1. New to Sakai? Find out about the project, the community and the features
2. Interested in Deployment, Help and Support?
3. Interested in Tools and Tool development?
3.1 How to develop tools
3.2 Useability and Style Guide
3.3 Requirements process
4. Interested in Architecture and Enterprise Integration?
4.1 Webservices
4.2 Portal
5. Teaching and Learning with Sakai
5.1 Implementing ePortfolios in Sakai
I think it's important to ensure that the 'newbie' participants in Sakai are brought up to speed as much as possible BEFORE the main conference, and tracks therein, really begin. I think we talked about this in the conference call but it hasn't reappeared since. That isn't to preclude separate intro topics in the track or themes listed for the main body of the conference. However, I think you'll get a much more coherent sense of community if there is some dedicated attention toward building that community and giving new participants grounds on which to stand and make more equal contributions to the main session themes.
This could get somewhat complex, but it's worth some careful thought. More than just a 1.5 hour 'everything you wanted to know about Sakai' preview, a pre-conference component might well have comparable structure to the main meeting - that is, it could have contributions on each of the four main themes, though I'm sure the bulk of newbie orientation should focus on process and structure. For example, how does one participate in this kind of community? What are expectations that I should have? Descriptions of the community structure and who's a significant player in each of the areas around which Sakai activity is now focused? How does this wiki community work and where do I get help? etc. Of course, to the extent that the newcomers can be provided some background on the swirling governance issues that would help them positively advance the discussion on this topic, as well.
From my perspective, this is a day's worth of activity all by itself. If the expectation is that the attendance at this conference is going to grow geometrically relative to the last, then I think it's worth the investment in trying to welcome and assist the newly engaged community to be productive contributors to this coming out party for Sakai in its new form - one which is based in and driven by community goals and objectives rather than grant obligations.
I think that these tracks do cover it all - but inevitably there will be some topics that appear (at least in the abstract) to fall into more than one track. For UI and Functionality, the abstract would probably tell one if it was about users and their needs/observations or about how to code/build/integrate. Thus the sessions would fall into Ed&Res or into Tech resp.
I dont think I have ever been to a conference where this bad-fit wasnt evident to some degree (well except for those with no tracks and random allocation of slots but they are chaotic!)
The OSP group (as am I) is concerned that the OSPI name be somewhere in the title of the conference. The Austin Conference will be the third conference that OSPI has hosted, our numbers have grown, we don't want to lose our constituents, and of course we want to make the Austin Conference as attractive as possible. So, I hope we can find a way to include the OSPI name in our conferences notices.
Third: the sessions and tracks.
I'd like a stronger sense of our audience. Both SEPP and OSPI have a core group who we can keep in mind as we plan the program, but with the 500-800 number we're aiming at, my guess is we'll be getting some people new to both Sakai and OSP. Also, my other guess is many SEPP members will have little knowledge of portfolios and many OSPI previous attendees will know little about Sakai (some have been known to ask "can we just turn Sakai off"?)
In other words, I don't think the committee can assume we know this new blended and enlarged audience. We may not even have the shared specialized vocabulary that the separate communities have.
So, I've added some extensions to the list of our top level tracks:
1. Education and research: instead use "teaching, learning, research, and assessment." Since the strongest drive for using portfolios is for managing campus-wide assessment, we need the term in our top level. We might want to include digital rights in this track, and collaboration, reflective thinking, student development and advising, co-curricular and non-curricular learning, life-long learning, implications of K-12 portfolio implementations, faculty portfolios and other topics.
2. Technology: I'm assuming this means sessions for developers, campus-implementers, architects, contributors, server folks, open-source geeks - right? Or?
3. Community Source: sessions ABOUT community source, or sessions to build out community source for the two projects? Or both? I assume we'll leave governance issues for special non-program meetings?
4. Management: maybe say "Managing Change and Implementation." These are the directors, AVPs, CIOs, and staff who want to know how to stage in Sakai/OSP: committing to a portfolio implementation involves a multi-year, broad-scale, curriculum-affecting change. Institutions facing re-accreditation visits and knowing they have to report on student progress toward learning goals will arrive at the conference with a measure of urgency. We need to anticipate that urgency with targeted sessions.
Jeff and I are working with OSPI folks to get a list of suggested topics to further flesh out this initial meager offering.
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From the first meeting:
Higher level Tracks that SHOULD encompass topics. But looking at it I see that I wouldn't know where to put UI or functionality issues.