Atlanta JA-SIG Conference Calendars

I've created Google Calendars representing the Pre-conference seminars, Birds of a Feather sessions, plenary sessions, kiosks, mini seminars, the Projects Applications and Solutions track, and the technical development track. (All of these links are to add the calendars to your calendar, and none open in new windows, so right-click.)

This was pursuant to my figuring out what I'm going to attend at the conference.

Old Spring Presentations

Opensource is a good thing.

It means that, because I chose to put some powerpoints I made once upon a time on the web such that they were publicly available, other people archived them for me so now I can find them via a Google query and recover the Spring slides from yesteryear that I thought I had lost.

There's an efficiency to be had in just putting it all there. Anything that can be public, should be public.

uPortal is popular

According to Yahoo Site Search, there are 4,479 pages on the web that link to uPortal's main webpage. 4,450, I suppose, once this blog post is indexed.

That sounds pretty darn popular to me.

What does this mean? Well, Yahoo Site Explorer credits Sakai's main webpage with a comparable 4,653 inlinks.

Available Position: Sakai Support Specialist at Stanford

Open position: CourseWork (Sakai at Stanford) Support Specialist.

Your campus needs a portal

Sometimes people ask me why a higher education campus needs a portal. Financials software, learning management systems, the value proposition is more tangible. But a portal? A meta-application that itself doesn't do much? Why do I need that?

Here's the relevant problem universities have: they're complex, there's a lot going on, there's a lot of noise, there are all sorts of services dribbling all over the place. This is a source of stress. People miss opportunities. How many people wish they could go back to college and take one more class, attend one more guest speaker, get just a little more involved in some activity? I bet basically 100% of college graduates.

Those are the opportunities JA-SIG software helps people realize. Because by virtue of the Central Authentication Service) you spend less time mucking around with lots of different accounts or having your online identity stolen you're less stressed and more able to take advantage of university. Because the portal helps you to be aware of events and requirements and opportunities, you're able to plan more effectively and better use your time. Sakai as learning and collaboration system facilitates doing the real work of learning.

Colleges need to be on opensource because life is too short for artificial constraints, for a vendor telling you what you are and are not allowed to do. Opensource frees colleges to go after the services and integrations that will actually deliver value to their constituents, or at least help the technology get out of the way as much as possible, and it is that that will make the educational experience better. It frees them to choose the locally-appropriate spot on the edginess curve, whether they want to be very conservative and limit risk or want to be on the edge with lots of cutting edge code.

Enterprise portals are for "members" of the University community. Who play lots of different roles and have many different activities and needs. They are sometimes very serious and studious. They are sometimes playful. They are sometimes collaborating in ad-hoc groups. And sometimes they're just trying to navigate bureaucracy. uPortal and Sakai are flexible enough to accommodate all of these roles and behaviors: uPortal is all about gathering user attributes and using them to understand groups and roles and to provide appropriate content. It's all about aggregating relevant information to help someone stay on top of the game. And Sakai is both a relatively serious pedagogically-driven LMS and a platform for more adhoc collaboration. In addition to offering course-related sites, you can create sites in Sakai for various groups on campus to collaborate outside of the context of courses.

The software is complex but that's because it's modeling a university that is necessarily complex. This is complexity that is doing work.

Getting portal groups and user attributes to portlets

The package esup-portal-ws provides a web service to retrieve uPortal group and user information from portlets.

This looks like an alternative to the classloader games we sometimes play.

In the words of Pascal Aubry (as posted to jasig-portal):

One of the main issues we encountered when developing portlets is that the portal and the portlets run in different Tomcat contexts, which prevents from accessing the portal objects from the portlets, in particular, the groups and the user attributes (Note: hopefully this separation has many advantages).
The package esup-portal-ws solves this issue by providing a web service (executed by uPortal and interrogated by the portlets) which gives access to the portal groups and user attributes. We think that this project can be useful for the whole JA-SIG community, especially the people who develop portlets or port existing uPortal channels to portlets, and who want to keep a close integration between their portlets and the portal Information System.