Oncourse 2.4.1 Release this Saturday, 28 July 2007

We have been hard at work for the past two months (i.e. since the Sakai 2.4.0 release on June 2nd) trying to reach functional parity with our legacy course management system. Here are some highlights of the new functionality going into our post-2.4 release:

• Gradebook – new grading scale: Letter Grades
• Chat – you can now completely clear the chat history archive
• Roster – privacy status is now indicated on the Roster
• Messages
  • Bulk deletion of messages
  • Bulk move of messages into a folder
• Assignments
  • Allow grading for students that have not submitted any submissions
  • New non-electronic assignment type
  • An email confirmation is sent to students upon submission
  • Option for graders to receive an email notification upon student submission
  • Bulk upload of grades
• Introduction of a new role: Teaching Assistant/Associate Instructor – Provides ability to limit grade-book privileges to this role.
• Resources
  • Citations (Sakaibrary)
  • Show a resource’s description via a mouse hover
• User Presence – An individual’s privacy status is now exposed in user presence
• Calendar – When an assignment is posted to the calendar, any attachment is also exposed in the Calendar entry
• Portal – Display long description of a tool with a mouse hover
• Portfolio – implement Goal Management

Interesting Educational Gaming Interview with Heather Chaplin

http://www.gametheoryshow.com/index.php?post_id=231847

Journalist Heather Chaplin joins us to talk about how teaching kids game design can prepare them for the modern world of vast systems, so much more beneficially than old fashioned methods.

18 hours and counting to iPhone activation!

I purchased a 4GB iPhone yesterday, June 30th and activated it at 6:00pm. All of the 8GB models were out of stock and I just had to have one. The iTunes activation completed without error on my OS X 10.4.10 machine. At the end of the activation process, it told me:

Your activation requires additional time to complete.
You will receive an email confirmation sent to youremailaddress@.com once your activation is complete.

Well it is now 12:00pm on July the 1st and I still have a $500 paperweight! I have been on the phone with both AT&T and Apple twice yesterday. In both cases all they could do was point fingers at each other. AT&T says everything looks good from their end but they cannot peer into the mysterious activation process and that I would need to call Apple. Apple says that they cannot peer into the mysterious activation process and that I would have to call AT&T! This is ludicrous! Surely one of the vendors can see where things stand in the activation queue…

Here is the really frustrating part of the story. I bought an iPhone for Clayton and his activated and was working within a matter of minutes! So this left me wondering, what is different about our situations… Both of us are existing AT&T customers and should have received an pain free and timely activation; only one of us did. Could it be that because I had a Blackberry and an existing unlimited data plan that I am doomed to activation hell? The last time I spoke to a rep at Apple, they said that I should expect to wait 24 hours as they have 8,000 activations in the queue. Somehow I expect that 24 hours will come and go and I will still not have a working iPhone. So much for Apple simplicity and “it just works”! Argh!