This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Stellar's Tipping Point
You know what the killer feature was that led to Stellar being the course management system of choice at MIT? Automatically synching the membership page with the registrar's enrollment data. Once we did that Stellar had a steep increase in the number of class websites requested. We started off with a class list that instructors maintained on their own, adding whichever students they like, or letting the whole world in. But maintaining those lists was a source of more work, and they looked to Stellar to reduce their workload.
It's such a boring feature to be the big sell. But it is a core piece of functionality, and without that Stellar was like a car without seats. You had to bring your own seats with you.
The basic functionality we need to work on for our Sakai pilot is simply better class list management, starting with registrar feeds. Administration, especially course management, is a weak spot for Sakai. As it stands now, Sakai classes don't even have a visible class list. The sectioning efforts under way will help, and I hope to get better acquainted with the status of those efforts in the next few weeks.
Throttling Netflix
I'm a big Netflix user. Lisa and I don't have a TV, but we watch a TV show nearly every night thanks to our Netflix subscription. A while back I read about their strategy of "throttling" customers who rent a lot of movies. Apparently Netflix starts losing money if you rent more than 5 movies per month, so when you do that you start seeing slowdowns. It takes them an extra day to receive that movie. It takes them 24 hours to put a new movie in the mail when it used to take them 30 minutes.
Here's a great discussion from Stanford on the Netflix throttling strategy from Stanford.
Throttling is a big mistake for Netflix. I used to proselytize people left and right about the benefits of Netflix. I gave a few Netflix gift certificates as stocking stuffers one christmas. I would go on and on about how great it was. But now my relationship with Netflix is strictly business. I'll take my throttlings, but I'm not offering any hugs in return. Second I see I better deal, I'll be parting ways with Netflix.
Tags: Netflix
Vacation
I'm off for a vacation. We'll be somewhere in Vermont with no cell phone reception. I'm not going to bring my computer, which is a very radical step for me. I hope I find it refreshing and energizing after I get past the part with the tremors and vomiting.Tags: Vermont
Whisper and Wu-Wei mirror
I got this message from Elle.
Just wanted to drop a line and say thank you for the wu-wei download on your site! I've just mirrored copies of Whisper 0.1 and 0.2 on my site, so feel free to grab them as needed.
It's the sparky little micro-CMS that will not be extinguished.
Tags: TAGS
Chemistry template in Stellar
The Department of Chemistry has decided to put more of their classes in Stellar, partly because it makes it easier to move materials into OCW. Their Fall 05 classes, 5.111 - Principles of Chemical Science, for example, sport the new look.
Eileen Huang, the OCW faculty liaison put together the look. The best part is that she did by taking a current Stellar look and simply editing the CSS. She sent me the style sheet and a new header image, and later that day I showed her the new look. This experience more than anything else shows the benefits of moving over to a fairly simple CSS-based layout in Stellar.
New Stellar Listings
We released a new version of the Stellar Course management System over the weekend. This is a fairly small release, most of of our effort is devoted to Sakai work, but there are several nifty new features.
One is that the lists of class sites now display the access level for the site. This will save people trying to get into the classes a lot of effort, because they can seek out Public or MIT only courses even if they aren't on the class list. In the past people had to try to get in and see what happened.
All Stellar sites that have a OCW corollary will have a link to the OCW site on their homepage, as another way to open access (instructors can disable this link). See for example 11.423 Information and Communication Technologies in Community Development. Scroll down to the class description and you'll find a link to the OCW site.
Portals and learning applications
E-literate has a worthwhile post on portals and learning applications. I left a comment that I will cross-post here.
In a portal like My Yahoo the portlet is not the application, it is a little feed that leads you into the application. Click a stock quote and you leave My Yahoo and got to Yahoo Finance. Yahoo Mail has a portlet but it's just a window that tells you how many unread message you have, if you want to send a message, you click a link in the portlet leave My Yahoo and move to Yahoo mail.
So wouldn't it make sense to develop applications so that they operate independently of the portal, but can send a small preview of their contents over to a portal? Sakai tries to be the portal, and assumes that EVERYTHING happens in that portal, you never leave.
This seems like a mistake, perhaps the best way to integrate UPortal is not to build into Sakai, but export views of Sakai to UPortal via JSR-168. Sakai doesn't need to be a consumer of JSR-168 (I believe that's the current plan) rather it can just export little windows into it's functionality to a larger university portal, that might also include portlets from the school teams, dining services, whatever. That way Sakai tools (quiz and gradebook, say) can share a class website together, and be happily talking to each other, while also each sending a preview to the school portal.
Indiana's Sakai Transition
Indiana has an interesting method of moving people over to Sakai. Their installation of Sakai is called OnCourse CL. New classes will default to the new system, but instructors can opt-out and use the original (non-Sakai) OnCourse. Here's their help page: Which Oncourse for Your Course?
It includes a link to a survey instructors can take to see if they should use the Original OnCourse or the Sakai OnCourse. I took it and it said I should stick with the original. Ouch! This survey seems like it would be generally useful to anyone deciding whether to use Sakai. It's well worth checking out.
