Sakai Project Overview Hosei University IT Research Center

Sakai Project Overview Hosei University IT Research Center Tokyo May 13, 2005 Joseph Hardin, University of Michigan School of Information Sakai Board Chair KYOU / sakai Boundary, Situation

The Sakai Project “The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the u. Portal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools. ” Sakai Project receives $2. 4 million grant from Mellon 2

Sakai Funding • Each of the 4 Core Universities Commits – 5+ developers/architects, etc. under Sakai Board project direction for 2 years – Public commitment to implement Sakai – Open/Open licensing – “Community Source” • So, overall project levels – $4. 4 M in institutional staff (27 FTE) – $2. 4 M Mellon, $300 K Hewlett (first year) – Additional investment through partners 3

Why: All the simple reasons These are core infrastructures at our Universities • Economic advantages to core schools, partners • Higher ed values – open, sharing, building the commons – core support for collaboration tech • We should be good at this – teaching, research are our core competencies; collab essential • Maintains institutional capacity, independence • Ability to rapidly innovate – move our tools within/among HE institutions rapidly Based on goals of interoperability Desire to harvest research advances and faculty innovation in teaching quickly 4

Sakai Project Deliverables Sakai Community – Committed and active Working Code – CMS/CLE- Collaboration and Learning Environment – Sakai 1. 0 • Course management system – core tools plus • • • Quizzing and assessment tools, [e. Portfolio from OSPI], etc Research collaboration system Portal (u. Portal 2. 3, 3. x) Modular tools - also pre-integrated to work out of the box Tool Portability Profile • Specifications for writing portable software to achieve application ‘code mobility’ among institutions – modular tools and services Synchronized development, adoptions at Michigan, Indiana, MIT, Stanford – Sakai 1. 0 is the next generation for Course. Work, CHEF, Oncourse, Stellar 5

Supporting the Class Sakai as Course Management System (CMS) 6

Supporting the Lab Sakai as collaboratories - support for online research teams 7

CHEF-Based NEESGrid Software NEES Chef -> Sakai 07/05 8

NMI / OGCE www. ogce. org NSF National Middleware Initiative Indiana, UTexas, ANL, UM, NCSA 9

Bringing the lab to the classroom 10

Both students and faculty can set up projects Ctools – List of Worksites – Classes, Projects 11

Ctools – Production Sakai at University of Michigan 12

Site/class home page 13

Site Resources area 14

Discussion tool – Forums 15

Email Archive 16

Site Info – class list 17

So, More than a CMS • Sakai more than Course Management System • Sakai = Collaboration & Learning Environment Staff 1 Staff 2 Staff 3 Student Portal Discussion Forum Resource Management Collaborative Project Portlet Middle East News Feed Discussion Forum ASUC Middle East Discussion Portlet Use for teaching/learning/research and many other online group activities. 18

The Sakai Framework

Sakai Technical Goals Provide environment • to write tools and services which seamlessly move from one Sakai deployment to another – tool portability • where the addition of a new tool does not de-stabilize the existing tools – modularization • to allow tools to exist both within Sakai and standalone (I. e. easy porting of external tools into Sakai without requiring rewrite) • and capabilities so that Sakai services and tools can be accessed using web services. 20

Sakai Foundational Documents • Sakai Style Guide - Describes in detail how Sakai tools are to look and operate regardless of implementation technology • Sakai Java Framework - Describes the Sakai Application Framework (SAF) as implemented in Java • Sakai Tool Portability Profile - Describes how to write tools and services to be portable across Sakai systems (in progress) 21

Service Oriented Architecture • Decompose tool code into presentation elements and service elements • Provides an abstraction (API) which shields the tool code from the implementation details of the service code. • Allows separate development of tools & services. • Allows effective unit testing of services • Allows an implementation to be replaced transparently with another implementation as long as the API contract is fully met 22

Service Oriented Architecture Browser My Monolithic Code Persistence Browser Presentation Code Service Interface (i. e. API) Persistence 23

Sakai Application Framework • SAF - Kernel - An augmented web application which enables the Sakai APIs to be called from the web application - this is a rich but not constraining environment • SAF - Common Services - A set of common services available to all tools (authentication, authorization, hierarchy, repository, others) • SAF - Presentation Services - A set of Sakai specific JSF tags to handle presentation details and provide widgets such as a date-picker or WSYWIG editor. 24

