Promptu

Is there a perfect storm brewing for the Sakai Project’s goals of improving the user experience? I am very impressed with the confluence of ideas and action in the Sakai UX improvement initiative, the Fluid project, and CARET’s Sakai Web 2.0 project. These initiatives show the community prioritizing the user experience need and coming at a shared problem from many angles, each contributing pieces of the design activities, technology, and community building. After spending the morning perusing the sites and catching up on the happenings that I am more optimistic regarding Sakai’s ability to reach user delight than ever before.

In addition to bringing good ideas and changes to the Sakai product, I am liking where it is heading in the communication department. Nathan Pearson, the UX lead for the UX improvement initiative has used Flash demos with voice over to share his design ideas with the community. Working rapidly and iteratively, he has taken the approach of share earlier rather than later, iterate and improve. He has had a lot of good research and documentation to launch from, but he also uses his design expertise and general design best practices to move forward with some best guesses which can then be tested. This can feel risky to many designers, but if the promise of being able to iteratively improve is real, then it is well worth it in terms of getting buy in and concrete visuals. In the open source and community source projects, this may be the best way to be successful with design and usability.

If you haven’t seen his presentations, check them out:

Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6

Nathan’s approach and Cambridge’s approach with the Sakai Web 2.0 project represent a value that is hard to come by in higher education, partly because of tight budgets which means all work must be efficient and produce a product for our end users, partly because of the reluctance of our universities to invest in R&D within its administrative units (even when supporting the academic endeavors of the campus), and partly because of our tendency to invest in a narrow range of skills (the ones that we think will shorten the time to delivery — such as programmers — and limit overhead costs — such as project managers). That said, even a range of skills doesn’t guarantee good product. I think perhaps a value of risk taking, exploration, and getting stuff in front of users for feedback will be terribly important.

Jutta Treviranus and I will be leading a discussion on some of these ideas and challenges regarding building the right organization and culture at the 9th Sakai Conference:

Mara Hancock and Jutta Treviranus will lead a discussion that explores the culture, values, and structures within our departments and institutions that enable a User Experience (UX) approach to flourish and bring transformational change to our services and open source systems.

Using the Fluid/Sakai partnership as an example they will look at the range of roles, skills, and methods that precipitate and enhance the inclusion and embracing of UX in the development process. They will lead the group in the investigation of ways in which the Sakai foundation and contributing institutions can enhance and extend their staffing models and capabilities to create a creative, flourishing, and inclusive development environment.

Hope you can make it and help us explore these issues. Meanwhile, thanks to Nathan Pearson, the CARET team at Cambridge and their friends working on the Sakai Web 2.0 project for adding some additional wind to the perfect storm.

Thanks to WIlliam and Flora Hewlett and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations for joining together to support the Open Cast project (new site will be coming out soon) planning grant. This funding will support the project in conducting three requirements and best practices workshops to explore the requirements and readiness for a new community source effort around the shared development and design of an open source podcast capture and delivery system for higher ed. Outcomes will be documentation of the resulting requirements and best practices, the development of a collaborative community (already well underway with over 200 individual participants), and a well defined proposal for next steps.

Why is this important?

UC Berkeley has been delivering open webcast content (audio and video) since the mid-90’s. As we have increasingly automated the process, brought down the cost to sustain the system, disseminated the content to popular platforms such as YouTube and iTunes (go to where the viewers/learners/users are), and increased our installations, we have found that this program makes a difference in both lives and professions.

First, professions.

In Spring 2006, UC Berkeley launched a free podcasting service, which leveraged Berkeley’s existing video webcast infrastructure in general assignment classrooms and our central scheduling and capture system. In doing so, humanities curriculum was exposed to an eager public. These humanities podcasts have had a tremendous impact on the public and far exceed the popularity of the sciences – becoming some of the most popular podcasts on iTunes, wedged between notable media outlets like CNN and National Geographic. Popular courses include “Man, God, and Society in Western Literature,” taught by Philosophy Professor Herbert Dreyfus and Professor Michael Nagler’s “Non-Violence Today”

Webcast video and audio helps to spotlight humanities curriculum and faculty at a time when the humanities are struggling to receive funds and recognition. The American Historical Society, for example, highlights the Berkeley History curriculum on its website . One young Berkeley history lecturer used the webcasting of her course to promote her teaching and scholarship, eventually earning an assistant professorship at the University of Virginia. Without a scalable and affordable system and set of best practices, the sharing of this content and exposure for the Berkeley History Department would not be possible.

Now, lives.

