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Category: Ed Tech
The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.
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Understanding the Sakai Product Council
If you have never been involved with an open source project, one of the great sources of mystification (and anxiety) for you might be how a group of people spread out all over the world with a wide range of motivations can come together to work on a complex project and produce something coherent and useful. Of course, we know that such things do happen. (For a beautiful illustration of it happening under conditions of extreme lack of visible coordination, watch Jon Udell’s classic analysis of the evolution of a Wikipedia page, Heavy Metal Umlaut.) We know that it can work. But, from the outside, it’s hard to understand how.
The truth is that there is a wide range of governance structures that work for different open source projects, and none of them are particularly mysterious once you come to understand them better. Some projects, like Moodle and Linux, have structures that bear some superficial resemblance to normal management structures in that they have strong central managers who make a lot of final decisions. I say “superficial” resemblance because, in many cases, these managers are acting as part traffic cop and part adjudicator, rationalizing contributions and suggestions for direction from all corners of the community more than they are giving top-down commands.
Other open source projects, like Sakai, take a more distributed approach to management. When they can, they tend to modularize the development so that small groups can work largely independently from each other and can reduce the coordination required to those areas in which their pieces have to work together, either from a technical perspective through integration or from a functional perspective through, for example, common user interface conventions. For those functions where cross-module decision-making has to happen, the community develops mechanisms that look a lot like a representative democracy. In some cases, community members will vote directly on an issue that needs to be resolved. In other cases, they will select representatives to work together in a small group to work through the issues. Just how much (and what kind) of coordination is required depends on a number of factors. Software that has a significant user interface generally requires more coordination than software that does not. Programs where the modules share a lot of technical integration interfaces or services also tend to require more coordination than those that do not. Projects that are in the beginning of their life cycle tend to require more coordination those that are mature.
Over the years, the Sakai community has tried a number of different coordination structures. One of the most recent innovations (and experiments, really) is the Product Council (PC), of which I am a member. What follows here is my own personal meditation on how the PC came about, what function it is attempting to serve and how successful we’ve been at it so far.
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Moodle for iPhone Demo
Here’s an interesting (and unusually high production value) video of an iPhone mobile interface for Moodle:
Moodle also has a Java-based cross-platform mobile client which is not as pretty but seems to have decent functionality. (My impression is that this is fairly similar to the state of affairs with Blackboard’s mobile clients.) You can see screen shots here.
In the long run, we’re going to need to think seriously about creating more teaching and learning affordances that are mobile-specific rather than just creating mobile interfaces to existing LMS capabilities, but this is still a good step down the road.
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Sakai 3: The Benefits of 'Everything is Content'
One of the more radical departures that Sakai 3 makes from traditional LMS design is that everything in the system is treated as content. A traditional LMS is an aggregation of tools—discussion boards, grade books, test engines, wikis, assignment drop boxes, etc.—each of which has its own data model in a relational database. It’s really a hodgepodge of separately designed tools that are knitted together through a user interface layer and a few common services. In contrast, Sakai 3 is being built on top of the Apache Jackrabbit reference implementation of the Java Content Repository (JCR) standard. Everything is treated as content, including grades, test questions and answers, discussion threads, syllabi, personal profiles, chat messages, and so on.
This approach has some benefits in terms of shoring up common weaknesses in LMS designs. But, more profoundly, it also leads to some pretty fundamental changes in the way that learning environments can work, thanks in large part to the strong and growing adoption and maturation of useful content integration standards.
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Michael Korcuska Moving On, Lois Brooks Stepping Up
Update: Lois Brooks now has a blog post up about the transition as well.
Well, I’m sad but not surprised to report that Michael Korcuska has been wooed by an organization with deep pockets to take on a very important role. The founder of LinkedIn, who is apparently a personal friend of Michael’s, invited him in for an interview and the inevitable happened. He was offered a job as their global head of customer operations, with a deal that was too sweet for him to turn down. Michael will be departing as Sakai’s Executive Director as of March 15th. The announcement is here and Michael’s poignant blog post about it is here.