Sakai Integration and Development Choices • Develop a TPP Compliant Tool Assured to be portable across Sakai environments • Integrate a web application – Responsible for own presentation and compliance to style guide (may use Sakai JSF tags if JSF is used) – Can operate both stand-alone and within Sakai • Integrate via web-services – Capability being developed 25

Sakai TPP Tools SAF - Presentation Services Tool Layout (JSP) Tool Code (Java) Application Services SAF - Common Services SAF - Kernel 26

Sakai Tool Layout in JSF <sakai: view_container title="#{msgs. sample_title}"> <sakai: tool_bar_item/> </sakai: tool_bar> <sakai: instruction_message value="#{msgs. sample_one_instructions}" /> <sakai: group_box title="#{msgs. sample_one_groupbox}"> <h: input. Text value="#{My. Tool. user. Name}" /> <sakai: date_input value="#{My. Tool. date}" /> <sakai: button_bar_item action="#{My. Tool. process. Action. Do. It} value="#{msgs. sample_one_cmd_go}" /> </sakai: button_bar> 27

Sakai Service Providers • Common Services are localized using plug-ins – User. Directory. Provider – Realm. Provider – Course. Management. Provider SAF - Common Services Role Provider • Plug-ins do not replace the persistence, they are consulted in order to populate Sakai structures User Provider – Repository. Provider – OKI OSID Based Providers Course Provider • These will be expanded 28

Sakai, IMS, and Web Services Header Button Button Tool Area 1 6 Web Services Launch Control HTML/HTTP Web Services 7 Application Code 4 2 Session And Services Bootstrap 3 External Web Application CLE Environment 5 29

Sakai and Portals • Sakai was initially intended to be a “portal plus a bunch of tools” - shake well and viola! You have a learning management system. • Initially this seemed simple enough – Buttons and rectangles – Collection of tools deployed in various configurations with various administration options • Portals and Learning Management systems turn out to be very different problems to solve • Sakai needs to work both in a portal and LMS environment (not that easy to do) 30

Portals • Organized by enterprise and are often driven by the office of communications (Library, HR, Athletics, President) • Often geared to individual customization • Many small rectangles to provide a great deal of information on a single screen • Navigation is varied, very hyper-like • Portals think of rectangles operating independently - like windows • Think “Dashboard” . vs. LMS • Organized by academic aspects and are driven by the registrar (Colleges, Departments) • LMS’s are customizable by faculty or departments but not typically by students • LMS’s like one tool on the screen at a time. • LMS’s think of navigation as picking a tool or switching from one class to another • LMS’s have interacting tools – one rectangle needs to know what’s in the one next to it • Think “Application” 31

Sakai Portal Integration Goals • Sakai TPP Tools will run in JSR-168 portals - “Write once run anywhere”. • An entire Sakai site can be included at some point in an enterprise portal – i. Frames - separate sign on (or Web. ISO) – WSRP - shared sign on via trust between portal and Sakai – web services for remote portals • Portions of many Sakai sites, tools, or pages can be aggregated to produce a personal federated view for an individual - moves toward a personal, and customizable by user, full learning and research environment. 32

Software Progress to date – Releases close to on time 1. 0 (2004), 1. 5 (last month) – Production and pilots underway, in pipeline – 2. 0 forming up nicely for June; recent meeting between Tools Team, Architecture Team and Board very good – Processes being developed - organizational methods evolving rapidly; release engineering, distributed QA, contributions acceptance models, definition of enterprise bundle, methods for OS Core… Still, this “Community Source” stuff is a learning process 33

Sakai in Production at UM, IU Now • We have about 25, 000 people using CTools in at least one course at UM. That is about ~54% of candidate users at University of Michigan. • There are over 1000 course sites representing nearly 2000 sections this term. • First semester of transition from Course. Tools Classic; transition complete Fall 2005, CTC ‘turned off’; then we are all Sakai/Ctools at UM • Running on big cluster of commodity Dell boxes; allows us to optimize as we provide stable service to large community; frequent rolls for updates Doing fine… 34

