Samigo and Gradebook sittin' in a tree
We held a meeting between the development teams for the Sakai Gradebook and the Sakai Assessment Manager (aka Samigo). This was pretty easy to arrange since we're all in the bay area now.
We looked at the two apps in some detail and noted the overlaps and potential conflicts. The Samigo project is much farther along, so hopefully our team will benefit from some of the work they've already done.
Here's a diagram Ray Davis sketched on the white board to show the differing scopes of the two applications.
It shows that Samigo shouldn't worry about final grades and the relationships between gradable objects, while the Gradebook shouldn't worry about how assessments are built and scored. They overlap only where assessments become gradable objects. That looks tiny, but it actually touches a few places in both of our UIs (and has a much bigger impact on back-end programming). Still, it's manageable and tidy.
What we're are doing is is building a little tunnel between modular applications that can exist independently. It's an interesting approach to have a collection of tools that do their own thing well, instead of one big tool that does it all. It's an attractive approach to developers collaborating on an open source project. I wonder if the people using Sakai will appreciate that model, or clamor for tighter integration.
We looked at the two apps in some detail and noted the overlaps and potential conflicts. The Samigo project is much farther along, so hopefully our team will benefit from some of the work they've already done.
Here's a diagram Ray Davis sketched on the white board to show the differing scopes of the two applications.
It shows that Samigo shouldn't worry about final grades and the relationships between gradable objects, while the Gradebook shouldn't worry about how assessments are built and scored. They overlap only where assessments become gradable objects. That looks tiny, but it actually touches a few places in both of our UIs (and has a much bigger impact on back-end programming). Still, it's manageable and tidy.
What we're are doing is is building a little tunnel between modular applications that can exist independently. It's an interesting approach to have a collection of tools that do their own thing well, instead of one big tool that does it all. It's an attractive approach to developers collaborating on an open source project. I wonder if the people using Sakai will appreciate that model, or clamor for tighter integration.
posted by Ben Brophy at
4:21 PM
