The SAPO Campus project will be presented at the VI International Seminar on Open and Social Learning, promoted by the UNESCO Chair in e-Learning UOC.

Take a look at our proposal for the demonstration session and feel free to give us some feedback

Rethinking Open and Social Learning and institutional supported technologies: the case of SAPO Campus (Carlos Santos, Luís Pedro)

SAPO Campus is an integrated Web 2.0 services platform based on user-generated content production and aggregation for use in Higher Education.

Upon an independent and open set of social core services (photo and video sharing, blogs, wiki, social bookmarking) lies a set of aggregation services (rss reader, portfolio, assessment, presence manager) integrated in a widget-based platform, labelled as an institutionally supported Personal Learning Environment (PLE).

Although SAPO Campus is an institutionally supported service, it’s core concept lies in the promotion of open and social learning. Several hashtags may be used to define the promotion of these broader concepts in SAPO Campus, at an institutional and personal level:

#Institutional: All users from the community are equal and have the same privileges in the platform (dilution of hierarchy); Core services are open and free for all of the community, without prior requirements or technocracies; All user-generated content is (un)protected, by default, by a non-restrictive CC license; Wide-open consumption and participation of (and in) core services means that everyone everywhere can view and talk about content, tearing down the metaphorical walls that typically surround the institution space.

#Personal: Promotion of an active and autonomous construction of a personal and meaningful learning environment (technologically supported by the institution), keeping an open and optional gateway to the integration of curricula supported by Web 2.0 technologies; Opening the PLE environment, and thus introducing dynamic, community-wide sharing and recommendation features; Automatic and user-managed mechanisms which promote an accurate understanding/accountability of the progressive management of the user’s Digital Identity.

Within a PLE/PLN conceptual model, SAPO Campus tries to balance and compromise institutional concerns and responsibilities with an open, personal and social learning experience. The vision of what SAPO Campus should be has been continuously updated through an iterative and user-driven participatory design development process, based on the feedback of the community and in the involvement of graduate students in the development team.

This month we presented a demo session of SAPO Campus at the Eden Seventh Open Classroom Conference in Porto, Portugal. The “SAPO Campus: a social media platform and PLE for Higher Education” session was prepared with the contribution of Josie Fraser (thanks Josie!). You may find here the submitted text.

The first part of the session was provided by Josie and was focused on a brief overview of the Personalisation and Personal Learning Environments (PLE) topics.

The SAPO Campus presentation has started with a brief overview of the main concepts and services of this platform. For the last part we’ve prepared a screencast of the platform to demonstrate what is currently available for the community and a lot more functionalities that are in the final stages of development.

Take a look at the screencast and let us know what you think!

+2000 copies are being handed out to all the freshmen in the University of Aveiro. Did you get your copy? If not, swing by the SAPO Campus homepage anyway!

Visit it and give us some feedback!

Next monday some services will be open and free to the University of Aveiro community.

After concluding yesterday’s post about the Javascript-powered Notification Server, I realized it had a gaping hole the size of the Grand Canyon. The platform could send notifications, but what about support for widgets? It sure would be cool if widgets could join in on the fun.

After about half an hour, the Notification Server supported notifications coming from widgets. The way you send out a notification is a little different, but still easy nonetheless:

var notification = {};
notification.kind = "success";
notification.message = "A hearty hello from me, the widget! I'm at the beach you see :)";
widget.sendNotification(notification);

Basically, you just need to create an empty object and populate it with the kind and message variables. You can omit variables, of course, causing their value to default to the Notification object prototype. You can probably notice I made no mention of callback: right now, defining a callback is not supported due to security reasons - a malicious widget could try to execute a platform function or even on another widget.

widget.sendNotification is actually a custom extension to the Netvibes UWA, and is meant to abstract the widget developer from the rather ugly Environment.sendRemote command, which sends a remote message to the widget platform.

Also, as of now, widget notifications are considered slightly less important than platform ones. The current implementation forces a skew parameter with a value of -1 on notifications coming from widgets, which decreases their overall priority by one point in the priority queue. This may be subject to change as development wears on.