We are very lucky that Stanford’s Lois Brooks has agreed to step in as interim Executive Director. As you may know, Lois just finished serving her second term on the Sakai Foundation Board and has been an instrumental force in Sakai’s development from early on. We are lucky to have her leadership to help ensure that the transition is a smooth one.
Sakai has made great strides during the three years of Michael’s tenure. During that time, project development communications and coordination have vastly improved, quality assurance has taken huge strides, teachers have taken a much more central role in the Sakai community, and the future of the platform has brightened considerably with the start of the Sakai 3 project. Michael had a hand in all of those improvements. Sakai—both the project and the community—has grown tremendously under his leadership.
Michael, you will be missed. But, thanks to the great work that you and the community have done over the past three years, Sakai is going to be just fine.
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Art Pasquenilli and the Sun Microsystems Legacy
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.
Email a few days ago reported Art Pasquenilli would not be transitioning from Sun Microsystems to Oracle Corporation.
Art and his colleagues in Sun Global Education made significant contributions to higher education. We recognize their contributions and see, in retrospect, how their initiatives have benefited and will continue to benefit higher education.
A Collaboration
Sun recognized early that collaboration across institutional boundaries and even country borders would improve information technology infrastructure. Partnering with IT leaders in higher education, Sun began by funding some small conferences of Java developers that later, with Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funding, became the uPortal project. They thought early face-to-face meetings of developers would foster collaborative development—and it did. This experience set the pattern that, with minor changes, served the Sakai project—the Sakai conferences–and now the Kuali project—Kuali Days. The lesson: people who know each other informally work together more productively
Developing IT Leadership
For a number of years Sun Global Education sponsored the World Education and Research Conferences. Higher education IT executives from major universities were invited. But Sun and the WERC participants identified emerging IT leaders and included them in the WERC. For example, the very successful ESUP Portail Consortium in France and Ladok in Sweden began from conversations at WER Conferences. These leaders continue to serve their universities—several now in executive positions.
The Tidal Wave of Data
Art’s passion was electronic libraries. With several leaders in the library community, Sun sponsored the initial PASIG (Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group). Under the leadership of Michael Keller; Stanford University now co-sponsors PASIG and have taken responsibility for the website—a planned transition typical of Sun initiatives. Art and his colleagues accurately forecasted the tidal wave of data coming from research and, to a lesser extent, the proliferation of journals and books. This came at a time resources available to university libraries was decreasing. Recognizing that cooperation was the only way to increase capacity and services with limited resources, PASIG focused on the use of information and computer technology to help meet these needs. The PASIG meetings and the materials coming from the presentations became a valuable resource for all college and university, and public librarians.
Their work also helped shape later versions of MIT’s DSpace and University of Virginia’s Fedora software. Both are now mature and mission-critical products. Implementation is growing—often based on information librarians learned from PASIG. Never the most public, Art was typical of the Sun Globe Education people who worked diligently to foresee the future, to develop Sun products and services to meet the demanding requirements, and to support the dialogs needed for implementation and results.
For Art and others from Sun Microsystems Global Education, our best wishes. Whether you transition to Oracle Corporation or to some other organization, we hope you will remain working in our community. At this time we need your passion, experience, and leadership.
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Blackboard's Progress Toward Standards Support
Coming out of this week’s IMS meeting, Ray Henderson has a good post up describing the progress Blackboard was able to demonstrate toward support of the IMS Common Cartridge (CC) and Basic Learning Tool Interoperability (BLTI) standards. Sometimes it’s hard to tell from a distance how committed a company is to implementing a standard—particularly one that’s still under development. Something to look for is regular public demonstrations of progress within the context of the standards body. The work Blackboard unveiled this week bodes well. The CC demo (import only at this point) was developed by Blackboard itself, while the BLTI demo was implemented as a building block by Steven Vickers at the University of Edinburgh (and released under the GPL open source license). Ray promises an update on the progress at the BbWorld conference in July.
Good stuff.