IU has the most professional well run support and documentation teams I've run into - I guess they need to be pretty efficient to handle 90,000 users.
Linkwalla 0.4
The Linkwalla 0.4 release contains some usability upgrades.
The del.icio.us tags input is only visible when the checkbox has been selected (via javascript)
When using the javascript bookmarklet, the user is returned to the page being bookmarked after the link is added.
The user for these usablity upgrades was me, maintaining the Link Feed affiliated with this site. It's great being so close to your user base.
Tags: linkwalla del.icio.us
Photoshop Action
I don't use Photoshop as much as I used to when i did more graphic design work, but I still use it often as a utility for resizing, saving for the web, etc images for wireframes and and the like. I had sometimes thought that I could probably get a much simpler program, maybe even Preview, to get the job done.
Today I had to process a bunch of wireframes and put them up in Sakai's SVN repository. So I exported from OmniGraffle, opened the set up in PhotoShop and began resizing and cropping. Just as i started the first one, I thought to open the actions palette and record my process. I resized, cropped, saved for the web and closed the document. Then I repeated the action for the rest of the files. Wow that was easy. I'm not going to stop using Photoshop.
Tags: Photoshop
Peeved by sloppy HTML
You know what peeves me? When people don't put <label> tags around their checkbox labels. Because I like clicking label. I don't want to have to aim for that little teeny checkbox.
Here's what I mean.
See? You can click the label on the first one and checks the box. It also makes it much easier for people using screen readers, or those who are just a little ham-handed, to fill out a form.
Admittedly I only started using label tags consistently in the last 12 months or so, as a result of doing accessibility testing on the Sakai style guide with the MIT ATIC lab. But now that I know to click on the label I do it all the time, both on the web and on the dialog boxes for my computer applications.
So all you HTML jockeys out there, using the label tag is easy and you're just not going to look slick with out it.
Tags: HTML accessibility
linkwalla + del.icio.us
I just packaged up Linkwalla 0.3 - adding the major new feature that when adding a link, you can send a copy along to del.icio.us. It was my first time using web services, but I feel I'm touching the edge of Web 2.0. I can't wait to try something like this with the Sakai/Stellar API. I just hope it uses REST.
Tags: linkwalla del.icio.us rest api
Permission Denied in Stellar
We've added a new access denied page to Stellar for people who are successfully logged in, but aren't on the access list for the class. If they failed to log in at all, they get the old page which has tips about logging in and using certificates.
Example: Barbara teaches 5.356 with Joe and Maria on the membership list.
- Dorothy is an MIT student and has logged into Stellar but when she tries to get into 5.356 she gets the permission denied page, which gives her the option to email Barbara to request access.
- Douglas is is from Miami University and has no Stellar account. He tries to access 5.356 and gets the old permission denied page that explains about certificates and such.
- Joe's certificate is in great shape, he can log in no problem.
- Maria has an old certificate that's no good. She fails to log in and gets the same permission denied/certificate info page that Douglas saw.
The main goal for the new page is to make sure that Dorothy doesn't have to call the help desk, explain that her certificate is fine, have them check and see if she's on the membership list, and be told that should contact the instructor. Instead she can contact the instructor immediately.
The new page is live now - and it's been used to request access from instructors 5 or 6 times already.
Here's a sampling of messages I've seen going to instructors.
I was wondering if I could obtain access to the Stellar site for the class called Fields, Forces and Flows in Biological Systems. I am a Master's Student in Electrical Engineering and I am very interested in this class. I would like to see if it matches my expectations and if I should take it in the Fall. Thank you!
I pre-registered for this class for Fall of 2005 and would like to get a head start by looking at the materials available. I think it will provide a good opportunity to see what the class is about and help me make an informed decision about my classes.
I would like to request access just to understand what computational and system biology course is about. Hope that you would allow me to view this website for about a week. Thank you.
What this says to me is that not only are we saving the help desk from getting calls, but we're making it easier for students in interact with instructors, and take action further their own learning.
Mighty Mouse
I'm just not that excited about Apple's new mouse. For years Apple has insisted on a one button mouse. Now they have a multi-button mouse, but the insist on having it look like a one button mouse. I'd take my Kensington Studio Mouse over that Mighty Mouse any day.
Tags: Apple Kensington mouse
Moving to Cambridge
My family is moving in to Cambridge. One of the big draws is living close to MIT, so I can walk to work. I'm going to save about 40 minutes of commuting time each way, giving me 6 1/2 hours a week to do something more enjoyable than negotiating the MBTA. Time is so valuable - it's going to be amazing.
One confusing this about having lot's of calls in to mortgage brokers and such is that all that spam I get about interest rates and "your application has been approved" seems possibly relevant. Of course when I see the messages are sent to by 'people' with names like "Amateur U. Walleyed" (that's a real one, I just got it) I'm pretty sure it's not really about my financing.