e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Stuart Lee

  • Announcing the Apereo Foundation Advisory Council

    Long-time readers know that I have had a close affiliation with the Sakai Foundation at teams and served on the Board of Directors relatively recently. This year, Sakai merged with the Jasig Foundation to form the Apereo Foundation. The purpose of the new organization is to become a sort of Apache Foundation of higher education in the sense that it is an umbrella community where members of different open source projects can share best practices and find fellow travelers for higher ed-relevant open source software projects. In this merger, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, last week the foundation just announced that the board of the Opencast project, which supports the Matterhorn lecture capture and video management project, voted to effectively merge with the Apereo Foundation. (The decision is subject to discussion and feedback by the Opencast community.) On the one hand, Opencast probably wouldn’t have joined the Sakai Foundation because they want to interoperate with all LMSs and wouldn’t want to be perceived as favoring one over another. On the other hand, had they joined Jasig prior to the merger, they would not have had access to the rich community of education-focused technologists that Sakai has to offer. (Jasig has historically focused mostly on tech-oriented solutions like portals and identity management solutions). The fact that the Opencast community is interested in joining Apereo is a strong indicator that the new foundation is achieving its goal of establishing an ecumenical brand.

    And in that context, I am pleased to tell you that I will be involved with the foundation in a more ecumenical role. Specifically, I will be facilitating an advisory council.

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  • Permissions and Openness

    I’ve been reading Opening Up Education. So far, I’m impressed. It’s hard to get all the articles in a collection like this to be consistent, coherent, and equally interesting, but the editors seem to have managed to do just that. 

    I want to comment today on the piece about Bodington by Stuart Lee. Long-time readers know that I have been a fan of this system. In the first part of a multi-part review of the system, I wrote:

    I have long complained that LMS permissions systems are usually too rigid and narrowly defined. Bodington’s permissions are more flexible than just about any other LMS I’ve ever seen. (It’s possible that dotLRN’s OpenACS-based permisions are as flexible, but if so, then they are hidden deep under the hood–typically out of the reach of most faculty members.) In most systems, you have a few pre-defined roles–teacher, student, administrator, TA, etc. These roles generally have pre-defined permissions. You can create groups that are essentially nested containers, e.g., a student group will always be a strict subset of the class that contains it. Likewise, these groups are often (though not always) mutually exclusive, i.e., a student can’t be a member of both Group A and Group B at the same time.

    Bodington works completely differently. Every object–a content bit, a discussion forum, etc.–can have an arbitrary number of groups attached to it, each group can have an arbitrary number of overlapping members, and each group can also have arbitrary fine-grained permissions for the object.

    At the time, I caught some flack for focusing on what some viewed as trivial aspects of the system. But Stuart’s essay, along with some recent comments to the Sakai discussion boards about the version 3 vision document, show that this stuff really matters.

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