Sakai 1. 0 Tools Admin: Alias Editor (chef. aliases) Admin: Archive Tool (chef. archive) Admin: Memory / Cache Tool (chef. memory) Admin: On-Line (chef. presence) Admin: Realms Editor (chef. realms) Admin: Sites Editor (chef. sites) Admin: User Editor (chef. users) Announcements (chef. announcements) Assignments (chef. assignment) C. R. U. D. (sakai. crud) Chat Room (chef. chat) Discussion (chef. discussion) Discussion (chef. threadeddiscussion) Dissertation Checklist (chef. dissertation) Dissertation Upload (chef. dissertation. upload) Drop Box (chef. dropbox) Email Archive (chef. mailbox) Help (chef. contact. Support) Membership (chef. membership) Message Of The Day (chef. motd) My Profile Editor (chef. singleuser) News (chef. news) Preferences (chef. noti. prefs) Recent Announcements (chef. synoptic. announcement) Recent Chat Messages (chef. synoptic. chat) Recent Discussion Items (chef. synoptic. discussion) Resources (chef. resources) Sample (sakai. module) Schedule (chef. schedule) Site Browser (chef. sitebrowser) Site Info (chef. siteinfo) Web Content (chef. iframe) Worksite Setup (chef. sitesetup) Web. DAV 35

Sakai 1. 5 Tools • Samigo - QTI compliant assessment engine (Stanford) • Syllabus Tool (Indiana) • Context Sensitive Help (Indiana) • Presentation Tool (SEPP) • Portfolio Tool - OSPI (R-Smart) (separate release) 36

Sakai 2. 0 (New Tools) • Completely re-written Kernel (UM / MIT) • Melete - Online classroom - lesson editor (Foothill) • Grade Book (UC Berkeley / MIT ) 37

Tools from Partners • • • Flow. Talk (Cambridge) Black. Board Import (U Texas) Xwiki (Cambridge) Mail / Messaging (Northwestern / Yale) Web. Dav Features (Rutgers) Many bug fixes… 38

Sakai Etudes Faculty Review • • • Most core tools - very nice Discussion tool - needs work Melete - Online Classroom - very nice Work. Site Setup - very nice Missing features – Individual messaging – Student tracking 39

In production use With >25, 000 users at U Michigan 40

Sakai in Production • University of Michigan – September 2004 - Sakai 1. 0 production – January 2005 - Sakai 1. 5 production • Indiana University – September 2004 - Sakai 1. 0 small pilot – January 2005 - Sakai 1. 5 large pilot – September 2005 - Sakai 2. 0 full production • Yale University – January 2005 - Sakai 1. 5 small pilot • Etudes / Foothill – April 2005 - Sakai 1. 5 medium sized pilot 41

Known Pilots and Production • Boston University School of Management • Carleton College • Foothill-De Anza Community College District • Indiana University • Johns Hopkins University • Lübeck University of Applied Sciences, Germany • Massachusetts Institute of Technology • Northwestern University • Rutgers • Stanford University • University of California, Berkeley • University of California, Merced • University of Cape Town, SA • University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal • University of Lleida, Spain • University of Michigan • University of Missouri • University of Virginia • Whitman College • Yale University 42

Sakai Community • Developer and Adopter Support SEPP - Sakai Educational Partner’s Program Community for ongoing dev, adoption, support • Commercial Support – SCA, IMS, maybe SPA Based on open-open licensing – open source, open for commercialization- see ECL at sakaiproject. org SCA – Fee-based services from vendors include… • Installation/integration, on-going support, training • Think of as “Sakai Red Hats” IMS – working with CLE/CMS vendors on interoperability between frameworks, e. g. , Web. CT, BB, Sun, etc. 43

Sakai Educational Partner’s Program Developing the Community that’s Directing the Source. • Membership Fee: US$10 K per year ($5 K for smaller schools), 3 years • Access to SEPP staff – Community development liaison – SEPP developers, documentation writers • Invitation to Sakai Partners Conferences – Developer training for the TPP, tool development – Strategy and implementation workshops – Software exchange for partner-developed tools • Seat at the Table as Sakai Develops The success of the SEPP effort will determine The long term success of the project. 44

