Blogs

We've been asked by email by a few folks who are curious about the OSP preconference workshop at the '09 Boston Sakai conference:

Is there an additional cost for the workshop?

No. The preconference workshop "comes with" your registration for the conference. This is probably confusing since so many other conferences charge extra for preconference activities.

Congratulations to all of the 2009 Sakai Fellows, including my Three Canoes colleague, Dr. Janice Smith. Jan has a heart for teaching and learning and has been helping the OSP community shape its message for Sakai 2.7 and 3.0. I've learned a lot from Janice in the short time we have worked together and have really gained an appreciation for her ability to bridge the gap between people with different backgrounds and skill sets. 

When developing a stylesheet for a Sakai/OSP portfolio template, you ideally want your IDE to transform your passthrough XML with the same version of Xalan as Sakai. My version of OxygenXML is using Xalan 2.7, but Sakai is still stuck on Xalan 2.6. I've heard other template developers complain that their stylesheet works in OxygenXML, but fails in Sakai.

In this, my first post at Three Canoes, I wanted to make an observation from working as a consultant in the Sakai open source community during the last 7 months. I have had the opportunity to work with two universities and two vendors as a subcontractor.

One of the paradoxes of trying to eek out a living as one who supports open source software is that it is tempting to hold your cards close to your chest and suggest that any knowledge transfer must be paid for. It is tempting to repeat the same old trick over and over again. For example, I have a decent handle on how many of the Open Source Portfolio tools can be configured to support different portfolio scenarios. One of the trickiest bits to using the OSP tools involves iteratively writing the XSL file that gives the portfolio tool its marching orders on how to organize and display the student portfolio from a pile of assembled content.

Last April I participated in the ePortfolios Conference at LaGuardia Community College and saw a team of students representing hundreds of their peers present their ePortfolios. Student after student of both genders and every color proudly stood up to show us who they understood themselves to be and where they intended to go in this world.

My purpose in working with portfolios in open source is to help people open their hearts to discover who they are and who they intend to be. A learner who has gone through a portfolio process that focuses on who that individual is, has he/she has learned, and how he/she wants to continue learning is a wonder to observe.