Sean's blog

Last night I was building a series of reflection forms for a large matrix (15 rows). Each reflection form had a rich text editor to hold the reflection.

The design of these reflection forms included some "default text" that would help to guide the student's thinking about their reflection. Each row of the matrix was to have slightly different default text in that field. There are two ways I could accomplish the task.

We had a little time in between some projects recently, so we decided to try an in-house project that ended up being something we thought should be out there in the community.

I've been hearing about the AAC&U VALUE project for quite a while now and had been anticipating the project deliverables (a well researched set of rubrics for assessing ePortfolio work) as something we could refer clients to as an excellent example of how to assess student work. It took us a few days to get it done, but the result is something that I think may be useful for the community.

I am working on a set of forms for a well-researched set of rubrics for portfolio evaluation to donate to the http://openedpractices.org community library. There are 14 rubrics in the set, each dealing with a specific learning outcome. Every rubric has a set of 5-6 criteria that can be rated on a 0-4 scale.

Indiana University's version of the page composer idea allows students to create up to 7 top level pages in their portfolio. By default these pages are:

I just completed a modification of the University of Michigan's Page Composer for Indiana University. This work was based upon their 2.5 version of their templates.

Features removed:

Last month I made my way down to SUNY Delphi for the "2-3-98 Conference" and sat on a panel of folks that had been involved in open source in education to discuss the "Meritocracy of Open Source" with Martin Knott, CEO of Moodlerooms and Mike Zackrison, VP of Marketing & Strategy at rSmart. This was the smallest conference I have been to in quite a while and I really enjoyed it's laid back feel.

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.