Sakai Educational Partners - Feb 1, 2004 • • • • • • • • • Arizona State University Boston University School of Management Brown University Carleton College Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching Carnegie Mellon University Coastline Community College Columbia University Community College of Southern Nevada Cornell University Dartmouth College Florida Community College/Jacksonville Foothill-De Anza Community College Franklin University Georgetown University Harvard University Hosei University IT Research Center Johns Hopkins University Lubeck University of Applied Sciences Maricopa County Community College Monash University Nagoya University New York University Northeastern University North-West University (SA) Northwestern University Ohio State University Portland State University Princeton University Roskilde University (Denmark) Rutgers University Simon Fraser University State University of New York • Stockholm University • SURF/University of Amsterdam • Tufts University • Universidad Politecnica de Valencia (Spain) • Universitat de Lleida (Spain) • University of Arizona • University of California Berkeley • University of California, Davis • University of California, Los Angeles • University of California, Merced • University of California, Santa Barbara • University of Cambridge, CARET • University of Cape Town, SA • University of Colorado at Boulder • University of Delaware • University of Hawaii • University of Hull • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign • University of Minnesota • University of Missouri • University of Nebraska • University of Oklahoma • University of Texas at Austin • University of Virginia • University of Washington • University of Wisconsin, Madison • Virginia Polytechnic Institute/University • Whitman College • Yale University New • University of Melbourne, Australia • University of Toronto, Knowledge Media Design 45 Institute

SCA – Sakai Commercial Affiliates First Generation – Open Source Software Support for the Sakai codebase, or support of Sakai users = SCA Member 46

‘Second Generation’ SCA Partners 47

…sees two significant areas of activity and investment on the part of institutions and higher education communities (…) with the Sakai Project having the promise of playing a keystone role in both of these areas: • Open-source Business and Learning Solutions: Institutions are driving towards collaborative, open systems for content creation, management and delivery, as well as administrative and support systems. The institutions see open systems as a way to reduce operating costs and a growing dependency on proprietary software vendors, and as a way to unleash the innovation and creativity of their faculty and students. • Interoperable Learning Content: Institutions are driving towards interoperable learning materials (textbooks, tests, supplemental materials). Institutions increasingly are differentiating themselves in their effort to attract students through specialization (…) A key need, therefore, is for content to be standards based and interoperable in order to simplify its acquisition. A related and critical need is the effective ability to find learning materials across a vast array of electronic sources. We believe that Sakai is one of the answers… 48

What we plan to do… Reference Architecture: Working with a group of higher education leaders and partners, IBM intends to publish a reference architecture for the higher education industry and to create an integration stack (…) SW Stack and Offering: With the Sakai application as the core, IBM plans to build an end-to-end software stack(…) HW Stack and Offering: Building on the software stack, the next logical step is to build a combined software/hardware stack and provide clients with what we are calling a “Sakai-in-a-Box” offering that enables them to order a Sakai installed server that they simply plug in and configure to their specific institution’s needs. This will be a significant factor in enabling a fast adoption rate for Sakai. Hosting Stack and Offering: Examining the successful business models of commercially successfully Course Management Systems highlights the fact that being able to provide a web-accessible ‘hosted’ offering is a key factor in fast commercial adoption(…) Code Donations: IBM is well known for our significant contributions of source code to the open source community, and we are open to considering the donation of IBM owned assets to the Sakai community. 49

What we plan to do… 2 “Commercial” SW expertise: As one of the world’s largest software companies, IBM Software Group can offer the Sakai Project significant experience across the full spectrum of code development, packaging, testing and commercialization. Global Sales and Marketing Channel: IBM manages the single largest Education Industry channel in the world, combining the most experienced team of IBM Education Industry sales experts in the world with the most extensive Business Partner channel in the world. With the key to Sakai’s success being quick, broad commercial adoption, having an experienced, global channel will be a significant contributor. 50

But, interestingly… • Sun • Apple • Unisys Are also asking about joining the Sakai Commercial Affiliates, and proposing to do similar things with the Sakai Community Validation of Open Source Model… But, interesting problems here… 51

The Sakai Community • Main site: www. sakaiproject. org – outward looking • Bugs: bugs. sakaiproject. org – open, active • Sakai-wide collaboration area – collab. sakaiproject. org; sakai work sites, discussion lists, resources areas; working instance of Sakai – sakai-dev@sakaiproject. org – open mail list, active – sakai-user@sakaiproject. org – open mail list, active • Sakai Educational Partners (SEPP) – Separate mailing lists, discussion areas; for internal use – Dedicated staff – technical and admin support – Two conferences per year; regular VTCs, phone calls Plus, the growing resources from industry 52

