RT @mkorcuska: Congrats to @mfeldstein67 @drchuck, @_ieb_, and Maggie Lynch on election to Sakai Board

Congratulations to all, and sounds like the future is well in hand…

Had the chance to meet up with some people from all around (NYU, Columbia, Marist, Zach and some others) last night in NYC to talk about all things including what sounds like some really exciting movement around Sakai 3. Was a great time, and real refreshing to see everyone again in person. Sadly I’m a horrible non-picture taker (Ian Dolphin, how did you not manage to Serendipitously be in NYC last night?) but you’ll have to trust me – good people, ok drinks, and great conversation.

P.S. Congrats to Nicola on her recently shinier finger…yes, that finger…

This may be old news to others, but I finally have my copy of the new “Sakai Courseware Management” book (courtesy of the folks over at Packt) and more surprisingly have even been able to carve out time to read the contents. For people who may not have been aware, this is the book that Alan Berg & Michael Korkuska have spent the last many months of their lives churning out.

After looking through “Sakai Courseware Management”, I’d say if you’re a technical staff member working with Sakai it’d be invaluable. Finally, much of the community knowledge and resources have been distilled into a single volume, greatly shortening the learning curve — and with enough topics that even old-Sakai hands will likely see some new bits, courtesy of the deep knowledge of Alan & Michael.

To get a feel for what’s in the book, check out: http://www.packtpub.com/article/sakai-courseware-management-the-official-guide-table-of-contents. Chapters 1-14 are a pretty straightforward introduction to the Sakai CLE. Chapters 15-19 are a bit off the beaten track, encapsulating a bunch of items that might be considered – “meta-Sakai” – things like community, teaching, and people that differentiate Sakai from some of the more traditional corporate LMS offerings.

Some nuggets you might not get a feel from the ToC, but that are items of note, the book is full of:

• non-official “Contrib” or extended tools and how they can be integrated with Sakai (e.g. embedding JFlash to let Sakai support online Flashcards for instance)
• pointers to product wikis, email lists, and docs — in many ways the entire book could be seen as a ToC for the broader SakaiWeb/Community
• references to people and institutions — providing a connection to the key players in the space

Overall, the text is written in a pretty clear, narrative fashion (with lots of sidebars detailing history, or inspirations for various pieces of Sakai. Packt has posted Chapter 11: Web Services: Connecting to the Enterprise at http://www.packtpub.com/files/Sakai-Courseware-Management-sample-chapter-11-Web-Services.pdf which is a good representative of the style of the book.

Though brief, chapter 11 gives you a quick overview of web services (some background reading might be requred) then drops you into some examples in Sakai. It’s unfortunately a bit light from an example perspective (e.g. what are items the authors believe you can/should use these services to do, but it gives the reader a good set of tools to poke around and explore the environment.

Arguably the publication of a book is one of the signs that a project has “made it” and for Sakai I think this is certainly the case as well. Especially for open-source projects with tight-knit core communities, the experience for a new-comer can be daunting, no matter how congenial the atmosphere as you try to synthesize a product, community, and culture all at the same time (often while, errr… trying to get something done in the first place) In that regard, “Sakai Courseware Management” makes my life much easier, since now when people have questions about Sakai, instead of trying to enumerate the variety of community resources, articles, email lists, and code — I can drop a 485 pg. volume on their desk — not only producing a resounding “thwackt” but giving them a great post-conference read on the plane resource.

Having said that, this is clearly an introductory, technical book. It’s great for looking at setting up Sakai, poking around the various resources, and finding out what the tools do. I think if I were say a faculty member interested in effective e-Learning using Sakai, or interested more from a teaching/pedagogical side I might be a bit disappointed (though for that audience, there are some great case-studies from the Sakai Teaching Excellence awards on page 341). So, while I don’t want to take away from what this book is, and the great void it fills; I suppose we’ll have to eagerly anticipate some follow-on volumes targeted at other audiences/topics, like “Teaching with Sakai”, “Building Sakai Tools”, or “Deploying Sakai as an Enterprise CLE”.

Other Posts about “Sakai Courseware Management”

• http://sakaiblog.korcuska.net/2009/05/28/sakai-book-announced/
• http://sakaiblog.korcuska.net/2009/06/12/sakai-book-now-shipping/
• http://steve-on-sakai.blogspot.com/2009/07/sakai-book-sample-chapter-on-web.html

Some interesting sakai-ux discussion tied in with thoughts I’ve been having recently related to native vs. integrated services and content in portal-type environments… where do the lines get drawn, and how do you handle horizontal services?