ETS and our webcasting faculty get amazing letters from learners around the world. These webcasts are engaging, entertaining, educating millions of people. There is not a continent that has gone untouched. Here are a couple of examples:

“…As far as I’ve been watching it’s been great, though I’ve only been watching Physics 10 with Professor Richard A. Muller because he’s really such an interesting teacher. I’m interested, I’m laughing and I’m learning…”

“Is there a course on art history? If so I beg on bended knee for that to be uploaded!
Thank you a million times for allowing us to watch your lectures here!
The person who had this idea should be knighted or maybe a petition for sainthood!
The free flow of information is an essential part of the evolution of any society!
Thank you again!!!”

No kidding. Comments like this come in like candy, reminding us why we come to work every day at such an incredible public institution like UC Berkeley.

Interestingly, the UC Berkeley students seem to get it too. They are absolutely in love with webcast because it helps them learn better. In recent focus groups with ETS they have talked about using it to review the lecture and to listen to other teachers from other semesters on the same subjects. They will review the lecture notes at night and then listen to the podcast on the way to school in the morning. Several students have mentioned that while they would love to have these embedded in their course sites, they also don’t want to deprive the public of them. One student mentioned how the MIT OCW helped her augment her studies as a high school student in India and credited her acceptance to Berkeley because of that.

Wouldn’t it be great if more schools could/would do this too?

We hope that Open Cast will make it easier for them to join in.

I sat next to an elderly lady on BART. I was on my way to the Airport, and she was on her way to visit her cousin in Pacifica. We both had suitcases and she was concerned that she might not be on the right train.

I don’t normally talk to people on public transportation. It’s not because I am unfriendly, perhaps because I am shy, but probably it’s because I just don’t happen to be a very good conversationalist. However, I talked with this woman, and didn’t ask her name. She looked like a Marilyn, though, so I will just call her that.

Marilyn lives in Sacramento and took Amtrak down. I commented on my train ride last labor day up to Davis and bike ride from there to the Capay Valley. I asked, “Do you know the Capay Valley? Guinda?” Her eyes brightened with happiness and a shot of pride, “Oh yes, I used to live there!” Why does a world so large for a short moment get small enough so as to actually feel like home? We spent some time talking about the almond (a-mond) trees in bloom, the politics of and problems with new housing butting against old farms, farm land preservation, the traffic on 80 in Farfield… She then mentioned growing up in a small town outside of Vermont and helping her Vermont-based uncle and Aunt (around Bennington) with their maple syrup harvest in the winter. When I mentioned that my sister lived in Vermont, she was so pleased. As she talked her hands motioned this way and that, describing the flow of the sap as it went through the sugar shack to be reduced to syrup. Her nails, long and pink with flowers painted on the middle finger of each hand, did not belie the work of her youth. When I asked about whether she climbed through the mountains around her home when she was young (she is from North Adams), she said, “Well! I had hiking plenty just getting to school… I had a good childhood.” We connected in so many ways, across the years, across geography. Yet, I had to meet her on BART, the flat line to interesting places.

The week of September 24-28 was the first Fluid Summit, held at the University of Toronto. This brought together folks not only dedicated to the project, but other key members from the associated communities such as the Sakai Executive Director, Michael Korcuska, and fellow Sakai board member, Clay Fenlason. We also had volunteers from the larger community, such as Kathy Moore, a UI designer from Boston University. Of course, we also had a large contingent from the Fluid Project core team as well, making it a pretty large group of designers, developers, and managers.

One huge benefit of the Fluid Project is that it reaches across communities - uPortal, Sakai, Kuali Student, Moodle — and brings people together around real work. This real work is what keeps us all motivated and getting up in the morning. I was surprised to find in a discussion with Michael Korcuska that he wasn’t sure about just how concrete the Fluid contribution was going to be. The Summit revealed to him how committed the project is to getting real results (designs and code) into these community source products. Michael wrote a great blog entry about the Fluid and Sakai as a result of his attendance at the summit. One of his statements that was particularly heart-warming to me was this:

“Fluid is Sakai

Looking around the rooms at the Fluid Summit I saw a lot of familiar faces from places like UC Berkeley, Cambridge and Georgia Tech. These folks know Sakai inside and out and that knowledge will ensure that what gets worked on is relevant to Sakai. Of course Fluid is other things as well, including uPortal and Kuali Student and Moodle, which should benefit everyone. But I stopped thinking about Fluid as a project that is somehow separate or “in parallel to” Sakai.”

When we were working on the proposal for Fluid, we articulated that Fluid would never be successful if it was seen as being from “outside” the community/open source project it was working to improve. Being inside — and trusted — is a critical aspect of making an impact and contribution to open source projects. Thus, we talked about Fluid as being “embedded” in the core projects it was working on. Michael’s comment indicates to me that we were right on with this approach.

