LSB History - Part 5
The following is a segment of a larger story that I wrote to attempt to summarize the history of the Living SchoolBook, a research group in the School of Education at Syracuse University. In this entry I begin to talk a bit about our involvement in the Sakai network and our contribution to that group. If you haven't read any of the previous articles about the history of the LSB, you may want to look at the previous entries related to this topic.
New CIO
In the winter of 2004 Syracuse University appointed a new CIO. He had just come from the University of Rhode Island where he was involved with the Open Source Portfolio Initiative, a multiple university effort to build open source portfolio software on Sakai (an open source framework). A brief introduction made it clear that the CIO’s interest in open source technology and portfolio software was very much in alignment with the LSB’s goals and beliefs. A proposal was written to the LSB PI’s to further investigate the OSP software as a new approach to solving our development issues. Whiile the LSB’s initial evaluation of the OSP software led us to believe that it would be an adequate platform to develop our own system, a great deal of the decision to abandon our own development in favor of the new system was fueled by a desire for the School of Education’s work in education systems relevant in a larger arena as well as the potential to work in cooperation with the central IT group.
An unanticipated benefit from the decision came when other IT groups on campus were drawn into the project. The LSB was no longer responsible for maintenance and setup of the servers, network and storage systems that were going to be important for a successful implementation. Eventually two new servers were purchased by ITS and connected to the university SAN and placed on the monitoring system to ensure system uptime and reliability. This allowed the LSB to focus efforts on GAP analysis and beta tests of the new software.Not only were hardware and personnel made available for the project. The CIO made a financial commitment to the Sakai Educational Partners Program.
Learning Sakai-OSP & Gap Anaylsis
In order to quickly get up to speed as to the capabilities of the yet unfamiliar software, the LSB began participating in the scripted testing effort for OSP 2.0 in the spring of 2005 during which several bugs were reported to OSP developers. A beta test was performed with a small Maymester class in 2005, which evaluated the OSP and Sakai courseware tools. The open communication between experienced OSP developers and users at organizations such as rSmart, Indiana, DePaul and Portland State Universities. The value of the community discussion could not be overstated as in a crucial step in shaping our next steps. It became clear that the culture and beliefs already developed at the LSB would be a good fit for this larger open source community.
During testing and experimentation of the toolsets, the LSB began to recognize that many of the tools in the OSP software mapped well to ideas expressed in our own previous requirements discussions. Most of the courseware tools that were present in the Sakai toolset looked much like those in commercial courseware packages. It was clear that they were not developed with the same constructivist pedagogy that the LSB developed Dialogue for. However, we also noticed that our own faculty were using less and less of the group conversation features of Dialogue and instead used the system as an assignment service. Instead, the faculty were asking students to do more reflection in PowerPoint based portfolios that were beginning to be used as summative assessments at the end of each semester.
A key component that was missing from the Sakai/OSP solution was a toolset for faculty to use that would allow them to identify which School of Education Proficiencies were addressed by each assignment and subsequently rate student performance for each identified proficiency. This tool set would allow be useful as a means for evaluation of student learning in relation to goals, accomplishing curriculum mapping activities, evaluating program effectiveness. In addition, the tools would provide a means for embedding the new program goals into the daily business of faculty. The new “goal aware” system may even be an ideal platform for performing research on the effectiveness of portfolio building as a teaching and learning strategy.
The conceptual separation of the “Institutional Portfolio” and the “Student Reflective Portfolio” could be accomplished by performing activies that were to be examined for program evaluation purposes using the “goal aware” courseware tools derived from the Sakai toolset. As students prepared their personal portfolio in order to illustrate their ability to explain their practice, they would be able to self select any evidence that they saw as relevant to the proficiencies using the OSP toolset. A list of completed coursework that had been identified by faculty as designed to teach the proficiencies would serve as an input to the self selection process.
The “goal aware” concept was presented to the Sakai and OSP communities at the Baltimore and Austin conferences where it received some attention from rSmart president Chris Coppola who encouraged the LSB to develop it further.