Sakaipedia – Home Page Filling growing need for info, and to distribute effort of generating it. 53

Some Sakai Partner Projects 54

The Berkeley Grade Book University of California, Berkeley funded development of an on-line grade book. The UC Berkeley grade book is now in pilot on the Berkeley campus as a stand alone tool, and moving into pilot at IU. It is part of the 1. 5 release. 55

Grad Tools The University of Michigan’s Grad Tools provides doctoral students a way of tracking their degree progress from the point of choosing an advisor to degree conferral. Doctoral students create their own site, which contains an automatically personalized dissertation checklist based on data from their department and from the graduate school. Students control access to their Grad Tools site, and use collaboration features common to CTools, including file storage, group email, email notification, structured discussion, and more. 56

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Samigo – Testing and Assessment Part of 1. 5 release 58

Melete – Online Lesson Authoring Tool Foothill College’s Melete, an online lesson authoring environment, is the classroom component of ETUDES (Easy to Use Distance Education Software) that is being rewritten in Java for Sakai-based ETUDES-NG. Melete offers instructors the ability to author online learning modules. Melete features extra controls to assist online teachers/learners, such as the ability to set prerequisites and the pacing of material. The Hewlett Foundation funded deployment of Sakai for the District-based service provided to 48 California community colleges. Part of 2. 0 release 59

Foothill College – Work with Sakai Effort led by Vivian Sinou, Dean of Distance & Mediated Learning Foothill College • Tools Development • Skins Design • Adoption & Implementation • Pilots & Migration • Training Workshops • Performance Testing With support from The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation 60

ETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots to Production 300 faculty from 17 community colleges (highlighted in red on next slide) from the ETUDES Alliance have committed to a pilot of ETUDES-NG (Sakai 1. 5 + Samigo + Melete) in the spring and summer of 2005. Three colleges will go into production in the fall. More to follow in the spring. All colleges will migrate to Sakai by July 1, 2007. 61

ETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots College of the Siskiyous Members Outside CA • Stephen F. Austin State University, TX • Harcum College, PA Mendocino College Santa Rosa Junior College Lake Tahoe Community College Vista College Chabot College Laney College Skyline College of Alameda Foothill College Merritt College San Joaquin Delta College De Anza College West Valley College Porterville College Gavilan College Bakersfield College West Los Angeles College Taft College Los Angeles South West Antelope Valley College Cerro Coso Community College Los Angeles ITV El Camino College Crafton Hills College Los Angeles City College Glendale College San Bernardino Community College Los Angeles Harbor College Long Beach CC Los Angeles Pierce College Coastline Community College Los Angeles Mission College Imperial Valley College Los Angeles Trade Tech Mira Costa College Los Angeles Valley College East Los Angeles College * 300 faculty from 17 community colleges (highlighted in red) from the ETUDES Alliance have committed to a pilot of ETUDES-NG (Sakai 1. 5 + Samigo + Melete) in the spring and summer of 2005. Three colleges 62 will go into production in the fall. More to follow in the spring. All colleges will migrate to Sakai by July 1, 2007.

College Brand Skins at Portal Level 63

Skins at Course Site Level 64

Melete – Lesson Builder 65

Composing content online using a WYSIWYG Editor Linking to websites to supplement or support the content of a lesson This is MELETE Uploading all types of documents for lesson components/content 66

Accessibility metadata Will plug in to TILE from U Toronto. Ability to check for lack of compliance with Section 508 accessibility guidelines 67

Student View – Navigation & Licensing content Navigation is created automatically Authors can license their content 68

Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) OSPI is a community of individuals and organizations collaborating on the development of the leading open source electronic portfolio software. The Open Source Portfolio software is individual-centric enabling users to gather work products and other artifacts to be stored and shared with others but more importantly to be used for personal growth and development. The e. Portfolio toolset is being developed on the Sakai infrastructure providing a stand alone application as well as an integration of rich portfolio tools in the full suite of Sakai applications. Tracking Sakai releases – 1. 5 and 2. 0 69