It is important to stress that Fluid is not a theoretical exercise or experiment. Efforts from its teams have already begun to be seen in implemented designs and code. The component and design pattern libraries will be be built and integrated “as we go,” we will not wait to achieve perfection or critical mass. Everything is open and available now. This includes access to decisions, methods, mock-ups, user research, code, html widgets, components, and more.

Look for the U-Camp to roll out for the JA-SIG Un-conference in New Brunswick on November 11-16 and the Newport Beach Sakai Conference on December 4-7. U-Camps are a place to learn, talk about, and do design. They include UX designers, training and support folks, faculty, and programmers. You can see some of the activities that took place in the Sakai Amsterdam conference U-Camp. The Newport beach U-Camp will be the third U-Camp for Sakai, and the fourth delivered over the past year. The Sakai programmer’s cafe and the U-Camp are exploring ways to bring together UX designers and developers — perhaps in some sort of sprint activity.

Before closing, I want to reiterate that projects that directly contribute to and impact production systems are the only type of project you will ever find the UC Berkeley Educational Technology Services unit involved in! While we may lust in our hearts after the pure innovation project, it is critical to our mission as a services unit that where we extend our effort has direct impact (hopefully for the good!) on our constituency. If you notice my eyes straying, just give me a nudge.

I attended the Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC) conference in beautiful Logan, Utah at the end of September. The OCW “movement” is still relatively young (2002ish?), and the OCWC organization is busy trying to define its mission and structure.

UC Berkeley joined OCWC in August, although we have been delivering “open courseware” via our online lectures since 1995 (http://webcast.berkeley.edu). This began as a research project managed by Professor Larry Rowe in his Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (BMRC) as the BIBS project (Berkeley Internet Broadcast System). We are now busy on what we call webcast NG, the next generation of the webcasting infrastructure that is being built upon Sakai’s open source framework and new infrastructure that includes some key elements from one of our favorite education and media companies, Apple. I gave a little talk about this while at OCWC and have attached my slides as a PDF if you are interested in learning more about what we do at UC Berkeley.

Some of the discussions I enjoyed the most were about sustainability. This is always of interest to me, as someone who is responsible for providing centrally supported services to my campus. Sustainability was talked about in terms of the OCWC organization and in terms of the OCW effort in general.

I think a central criterion for sustainability in the open content arena is “perceived value”. This means the value provided by the supporting organizations, and the value provided by the activity of providing the content (think about the alignment of university mission for this one), and, hopefully, the value of the content itself.

I suspect there is a formula for something like this that looks like, sustainability + meeting real (local and global) need + innovation = value. When looking through the lens of this formula, there may be an opportunity to expand the definition of OCW and its associated activities. To date it has often been defined as a publishing model which reflects the artifacts and experiences of a traditional course taught in the physical space of a classroom as well as those represented in an LMS or CLE. When thinking about sustainability, a publishing model makes good sense. However, while sustainability remains (and should be) prominent for most of us (this need is driving UCB’s current efforts), I doubt there is value in constraining the OCW vision to this in the future: innovation and meeting real needs will begin to take us well beyond this.

In regards to the meeting real needs part of the formula, at UCB we deliver videos and podcasts of complete courses via the capture of lectures. As we all know, a lecture is in no way the entirety of the course and this limitation is one of the common arguments used to convince a professor that public webcasts or podcasts are an OK thing to do — we are not giving away the keys to the kingdom! In fact, I think I would be hard pressed to find a large contingent of UC Berkeley professors at this moment who would be willing to release their entire course content in the manner of MIT’s powerful OCW program, let alone obtain an operating budget that would enable me to do so. That said, the email we receive from people all over the world indicates that in many cases, they consider these videos and podcasts alone as fantastic learning aids that expand their thinking and knowledge in valuable ways – these course web & pod casts improve lives! Now, if we could only get the funding to make all this content fully accessible through captioning, then we would truly be meeting real needs.

Adding “innovation” into the mix

While UCB is heads-down on getting our NG infrastructure in place, we are anxiously thinking ahead about new tools that will improve the experience of interacting with this content and help learners manage and share their own learning. These can be simple widgets with discrete interactions, to more complex applications that need to integrate with each other to manage institutional data through a CLE-type environment. Supporting these types of interactions begin to round out the value proposition since the activities that support managing an individual’s own learning and engaging with others to build knowledge are key motivators for learners. One way in which we can start to jump start this and alleviate costs is to form partnerships across higher ed and with companies doing interesting work such as YouTube and Apple, as well as building our platforms in an open enough way that our own constituencies can start to add to the value proposition!

