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For the people that haven’t seen MyCamTools yet, I’ve made a short video that quickly steps through most of the main functionality of MyCamTools. It just gives a short impression of what we have been doing and what can be achieved using client side development.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs7A_5vHkxo
The quality of this movie isn’t very good, so if you would like to see the entire movie in much better quality, you can download it over here.
This video might be very quick if you have never seen MyCamTools. If you would like to take a look yourself and step through everything in a normal pace, you can just visit http://mycamtools.caret.cam.ac.uk. If you are not a member of the University of Cambridge, you can write me an email (nicolaas.matthijs@caret.cam.ac.uk) and I will create you a Friends account.
We have finished 2 new widgets to be used on the Dashboard page: Quick FileUpload and Quick DropBox.
Quick FileUpload is intended for lecturers and allows them to upload one/multiple file(s) into the root folder of the Resources tool for the courses they are an administrator on. This also allows them to upload a set of files quickly into multiple courses. First they need to select the site to upload into, then they need to select the files to upload (you can select multiple files in the Filedialog) and finally you just press the Upload button which will upload all selected files and will also show a progress bar whilst uploading.
The second widget is Quick DropBox. Quick DropBox is intended for students and allows them to hand in one/multiple file(s) intothe dropbox of the courses they are a member of. First they need to select the site they want to hand in to, then they need to select the files to hand in (you can select multiple files in the Filedialog) and finally they just press the Hand in button which will upload all selected files and will also show a progress bar whilst uploading. So the basic functionality of this widget is very similar to the functionality of the Quick FileUpload widget.
Charles Severance (Dr. Chuck) did a post on his trip to Spain on his blog (http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/). He was invited to speak at the LaSalle University’s F1rst Congress on Information and Communication Technology Managers. The title of his talk was “Open Source Learning Management Systems: Much More Than Free Source Code”. There also were a lot of discussions going on about different kinds of VLE’s.
Over there, MyCamTools got mentioned :
Then I mentioned the outstanding work of Cambridge University on MyCamTools as a move towards a more user-centered Sakai. I suggested that this would not make Sakai “user-centered” in my strictest definition – but it was a move toward meeting the needs of the student in a way that was useful to them.
During a Sakai Spain User Group meeting, MyCamTools got mentioned again and was shown to the people over there. Apparently, the things we have done addresses a lot of the needs of the Spanish Universities :
We talked about some transition issues from existing LMS systems – it was mostly about user-comfort issues when going from WebCT to Sakai. This is such a common problem and I wish we were better organized for this. I asked to get a list of the needs. Interestingly, many of the needs were actually usability and portal design – I showed them my Cam tools and everyone’s faces brightened up. Ian Boston might find MyCamTools in production in Spain before it is in production in Cambridge 
Having someone else to run this in production would be great. It would mean more testing, more user feedback and thus very user centered improvements …
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