The Twin Peaks Project Sun Microsystems, Inc. funded deployment of a citation/link authoring tool by Indiana University. The Twin Peaks project is an experiment in providing a search and one click selection of library electronic resources from within the Sakai authoring tool. The interim tool demonstrated at the December 2005 SEPP Conference provided searching of EBSCO Academic Preimer, ERIC, or the IU Libaries SFX enhanced online catalog's electronic holdings. 70

Search as part of WYSIWYG Editor 71

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Building Contrib Community • Receiving code fixes and folding them in • Receiving large tools and figuring out how to integrate them effectively – XWiki – Blog – Jabber IM – SCORM player – RDF-based concept mapper –… Growing area. Necessary to achieve goal of rapid innovation within mature system. 74

Reflecting on Our Efforts • Open Source Projects are crucial to supporting innovation in higher ed • We have some examples now of ‘for higher ed, by higher ed’ OS efforts • A literature is developing around the dynamics of open source communities • What can we learn from experience and add to our common stock of knowledge; we are learning institutions, after all Two quick things… 75

Mobilizing across communities University missions of teaching/learning, research, service • Sakai as online collaborative research tool • Sakai as learning environment • These communities often don’t know each other – Source of duplicative efforts, u. Portal, Jetspeed – Source of useful variation, innovation – Force standards to realize common benefits • Communities can be co-mobilized to create critical mass • Provide alternate, complementary, adoption paths • Software development cultures different. Is this what allows Sakai to think risky behavior natural sometimes? And helps advance the software faster? Maybe. 76

Sakai QA Initiative Distributing QA • Task is to establish a set of distributed methods for support of QA throughout the Sakai lifecycle. • Developing methods for a community source effort; eg, Empirix contribution • Others involved in this include people from Indiana University, University of Michigan, MIT, Cambridge (now over 25 people from almost that many schools). 77

QA Testbeds Emerging • Across the existing nightly build, stable and production environments – Used extensively in 1. 5 release • Larger Institutional Investments Coming – At Foothill College – At University of Michigan • Cluster separate from dev, dev-test and production • Will be available to larger community for load testing; this summer, fall Release engineering emerging as key community effort – quality, participation. 78

So, What is Sakai? • Sakai is a project – an initial grant for two years • Sakai is an extensible framework - provides basic capabilities to support a wide range of tools and services – teaching and research • Sakai is a set of tools - written and supported by various groups and individuals • Sakai is a product - a released bundle of the framework and a set of tools which have been tested and released as a unit • Sakai is a community – an emerging group of people and resources supporting the code and each other, realizing large scale Open Source efficiencies in HE 79

What is Sakai - 2 • Form of cyber infrastructure: see Dan Atkins, NSF report – focusing on online learning and research • Platform for advanced pedagogy: Pedagogy DG; by the few, for the many; open playing field, for propagation; Evaluation DG; instrumentation • Seeks increasingly to leverage web, niche learning tools: see John Seely Brown – Blogs, wikis, IM, chat rooms, fora, announce: contrib code • Gateway to OCW – as resource creator, IP filter • Mobilizing and coordinating HE community resources • Moving these tech to largest population – more than 2, 000 faculty, 35, 000 students at UM; becoming core infrastructure; small liberal arts schools, community colleges; K-12 interest (another ball game) 80

What Student Sees – Really, a Bunch of Stuff Publishing from Sakai To OCW Metadata in RDF Teaching Research Sakai Raw Course Content Publication Pipeline Digital Course Materials: (1) Exporting from CTools (2) Matching OCW Categories (3) Increasing Production Values (4) Standardizing (5) IP Management Vetted OCW Content What World Sees – Targeted Re-use UM OCW Web Site or other Institutional Repository MIT OCW creation process doesn’t really scale. How automated can we make this process? 81

Now, Assume Sakai It’s June 2006 • Sakai running at 100 institutions, with 2 million daily users who are each using Sakai 20 times per day…. – Making 10 million new “learning resources” per day – What do we do with these resources? How do we manage them? How do we find them? How do we reuse the resources? How do we recombine them to make new “objects”? – This is *not* Google - because these learning objects are all fine grain access controlled. 82

