As the world’s most famous photographic agency, Magnum Photos has been the benchmark of photographic excellence and innovation for over 60 years. Magnum photographers participate in a variety of cultural and educational events that promote photographic authorship and offer a unique perspective to the world around us. Because of the breadth of activities that Magnum photographers participate in, Magnum Photos is pleased to announce the official launch of the Magnum Photos Events webpage. By offering a complete schedule and listing of Magnum events across the globe, the Magnum Photos Event page is driven by the desire to reach out to the photographic community. As a dynamic site, the events page will serve as a hub of engagement for the photographic and arts community at large.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (December 8, 2008) – The Appalachian College Association, a Longsight client, today received the prestigious 2008 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for the consortium’s project, “Learning Asset Management Project” or LAMP. LAMP brings together 14,000 students and faculty members of 16 of the Association’s member institutions in a shared instance of Sakai, a leading open source collaboration and learning environment.

Sakai is not a box or a set of predetermined pathways into which you plug in your content. Sakai is a highly flexible and capable framework that works best when you approach Sakai with a vision focused on outcomes. Sakai will support your vision for teaching and learning but it’s important that you understand how content is stored and presented to your audience.

Sakai stores content in an internal repository. Sakai can store the simplest, most fundamental pieces of content (an image, for instance) and it can store very complex pieces of content (an entire textbook in PDF, a link to an external program or even a complete web site). [If you store file types that are understood by your web browser, they can be displayed directly by your browser. If you store file types that aren’t suited for display in a web browser, your browser will offer to download, save or open the file with a desktop program of choice.] Sakai can even create and present highly structured lessons based on international standards, but let’s hold off on that discussion for a while.

The Resources tool in Sakai provides a means to manage content in the repository. When the Resources tool is added to a worksite in Sakai, a separate “container” for that worksite’s content is created in the Sakai repository. So the content managed by the Resources tool in “My Workspace” is kept separate from the content managed by the Resources tool in “English 101.” Learners in English 101 can’t see the content in your workspace unless you explicitly grant permissions for the content on an item-by-item basis.

Guess what? There’s a lot of content being authored for the web, and there’s no end in sight. Perhaps the oldest challenge of the modern web is how to bridge the gap between those who are creative and have content and those with the means to structure and present such content in a web browser. There are creative writers and artists with no interest in the technology and there are structured thinkers who command the technology.

To the rescue comes the nearly ubiquitous content management system (or CMS but not a course management system…that’s a different breed of application).

Content management systems are torn between two fundamental poles: one hand wishes to preserve creativity and flexibility, while the other hand aims to make things simple. These goals, more often than not, are opposed to each other. As one increases the simplicity of a CMS, the ability to tweak, move, modify, and control the result all diminish. Alternately, if one is given complete freedom inside a CMS, it begs the question: why have a CMS at all if creating content is as complex as it would be without one? It is in this light which Drupal sets itself apart from other CMS's.

We’ve heard from several of our clients that there’s a need for better end-user instructions for interacting with the matrix model in OSP. The matrix isn't the only area in need of explanation. Here are some suggestions for understanding the OSP interface:

There are usually two groups of people involved in ePortfolios. Each group has a different role. Portfolio coordinators design the portfolio process. Portfolio participants create and revise their own portfolios according to the coordinators' design. Coordinators are often faculty or project administrators and participants are often students.

1. Forms

Regardless of your role, you can't start using OSP without forms that gather data. Unfortunately, prepackaged forms don't come with OSP (the current OSP library has very few). Coordinators must plan and create them, then the forms are used to gather portfolio data. The lack of forms has been a barrier for those who wish to get started with OSP. [Contact Longsight for help with this design and implementation process].

2. Wizards

Then come wizards. Wizards are simply guides for using forms to gather data. Portfolio coordinators usually design and create wizards with the wizard tool in Sakai. Wizards define the order in which forms appear. For example, a simple sequential wizard could present three forms in order – one form to gather personal information (name, address, etc), another form that gathers a statement of work, and finally a form into which the participant enters a reflection on their experience. Ultimately, the portfolio participant runs the wizard to guide their entry of the data.

Longsight recently helped Magnum Photos and The Global Fund launch a new Drupal-powered focus site: Access To Life.

During a recent training session with the Ohio Learning Network, we demonstrated a common institutional form as implemented in the Open Source Portfolio (OSP) toolset: the faculty profile. Many institutions collect activity data from instructors every academic year. We use this common example to demonstrate the end-to-end creation of an OSP portfolio.

Update: The CAS module is now maintained at drupal.org.

phpCAS is a fantastic library for integrating Central Authentication Services into PHP applications. The library is well-documented and is licensed under the LGPL. CAS is a Java-based single sign-on solution originally developed at Yale and later placed under the auspices of JA-SIG (Java Architectures - Special Interest Group). CAS has quickly become the most popular single sign-on solution for universities. In its most simple use (CAS can also proxy single sign-on), CAS authenticates users and sends the user to the requested application with a ticket. The application is then responsible for authenticating the ticket (behind the scenes, with a tool like cURL) and automatically logging the user in if the ticket is valid.

Using the excellent phpCAS library, we have created a small Drupal module to allow single sign-on with CAS. The latest release (0.4.20) of the phpCAS library is included in the download.