The Living Schoolbook -

LSB servers shutdown

Sean Keesler — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:59:25 -0500

The LSB virtual machine has successfully been moved to the School of Education Tech Center.

Virtual LSB/Dialogue/iBuz(pd)

Sean Keesler — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 02:59:27 -0500

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to consolidate our projects and applications in preparation for the eventual closure of the LSB. The best way I have been able to come up with to ensure that the projects can be maintained by the School of Education Technology Center for a while is via a virtual machine.

As of last week, the LSB web sites, iBuz, iBuzPD, Dialogue Project, The Higher Ed Support Center for Systemschange and any other site we have been hosting were migrated to a VMWare virtual machine. This virtual machine isn't going to be allocated a lot of physical resources (RAM and storage space) and should be considered an archive.

While it might seem somewhat tempting to continue to use iBuz, iBuzpd and Dialogue, everyone should realize that there will be NO backup of the data in these applications and if there are any issues with the virtual machine, I will be advising the Technology Center to simply reset the entire machine back to the state I handed it to them (erasing any new data added since).

Some schools have expressed an interest in hosting these applications in house. I believe that running an instance of a virtual machine might be the best way to do that. If you are interested in discussing this, let me know.

Goal Aware Tools

Sean Keesler — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 16:11:41 -0400

Course Management Systems often enable central administration of classes from a technical perspective. However, faculty and students tend to remain isolated from the program in which the class takes place. IT systems seem to perpetuate the traditional “closed door” classroom.

There is increasing demand for a “goal oriented” view of student progress toward institutional, program and personal outcomes for the purposes of curriculum mapping, program level assessment and student advising. While portfolio software has been frequently deployed to gather data for student assessment it often fails to address the bulk of student activity in their coursework.

The Living SchoolBook is involved in an effort to design and develop a suite of courseware and portfolio tools built on top of the Sakai framework that will address this gap and play a significant role in the School of Education's Assessment System. Syracuse University’s School of Education plans to deploy a suite of “Goal Aware Tools" to meet accreditation requirements. We presented this idea during the Sakai/OSP conference in Austin in December 2005 (here is an annotated version of that presentation), again in Vancouver in June 2006, Atlanta in Dec 2006 and Amsterdam in June 2007.

Tools thus far [demo]

On February 22, 2006 the alpha testing kickoff was held. The attached document was distributed to introduce:

the process for using these tools
the testing procedures
the timeline for testing
definitions of key phrases

Alpha testing was a success. A few small issues were handled and we now have a beta test in progress for the remainder of the Spring '06 semester. We have also made available another instance of Sakai and a few flash animations that illustrate the planned use of these tools.