SyrCLE intro - Message Center and rWiki
This fall we are planning to upgrade our instance of the Open Source Portfolio (v2.0) to Sakai/OSP 2.2.
Our existing system, the Dialogue Project, has been running for almost as long as I have been here. The Dialogue Project was meant to be a platform for connstructivist teaching strategies and it heavily relied on graded conversations as the primary means of assessment. Faculty use has been changing during the past five years with more faculty electing to use "One to one" conversations in place of "Small group" conversations. Whether this is in response to accreditation demands, time contraints, training or the relative effectiveness of small groups as a teaching strategy has not been determined.
Regardless, many changes were necessary to bring the system in line with current needs. We elected to use Sakai as the platform for our new Collaborative Learning Environment. The new system, as deployed, will be portfolio-centric and will:
- Provide a set of tools for student portfolio building
- Enhance traditional courseware tools with outcome data collection features in order to support institutional portfolio and program analysis.
We'll need to do some work to communicate the value of the new system over the incumbent system. Whether or not faculty like it, many have gotten used to it and of course are not eager to switch. At the least, they are not eager to be the first to switch. Let someone else cut their teeth on it!
Today I made a couple of screencasts of tools that we want to demonstrate to faculty:
- Message Center (thank you very much IUPUI)is a very nice replacement for the default discussion tool in Sakai. While it isn't a drop in replacement for Dialogue's conversation features, it should assuage the concerns of folks who saw the default discussion tool. I can't overstate the importance of this tool for the School of Education's main tech users.
- rWiki (CARET, University of Cambridge) strikes me as something that would be a very powerful and flexible freeform portfolio building tool. Those institutions who think that portfolio tools are too constraining and too focused on learning outcomes should probably love this as an alternative.
Here are the screencasts I created for our faculty: