Collaboration

The blog tool in Sakai is an online journal, in which individuals can write entries, ordered by date, which they can share with others. Members of the site can comment on each other’s entries. It works on a site-by-site basis – entries that people write in one site will not appear in any other sites. People will not be automatically notified by email about comments on their blogs, or about new entries in other people’s blogs. RSS feeds of someone’s blog can be used. Comments and entries can be added, read, edited and removed from the blog.

Chatroom can be used for real-time, unstructured conversations among site participants who are signed on to the site at the same time. Easily create an "Online Office Hours" chat room for student questions and answers. Dispersed collaboration groups can use Chat as a space to have conversations across distances or catch up with conversations that they may have missed. The Chat Room tool alerts users to other participants who have entered the same chat room. This way, users know who is available to talk. Messages exchanged in the Chatroom are all public unless specified by the instructor.

Discussion allows structured conversations that are organized into categories. Site participants can post replies to a topic (a "flat" discussion) or to other replies (a "threaded" discussion). A site's owner can also choose whether or not to allow site participants to post their own discussion topics. You may view Discussion in a row or column layout. Categories are the top level in the Discussion tool. Topics appear under the categories, and replies appear grouped with the appropriate topic. When posting a topic, you can limit replies to only the top-level post (i.e., your initial post), or you can allow replies to any posts. Permissions to delete a discussion item can be controlled by the site owner.

A Blog, much like a Wiki is a system of posting, editing and managing a collection of hypertext pages usually dealing with a topic or purpose. As an instructor you can choose to add the Blogger tool to a course for students to use as a vehicle for expressing ones comments and promoting conversation/interaction amongst peers based on a course topics. Depending on the settings, students can create their own blogs or just edit/add comments to a blog started by the instructor.

Instructors or site leaders can use Forums to create an unlimited number of discussion forums for their course or project sites. The Forums tool is designed to be an effective tool for both academic and collaborative work, and is integrated closely with other tools like Resources and Gradebook. A forum is not visible to site participants unless at least one topic is created. Site participants in an asynchronous discussion in Forums can engage site resources. Interactions can be assigned a point value and sent to the Gradebook with comments. Messages can be composed and added to Forums using the WYSIWYG interface, which allows rich text, plain text, and HTML editing. You can add attachments to any message by linking to files or web links in Resources. Forum statistics are available for site owners to determine the participation level of individual participants. Materials from other sites can be re-used by importing forums and topics from your other sites. Site leaders can change forum and topic settings in combination with pre-defined groups to allow or deny access to specific discussions per group. Discussion items in the Forum can also be printed.

A Wiki is a tool for people with limited technical knowledge to change and create web pages. Wiki was designed specifically for researchers and lecturers to collaborate on documents, share information and create teaching materials. The Wiki tool in Laulima view, create and edit new pages. It also allows you to attach images and files. Information and history of the current page can be viewed. Permissions can be set for each participant to read only, read and create, read and update and read, create and update pages.

Discussions & Private Messages (a.k.a. jforum) helps to facilitate one-on-one and group communication. The Private messaging portion of this tool gives all users the ability to communicate one-on-one with either their peers or the instructor. By default this tool is already in each course and has preset categories and forums. Instructors can post messages that have "read only" privileges to list instructions. A "read and reply" privilege on a forum can initiate two-way communication with student-student and student-instructor. Giving "read, reply and post" privileges on a forum shapes the conversation into a threaded discussion where students can have maximum interaction and collaboration.