June 2006 • Sakai running at 100 institutions, with 2 million daily users who are each using Sakai 20 times per day…. – Making 10 million new “learning resources” per day – What do we do with these resources? How do we manage them? How do we find them? How do we reuse the resources? How do we recombine them to make new “objects”? – This is *not* Google - because these learning objects are all fine grained access controlled. . RDF - Resource Description Format is designed to describe Resources (Metadata) and describe relationships between Resources distributed across the Internet. (a. k. a. Semantic Web) 83

RDF Chicken or Egg? Sources of RDF Information Consumers of RDF Information Sakai/RDF Dspace/ Simile Fedora 2. x, 3. x Piggy. Bank RDF Protocols, Formats, Ontologies Infrastructure JENA, etc. . Haystack PIM Annotea Infrastructure JENA, etc. . Data and Metadata 84

RDF Infrastructure and Protocols • Protocols and formats are pretty well established • JENA is adequate for medium-scale work • Large-scale performance is active research effort • So, this is a ripe technology 85

RDF Consumers • Coming along - enough exist to be “interesting” – Piggy Bank - Bookmarks on Steroids – Annotea – generalized web annotation tools – Longhorn – browsing RDF Stores • Suffer from a lack of producers – Where’s the RDF data? 86

RDF Producers • Adding RDF to repositories will make existing “Curated Resources” available via RDF – DSPACE – institutional repositories – emerging spectrum of ‘repositories, ’ from library, through institutional, to individual – Fedora - ditto – Edu. Commons – u-learn enabling tools – creating niches – OCW – institutionally maintained resources • Adding RDF to Sakai would create a massive source of “Organic” Resources – Interesting information - class information, calendar entries, chat messages, e-Mail – Educational objects – of all kinds, simple to complex/with context – Fine-grain access control – part of Sakai architecture Serious, detailed, reusable metadata 87

Sakai/RDF Futures – 3 Steps • 1. Current Metadata - enhance schema metadata with simple editor and accessor. RDF access - RDF get. Data(); LOM, DC, NEES, … Convert properties inside to RDF; add RDF access-controlled renderer to provide RDF access from the outside. • 2. Separate RDF Service - RDF for annotation, work with RDF aware tools This would involve a new API, a tuple manager. Integrate Jena into Release and fully provision – works “out of the box” Tools (existing or new) that want to store RDF, can. Tools can be inside of Sakai as Sakai tools or work with RDF over web services. But old tools are still there working on old metadata (typically relational) representations. • 3. Integrated RDF content and metadata - shift core tools and services (chat, discussion, schedule, announcements, resources, mail archive…) from relational to RDF tuples - must retain performance - migrate old metadata as views into the new structure – solve RDF performance issues 88

Conclusion • We have a problem in the explosive growth of resources in the form of Sakai sites and courses • If we properly RDF-enable Sakai at the lowest levels, we could enable a whole new category of RDF applications • Sakai is a platform for moving new technologies (RDF) into wide use quickly 89

Part of Much larger Whole • Multiplying Open Source Efforts • integration, standards…innovation • Figuring out how to work together • Development, operations, maintenance, timing, evolution, building open source community in HE Chandler/Westwood PKI Dartmouth Twin Peaks Navigator 90

Community Source Projects “Community source describes a model for the purposeful coordinating of work in a community. It is based on many of the principles of open source development efforts, but community source efforts rely more explicitly on defined roles, responsibilities, and funded commitments by community members than some open source development models. ” “Community Investments for Community Outcomes” Thanks to Brad Wheeler 91

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Summer Conference 2005 Part of Community Source Week Conference Co-Chairs SEPP Partners – Yale and Cambridge Technical Description of 2. 03. 0 Dev & Contrib Processes Governance Discussion Underway Now Baltimore, MD, June 8 -10 93

Thanks 94

Installing and Deploying Sakai • Download Quick Start and follow instructions - 5 -10 minutes - this is a developer edition with an in-memory database (HSQLDB) • Install a real database (My. Sql, Oracle) and reconfigure Sakai to run in production 95

Demo Sites • Sakai - Collab. sakaiproject. org – running Sakai 1. 0 system; open • Sakaiproject. org – open info site; gateway to DGs and public forums • Ctools – can get login if you want to evaluate and see production system; very similar to collab. sakaiproject. org 96