UC Berkeley webcast has a new distribution partner in YouTube: http://youtube.com/ucberkeley. The site was officially launched on Wednesday, October 3, to a great community (global) response. There were many notices of this across the blogosphere and Web. Ben Hubbard, our webcast program manager at UC Berkeley is tracking many of these on his del.icio.us site.

We see this as the beginning of a very interesting relationship. Integrating educational content into YouTube, firmly a leader in the web 2.0 world, begins a unique experiment in building informal learning communities around formal learning activities. Not sure exactly where this will take us, but I expect there to be some tensions along the way and some breakthroughs. I’ll keep you posted.

In early September I took three days of work to go backpacking in Yosemite with my friend Diane and partner, Tracy. One of those days, a Friday, I did all the food shopping and equipment gathering/packing. The next day we picked Diane up at 5 am and headed for Yosemite. By 10:30 am we had permit in hand and were at the trailhead. Four days, three nights, several mountain passes, and many switchbacks later (OK, for some of us a few blisters also!) I felt like I had been gone for ages. With our cell phones tucked neatly in our spare tire compartment, the high mountain air, marmots, waterfalls, gorgeous views, and hard work (~8-9 miles a day average) I experienced a renewal no Hawaiian beach vacation could ever serve up. Check out the pictures on my Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigbluetractorgirl/sets/72157602142334944/

I have been thinking about the personal responsibility and identity issues that reveal themselves on the web and in virtual environments. I haven’t done any research on this issue, although I am sure there is plenty. Mainly, my opinions are stemming from my personal experience with contributing to a number of different social networking tools such as facebook, this blog, LinkedIn, as well as a large number of email lists and open source communities.

One of the elements we talk about a lot in education and online tools is how students who are shy, or simply not comfortable voicing opinions in-person, find it easier to express themselves on the web or in a mediated virtual environment. This doesn’t surprise me, as someone who is fairly shy myself. For this reason, the potential alienation derived from virtual communication has never really concerned me. I can carry on a virtual conversation and in-person conversation with the same agility. In fact, sometimes it is easier to engage initially virtually as a way to ease into a community. What doesn’t change for me is my essential persona. I am always Mara Hancock, and the words – whether typed or spoken – are my own.

Watching my son – who is not shy – “talk with my friends” via IM every night I have been equally unconcerned. What is strikingly different though, is that he is not talking to “Derek who lives two blocks away,” he is talking to “PidgeonToes” or “MrRogersRIP” or “DragonGirl.” Peering over his shoulder, I have to ask, “who are you talking to?” I can never remember which alias goes with which kid. My IM alias is incredibly boring, “mara_hancock,” betraying my age and essential unhip self.

Recently, I have received several cranky comments on my blog. I have it set so that I can review and moderate comments, which I usually do happily and quickly. I am more than willing to post comments that are controversial or promote dialog. I believe that is part of the responsibility that comes with choosing to publish in this medium. Most of my peers are professional in their manner and bring interesting ideas to share. However, these recent comments however are clearly people venting. They don’t compose their argument or message and tend toward the use of profanity. These things, while concerning, don’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that they do not sign their real names. I have no idea who I am talking to, I have little context with which to assess this person’s perspective or opinion.

Now, I grew up in a relatively liberal family with a strong work-ethic and sense of personal responsibility and values. I know that my opinions are sometimes controversial, but if I believe it important to express them in a public arena (and the web is public), then I also believe it is important enough to sign my name next to them. I think about this when I sign petitions, when I sign letters and emails, and when I write in this blog.

So, if you would like to have your comments included on this blog, please, let me know who you are. You know who I am. It’s like shaking hands.

In my blog post at Penn’s State Terra Incognita blog, I talked a little about how UX designers can help bridge the gap between instructional designers and developers of teaching and learning software:

Another challenge in creating applications for academia is that many of the user goals are embedded in pedagogical methods that may be discipline specific or not expressed in a generalizable way. Instructional designers and faculty are rarely part of a development team. In the higher education community source environment we have an opportunity to remedy this. It may require reaching across local organizational divides to ensure that the user and instructional goals are adequately being met: Often, instructors don’t speak the language of technology, so the instructional designer can help translate, generalize, and communicate their needs. In turn, the instructional designer often doesn’t speak the language of the application programmer, and the UI designer can help translate and represent their needs within the design and work flow of the application for the developers. Here is a diagram that attempts to illustrate this point and show how UX can be a bridging activity: UCD in Higher Education