From a functionality/architecture point of view, the idea of loosly coupled integrations with external services like wikis, or Google Apps, or other tools seems very attractive.

however

There are significant horizontal capability components that while not impossible to resolve may complicate that scenario. Initial thoughts:

• TOS – ensuring users understand external, but integrated tools may have separate terms of service, SLAs, data ownership/retention policies, etc.
• import/export I think the ability to “package” and port a course/site/project or archive it is something that lots of people want. Again possible (treat external resources as links? Embed their content? Cry?) but I think it has some strong implications in user experience and architecture
• Search – this one might actually be a bit more straightforward

I will make the observation/parallel from the portal world – CampusEAI is currently heavily involved in building out a social portal, that combines the integration of enterprise services & applications with natively managed content like blogs, wikis, discussions, profile, etc. As we continue to get further down this road, some interesting intersections between user expectations and boundaries between external and internal content continue to present themselves up.

So far the balance we’ve come up with is largely – some stuff is in, some stuff is out, but there’s continual tension on the boarders of that distinction, and I’m not confident that that particular firewall will hold or be appropriate in the long run.

Not sure I have good answers for you Just a brain-dump of my internal thought processes these days.

ITWeb :Unisa embraces Microsoft: “[ Johannesburg, 3 December 2008 ] – At a time when many public organisations are migrating to open source solutions – the University of SA (Unisa) has chosen to embrace Microsoft. From 2009, registered students at Unisa will be required to sign up for a Microsoft-provided e-mail service. The free e-mail system – myLife – will be the only system Unisa will use to communicate with its students. This marks a move away from the university’s Sakai community source platform – myUnisa – which the university runs on a Linux platform.”

(Via car hire bulgariaGoogle.)

Based on the article at least (not having talked with the folks at UNISA about this item) it’s hard to tie moving to Live@EDU for email to moving away from Sakai. If anything, having guaranteed email accounts (which it sounds like may not currently be the case) seems likely to enhance core services like announcements, email notification, mailing lists and others.

Don’t Stop at Gmail | The Hoya: “Georgetown has never been on the cutting edge of technology. Changes to our e-mail system and wireless service have come slowly, and the university is still in the process of revamping data security following a major security breach last semester. Here is an opportunity to cut costs without sacrificing user satisfaction, to participate in a dynamic programming project involving some of the nation’s top universities and to shake off our dependence on a for-profit vendor for support and updates. Georgetown has the chance, for once, to be in the forefront of campus technology, and this is an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.”

(Via Google.)

Post from the Georgetown school paper makes the case for transitioning from Blackboard to an Open-Source LMS, and specifically mentions Sakai

We needed to populate some training course and class rosters into Sakai to let people play with site creation, roster attachment, and publishing tests to students. While we could have used webservices, we decided to leverage the built-in CmSyncJob and generate an XML file to dump out the data, and then sync it into the CMS (we wanted something easy to check into SVN for future usage).

The fun part was it let me use Ruby’s Builder (originally part of rails, but then extracted) to produce the XML, which was fun. Builder has a nice Ruby syntax that uses

to allow a nice language to XML mapping:

  puts "* Writing Academic Sessions..."

xml.tag!("academic-sessions") {
  2008.upto(2012) { |i|
    xml.tag!("academic-session") {
      xml.eid(i)
      xml.title("#{i-1}-#{i} School Year")
      xml.description("#{i-1}-#{i} School Year")
      xml.tag!("start-date","6/1/#{i-1}")
      xml.tag!("end-date", "8/31/#{i}")</pre>

And just run though a bunch of loops, and pretty clean method calls to spit out XML.

Thanks to http://blog.katipo.co.nz/?p=29 for the tips on Builder, especially the bit about using

to put in names which would translate to Ruby keywords (e.g.

where the - makes it

otherwise)

So… I was editing config.js to cut down the option from the default Sakai toolbar configuration for a Sakai build (which makes a huge diffence in being able to see stuff in the richTextAreas).

I got burned for a while (well, 10 minutes anyway) due to Firefox and some aggressive JS caching. Did a bunch of mvn deploys before I realized that was the problem.

Installed the Clear Cache Button which helped enormously.

Many thanks to Google, the FCKEditor docs, and the blogger who shared his pain (before me) about getting stuck due to Firefox’s caching.

I started this entry while I was riding a train back from the Laguardia ePortfolio Conference I’m endeavoring to reflect upon and synthesize threads from various (enlightening) presentations I’ve seen, and discussions I’ve had the privilege of participating in. First a brief plug: the content from the conference was fantastic — many congratulations to the folks from Laguardia Community College for organizing such a wonderful event.

