Sean Keesler's blog

Nov 23 08:48

Types of metadata tags for learning activities

By: Sean Keesler Tags:
As I mentioned in previous posts, our initial use case for the "Goal Management" tool was to be able to create reusable, institution-wide metadata tags for learning objectives that faculty could use to describe the work they were assigning students in locally meaningful terms.  The school had developed its own ontology from its shared meaning of what they thought a Syracuse School of Education grad should be learning.  Broadly, this ontology of learning objectives stats that our grads should learn:
  1. Critical reflection and explanation of practice
  2. Content Knowledge
  3. Inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy
  4. Assessment of Student Learning
  5. Professional conduct and collaboration
Probably every School of Education would come up with a similar list.  However, our list took at least a year to develop.  It was as long as 22 objectives, shrunk to 7 and now is 5 broad proficiencies each with 4 or 5  sub-proficiencies.  The list has changed and as the faculty and ideas change the list will change as well.  Its a living document that will change as faculty reflect on their practice, what is and isn't working, the curriculum and trends in education.  Any system meant to support this has to be able to change as well.  I can imagine a yearly deprecation of old sets of goals and publication of the new, slightly revised plan for the new year.  Looking back over time, an analyst could not only see the change in student performance but also see how the institution has evolved and changed.
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Nov 16 14:56

Caddywampus communication in Sakai

By: Sean Keesler Tags:
There was an OSP 2.4 planning session in Phoenix this week.  Representatives from the University of Michigan, IUPUI (by phone), Virginia Tech, the University of Amsterdam, Portland State University, IBM, rSmart, ASU and Syracuse University attended the meeting where we spent two days looking at what would be in the scope of the OSP 2.4 release, due out in May 2007.

While Syracuse has meager resources to contribute to OSP’s next release, we will be doing some documentation and some XML development to create example forms and templates to ship with the software.  I was pleased to see the value that many schools are finding in the Goal Aware Tools and that there was sufficient interest in them to get that tool set integrated into OSP.  We have been happy to let them sit in the contrib area of confluence and subversion up until now, but as this round of grants wind down, it is a great to find a place for that to land.  What a great way to disseminate! 
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Nov 10 01:15

Who is the community again?

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

I called into a conference call to get into the details of next week's OSP 2.4 requirements group meeting in Phoenix, AZ.  The big players in OSP are going to be there...and us.  We had just completed voting on what we thought were the big issues that really needed to be addressed in the next release.  Goal Aware wasn't last, so that made my day...

The results of that vote live over here, in the Sakai wiki. 

The point  I was trying to make was that I had a hard time with that vote.  I've spent the past year up to my nose in OSP and Sakai trying to make it work for us.  As a result, I have learned a lot.  While watching the Sakai-user and Sakai-dev lists I see a lot of people struggling to get their head around OSP.  Its just not obvious how to use the tools.  When you learn that you need a small army of developers to run the thing, it is so easy to get discouraged.  

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Oct 12 09:49

Defensive patents for open source?

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

At Syracuse University we are using the Sakai platform as a means to jump start an idea.  As a research group within the School of Education, we are focused on developing innovative approaches to engaging teachers and learners.  The particular effort we have been involved in over the last three years has required us to analyze the gap between the courseware and portfolio-ware toolsets and how we might better reconcile those differences.  We needed a platform on which to develop new tools that bridged that gap.  It should be no surprise that OSP/Sakai provided us with that opportunity.

Not only was it a compelling research question, but one solution to the problem, which flies under the flag of the "Goal Management"/"Goal Aware tools" flag in Sakai's contrib area, seemed to have broad application as K12 schools struggle to gather data to demonstrate that they are meeting NCLB and higher education accrediting bodies are beginning to focus on outcomes-based assessments of institutions as part of their accreditation process.  One of the truly amazing benefits of engaging the Sakai community was that it gave our small group people to talk and wrestle with as we developed the idea.  We believe this is a community idea.

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Sep 28 06:08

Goal Management API = Metadata tagging API

By: Sean Keesler Tags:
Goals, Items, Activities and Ratings - 0.7 release plan
Of course a "Goal Aware" Tool can tag an assignment with learning outcomes.
Tags, Items, Activities and Ratings - let's get generic
If I start to think about the tool in a more generic sense, I can see how we will be able to apply many different types of metadata to activities.

Lately I have been thinking about some different uses for the "Goal Aware" tools  idea which has led me to the conclusion that the tool is named wrong.  It should be characterized as a "Activity Metadata Tag" tool.  Branding is funny though.  Names suggest use and I was afraid that "Metadata tool" would elicit blank stares from my main audience of higher education faculty. 

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Sep 13 22:25

I don't like heirarchies

By: Sean Keesler Tags:
At Syracuse we are doing something a little crazy with Sakai.  At least I think so.

A look at most of the courseware packages that I have had exposure to has made it plain that that tools deployed in courseware  are typically configured with roles for the teacher and students.  The scope of the activity is usually limited to those in the “course” or “worksite”.  The dean or program chair usually isn’t included in these closed door communities and thus is not privy to what is going on in there. That has made a lot of sense in the past because teachers like to close their doors and do their own thing.  Courseware imitates life.
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Sep 06 11:13

Requirement for Goal Management Tools 0.7 release

By: Sean Keesler Tags:
No Ratable Junctions
The 0.6 release of the Goal Management tools allowed a user to link an activity to one or more goals. This provided the opportunity/necessity to rate each student's performance for each link.
0.7 Release with
A requirement for the 0.7 release will be to allow a user to allow multiple links to goals to share one rating. In this example, the same rating would apply to both the SOE Proficiencies' "Content Knowledge" goal and the Mathematical Education Specialty Association's "Knowledge of Mathematical Problem Solving".
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Sep 06 09:40

Goal Aware Data Point Tool and System Adoption

By: Sean Keesler Tags:
Last I had heard, our enterprise courseware system on campus (not Sakai) was used in about 30% of the classes.  It is a very big job to get faculty to learn enough about courseware to jump onboard.  It isn't required that faculty use any courseware at all at Syracuse University.  It is a centralized service provided to faculty that find value in it.

The Goal Aware tools built on the Sakai platform are intended to be a better means to collect student performance data from faculty to support ongoing program assessment. The college’s current assessment system relies heavily on many hours of paper shuffling, emails, spreadsheet manipulation and centralized, manual data entry to gather each semester's data from each class.  Use of the Goal Aware tools would allow the workload to be distributed among the faculty, reduce chances for error during data entry and save time.  This would be true, however, only if the tools were widely adopted.  30% would not do.  Success will only come at a much higher adoption rate.
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Sep 01 07:01

SyrCLE is ready for the first day of classes in the School of Education

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

SyrCLE - the Syracuse Collaborative Leaning Environment is the School of Education's implementation of Sakai and the Open Source Portfolio toolset.  It is ready for use by faculty, program coordinator's and students.  Faculty interested in using these new tools should contact the Living SchoolBook by email (help@lsb.syr.edu) or by phone (443-3450) to establish an account and receive training.

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Aug 26 11:01

Blackboard Patent: "I'm not touching you"

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

For the past year or so, the LSB has been developing a set of tools that allow students and faculty to describe learning outcomes and link them to classroom activities.  We believe that this is an important step that would complete a collaborative learning environment that is a blend of traditional courseware tools and portfolio tools.  As far as I know the idea (although simple in premise) has not yet been developed on other platforms.  We have released the code with the Sakai Foundation educational community license.  We think that this is an important idea that many institutions would be interested in using and further developing and we would welcome their participation.

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