By Anthony Whyte on
Tue, 20 May 2008 01:26:36 GMT
There's a thread on the Sakai pedagogy list called "Content Authoring" that's morphed into a discussion regarding Sakai's relative openness as an open-source project. During the exchange there was a mention of Ohloh by Chuck Severance which drew a response from one participant in the discussion asking to see richer Ohloh profiles of Sakai core/contrib committers.
Since we started enlisting Sakai projects on Ohloh, 71 core and 87 contrib contributors have been tracked (the latter group also contribute heavily to Sakai core projects). Only a fraction of the profiles listed include any information beyond the basic developer X as represented by a portion of their email address has made Y commits since Month Z.
Creating an account permits developers to provide additional inform ...
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By Anthony Whyte on
Fri, 09 May 2008 05:22:28 GMT
Gert Sibande College (GS), located in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa has joined the Sakai Foundation as a member institution following deployment of Sakai as GS’s enterprise collaboration and learning platform. This is exciting news as Gert Sibande is both the first Sakai adoption and foundation member among Further Education and Training colleges (FET)—academic institutions that provide vocational and occupational training vital to South Africa's economic development.
Gert Sibande has campuses located in Ermelo, Evander, Mpuluzi and Standerton. GS's Sakai installation is intended to serve all four locations, although bandwidth and connectivity issues—a general South African challenge at present—prevent full access to the system. Nevertheless, the provisioning of course sites with content is now underway, faculty workshops ...
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By Anthony Whyte on
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:20:58 GMT
The University of Cape Town's Sakai Vula gateway features a collection of graphic art produced to both promote Vula and engage students, faculty and staff in the process of online learning. There are ten images in the collection, one of which is loaded randomly whenever the gateway page is requested.
 "V is for Vula" in red, black and yellow is particularly striking; David Horwitz tells me the design is inspired by an old United Democratic Front (UDF) anti-apartheid poster.
Another image I find quite creative spells out "Vula" (meaning "open ...
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By Anthony Whyte on
Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:46:44 GMT
North-West University (South Africa) and Psybergate are engaged in an interesting project to develop "offline" capabilities for Sakai. Codenamed "Solo", the application will be contributed to the Sakai Community upon its release.
The idea behind Solo is to create a "disconnected" version of Sakai that would permit students to better control their internet usage in bandwidth-challenged environments like South Africa. NWU's initial thinking involves distributing a Solo client application and set of course materials to their students on a CD/DVD. The client would permit students to sync with their Sakai course sites when new or updated course materials become available. The offline cl ...
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By Anthony Whyte on
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:29:45 GMT
While in South Africa Adelle Lotter of North-West University (NWU) asked me to give a talk on the Sakai Community at NWU’s Mafikeng campus. I readily agreed. Mafikeng is one of three NWU campuses (Mafikeng, Vaal Triangle and Potchestroom) with a student body composed of 6576 undergraduate and postgraduates, the majority of whom are native Setswana speakers. My talk was part of a larger event promoting Mafikeng’s adoption of eFundi, NWU’s enterprise Sakai implementation, the campus’s first online LMS offering.
I was the first speaker and while prepping the hardware before the opening remarks, the moderator glanced at my opening slide and enquired, “What is Sakai?” I quickly learned that neither she nor the audience was at all familiar with Sakai, the worldwide Sakai Community or that other South African institutions such as the Unive ...
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By Anthony Whyte on
Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:11:39 GMT
I wrote a bash script to reduce the tag clutter that is building up in our SVN repository due to the numerous QA tags that we have generated since Sakai 2.4.0. For a given tag, the script checks out the relevant .externals file, parses it for project module names and then iterates through the resulting list, issuing a succession of svn delete statements before exiting the loop and deleting the parent tag folder in /sakai/tags.
I should note that the tags are simply removed from the HEAD revision. They are not actually deleted. The result is a set of "clean" tag directories containing fewer obsolete tags—all good for new developers having a look around the repo and perhaps for veterans as well.
I identified 35 obsolete QA tags and beg ...
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