Sakai has amazingly broad potential. The energy and excitement in the community and among those who have been watching Sakai make it clear that we’re really realizing the benefit of contributor’s blood, sweat, and tears in the form of some exciting tools for teaching and learning. Sakai seems uniquely positioned to become the base of a whole ecosystem of tools supporting different facets of the academic experience ranging from instruction, to assessment, to facilitating interactions between learners. I think we may be at a crossroads in terms of positioning, particular as we evolve towards explaining the product, beyond the project & community. Laguardia’s conference and discussions, especially those related to “Sakai vs. OSP” really focused my thinking on various opportunities for Sakai to support different areas of teaching, and learning.

A statement: I think the the common usage of Sakai to discuss both a specific set of tools supporting course/learning management (Sakai CMS/LMS?) and a platform/environment upon which those tools can be built and deployed has resulted in some confusion. I have heard many questions recently in the vein of “do you have to use Sakai to use OSP?” or “we’re a Blackboard school, and aren’t going to switch, does that mean OSP is out?” The fact that OSP is a toolkit built on top of Sakai (the platform) seems to be a confusing point for many who don’t currently have plans to deploy Sakai as a CMS/LMS.

To clarify, yes: it is quite reasonable to deploy OSP as a system exclusively dedicated to portfolios, completely separate from the other tools. Inputting text, adding reflections, uploading evidences, and managing assessment are all perfectly capable of being performed in a stand-alone environment. In the same way that past releases of Sakai downloaded from sakaiproject.org “stealthed” (hid) the portfolio tools an institution could choose to leverage the OSP piece of the Sakai ecosystem without forcing your users to adopt the entire environment — one advantage of the platform’s open-ness and customization capabilities.

In fact, I think this scenario illustrates a very real way to explain Sakai. If Sakai is a platform upon which bundles of tools (courseware, OSP, etc.) can be built, then we have a product with many facets. Each facet (LMS, OSP, Collaboration) supports a different interaction scenario, part of a greater whole of learning. Going forward, perhaps explicitly separating that greater platform from its concrete manifestations (particularly as courseware) would help emphasize Sakai’s potential as a learning suite or system — with facets focused on all aspects of a learner’s experience: courses, co-curricular’s, career advising, libraries & research, collaboration, and personal expression for a start. This thinking was really influenced by listening to many people talk about OSP — as a toolkit for building concrete artifacts: resumes, co-curricular transcripts, certification documents, personal expressions — all leveraging the same tools, but in many respects separate endeavors linked only by

I think there’s a danger that we could allow ourselves to slot Sakai into a box defined by the products that came before. though that’s where many adoptors initial exposure came from. The example of OSP illustrates the clear potential of Sakai’s modular architecture to enable assemblage of higher-level environments supporting particular styles of teaching or interaction. A common environment lets us both build on previous work, and also focus on integrating the experiences for out students and teachers, participants and leaders. My programmer’s mind sees this as being much the same potential as is now playing out in the Eclipse eco-system.

So the question I think this brings up is: if we focus on this broader picture, and think about these “bundles” as being the real deliverable, could we better frame this relationship by rebranding (consistent with recent thoughts about relaunching) the Sakai courseware tools as a separate entity within the Sakai umbrella — “Sakai Classrooms” maybe? Leaving room for thinking of the ecosystem as bundles, which you can mix and match: “Sakai Portfolios”, “Sakai Communities”, “Sakai Social Networking”. Different bundles of functionality built on the same platform, possibly using the same individual tools, but illustrating some of the broader possibilities.

Desire2Blog: Sakai Seems to Think It’s Over:

Maybe Sakai thinks they are finished with this thing, but I’m pretty sure that D2L, SFLC, Blackboard, and all the other players are expecting it to continue on for quite some time. It could very well be that their input from this point forward will be minimal or less. However, their press announcement makes it sound like the whole thing is over. Clearly, that is not the case.

While I’ve not been directly involved in the D2L/Blackboard patent or legal proceedings, I did want to chime in. Many schools that I’ve talked too (and I think the gist of what Michael’s comments reflected) while they recognize that the legal process will drag on for quite a long time, see the likely invalidation as a huge step. Much of the uncertainty expressed by some of our members, or people we’ve talked with recently has been eased, now that the legal shadow looks likely to be removed.

Having said that, Barry is right to point out that this case isn’t over, and I’m sure our edupatents crusaders would be quick to point out that even after this case is over, this particular wave is unlikely to recede any time soon.

Update: Michael Feldstein covered this situation, and how the process is related in terms of Sakai, SFLC, and others in his usual impressive detail.