Panel – 203 — This panel will include representatives from a number of institutions that are running Sakai in production or have significant pilot efforts underway. We will specifically focus on issues related to user support. We will talk about similarities and differences between institutions, and discuss support issues relevant to those about to adopt Sakai on their campus.
• Using JSF for Tool Development – 098 — This presentation will focus on the developer experience with JSF. Together, John Ellis of the OSP 2.1 project and Ray Davis of the Gradebook project will explore some of the plusses and minuses of using JSF, and provide practical tips regarding what sort of problems you might encounter and how you might deal with them.
• Using Sakai and eduCommons to do OpenCourseWare – 082 — eduCommons is designed to work alongside LMS's like Sakai to support OpenCourseWare. We will discuss the technical features of eduCommons, and demonstrate how eduCommons and Sakai can be used side-by-side. For OpenCourseWare. We will also discuss the roadmap for tighter integration between Sakai and eduCommons in the future.
• Using the Sakai Collaborative Toolkit in eScience Applications – 083 — Sakai is a Collaborative Learning Environment - this presentation explores the application of Sakai beyond basic teaching and learning and places Sakai in the context of eScience applications and shows the relationship between Sakai, institutional repositories, portals, and other technologies.
• We don't all have to agree - Flexible UI Design – 069 — This panel will discuss approaches to designing Sakai tools that provide a consistent Sakai user interface (UI) experience from tool to tool while at the same time accommodating diversity in UI design when implemented by different institutions, departments or disciplines. These same approaches would allow the transformation of the UI to address the alternative access needs of individual learners or educators. Panelists will discuss the tools, architecture and design strategies needed to realize these goals.
• What is Sakai – 204 — This session will provide a brief history of Sakai over the past two years as it relates to releases and the community, highlights of features included in the 2.1 release and a brief description of the potential future of Sakai as it relates to upcoming releases and the newly formed Sakai foundation.
• What is Sakai - Repeat – 202 — This session will provide a brief history of Sakai over the past two years as it relates to releases and the community, highlights of features included in the 2.1 release and a brief description of the potential future of Sakai as it relates to upcoming releases and the newly formed Sakai foundation.
• What OSP Users Need to Know about Sakai – 045 — Are you wondering where the functionality of Sakai and OSP meet? Have you given any thought to how configuration of one affects the other? Find out what you need to think about in setting up Sakai to make the most of OSP functionality and help ensure a successful ePortfolio implementation on your campus.
• Wouldn't it be great if.. - Exploring instructional methods using Sakai – 036 — Participants will be given teaching examples from award-winning instructors at Indiana University and asked to think critically about the use of these instructional methods in the Sakai environment. The goal of the session is to challenge ourselves to articulate how the Sakai tools might best support teaching and learning.