Since that writing, there has been a string of emails across the Sakai UI and Pedagogy email lists pertaining to this issue (just lucky timing I think). Mark Notess, a usability expert from the University of Michigan pointed the list to an article he wrote for eLearn magazine back in 2001, titled Usability, User Experience, and Learner Experience. While somewhat dated (according to Mark) there are still plenty of points that hold true today as we work on Sakai. This one in particular caught my attention:

Learner-Centered Design

How do the concepts and processes of user experience apply to online learning? To the extent that an online learning system is another piece of software, the applicability is straightforward. All of our methods that have worked well with software applications should be used with online learning and should work equally well. But creating online learning is not identical to creating typical software applications because we have to concern ourselves with things like instructional strategies, content sequencing, and quality of learning.

Web usability has been a hot topic for the past few years, but web-based learning faces some different issues. Web usability has largely concerned itself with e-commerce–product catalog navigation and converting hits to purchases. Other web usability work has focused on information seeking and finding. But web-based learning is a different experience. It raises questions like these:

• How can we keep learners engaged with large amounts of content?
• How can learners get oriented and effectively navigate an online learning environment consisting of dozens of learning resources, tools, and activities?
• How do we engender effective online collaboration between learners?

He included in his email the comment,

“My contention, which is actually motivating my current dissertation research, is that the growth of the web and web-based learning environments has increased (or perhaps created) the need for IDs to be able to work with UX people and developers such that there is a need for a common language and inclusive, cross-disciplinary processes.”

I think he and I are on the same page. When I look back to my graduate training in instructional design, the principles in conducting a needs assessment in a performance or learning environment don’t vary too much from the principles of a good UX field study. Perhaps simply finding the shared vocabulary would be a good starting point. However, UX still needs to translate to developers on the other end of the continuum. They also tend not to have the depth of knowledge (I know I am generalizing here) in understanding the tools of the trade in learning theory, and where behavior in the teaching and learning activities can be generalized and the issues and assumptions imposed by discipline, etc… However, I am starting to ponder the importance of the fact that not only do instructor’s not speak developer-speak (for the most part) they also very often don’t speak pedagogy-speak! So, that leaves us with a lot of people in different fields with common goals and close enough vocabularies to confuse the heck out of each other!

I know this is actually a good thing. I know that the fact that community source efforts allow us to be embedded in an environment where we actually have these different skills sets all organized around a common goal has the potential to be incredibly powerful. It feels like the answer is on the tip of our tongues!

UC Berkeley has officially launched its new release of the Sakai CLE, bSpace, for the Fall 2007. This is a pretty substantial change, moving from the Sakai 2.1.2 to 2.4.x code base. It will be a huge improvement for our faculty, student, and staff users. After this point we intend to be as aligned with the .x branch as possible so as to make our local deployments easier and bring the latest fixes and enhancements to the campus in a timely fashion. In addition to the UC Berkeley staff, we have many other schools and Sakai partners to thank for this release. There are many new features included in the Sakai 2.4.x release, but some additions that should be highlighted are Indiana University’s Forum tool (to replace the old discussion board), Boston University’s Mailtool (send email to specific roles within the course such as enrolled students or GSIs), and the University of Capetown’s poll tool (quick surveys). With this release, I can say with absolute confidence that the value of community source effort has been realized.

The ETS UC Berkeley Development and User Experience teams were responsible for:

• a fresh new interface (local implementation), with a vastly improved skin which not only looks good, but greatly assists users navigating Sakai.
• the integration code that campuses around the world now use to bring enterprise data into Sakai (partnered with Stanford on this)
• an improved gradebook tool (section/group mgmt, configurable spreadsheet download for egrades, grade comments)
• improved roster tool (not in official release — includes student photos now available for instructors from IU)
• section info tool (integration with SIS data, auto and manual management of sections)

For our local implementation of bSpace, our thanks goes out to the ETS training and support and QA staff, and our colleagues in IST — especially those in Karen Kato and Jeff Makaiwi’s teams for getting this release off the ground and into the hands of the users.

As of July 31, we no longer host or support courses in either Blackboard or WebCT, making Sakai the single enterprise LMS on the Berkeley campus, a goal we set out to achieve over three years ago. We also assisted the Library in their retirement of their eRes system and migrated content and users onto bSpace. We expect to retire our homegrown system, Courseweb, in January, with all the primary features for the faculty now included within bSpace. Over the next several years we will be following the Kuali student project closely to ensure that we can create the best integration points between the new student systems and Sakai. Of course, we’ll be working with them also through the Fluid Project.