This is a guest post by Nate Angell, a nominee in the 2010 Sakai Foundation Board of Directors election. His bio and platform are available here.
Challenges & Opportunities
The greatest challenge we face in the Sakai community is how our collaboration can stay healthy and relevant in a time when numerous forces are rearticulating not only educational technology, but education itself.
Before Sakai first started—not even that long ago—centralized learning management systems (LMSs) were not necessarily considered crucial in higher education, as they still are not across K12 today. Since that time, most higher ed institutions have recognized that offering enterprise online learning platforms is crucial to their missions. In the interim, we formed Sakai to enable us to develop and support such central platforms on our own terms.
Yet today, the now well-accepted idea that an educational institution should offer a single, centralized learning technology platform is under a variety pressures to evolve, including:
- Nimble, specialized technologies with compelling academic capabilities appearing and disappearing nearly daily.
- Large commercial technology companies offering seemingly costless platforms for collaboration, research, and thought work.
- Students, faculty, and researchers finding more reasons to reach outside institutional and pedagogical boundaries.
- More people customizing, hacking, and developing their technology tools.
- Data generated by teaching, learning, and research calling out for and flowing in to a wide variety of new uses.
- People increasingly accessing online technologies day and night from multiple devices in far-flung locations.
- Educational institutions reinventing their activities to meet changing cultural and economic patterns.
These same pressures—and more—challenge the Sakai community, our practices, and our technology to evolve as well. To meet this constellation of challenges, I believe we in Sakai need to understand them as opportunities for our continued engagement, not as threats against which to raise our defenses. This positive attitude is not unfamiliar to the Sakai community: we rose together out of just such engagement and apply it daily to our work with each other. Sakai exists not merely to support what we have now, but to bring our collective energy and effort to develop and own what we need tomorrow.
Sakai in Three Years
My vision of Sakai three years from now can be summed up in a single word: growth. Not just growth for growth’s own sake, but growth along many dimensions.
Part of that growth should be new people and new institutions choosing Sakai and adding their ideas and resources to our collective endeavor. We set out to help educators take control of their own technology destinies. If we are not bringing that gift to more people, then we are not fulfilling our founding goal.
Yet successful growth is not measured only by adding more names to the Sakai list. We also need to grow what Sakai can offer: our continuing work to open Sakai to other technologies via a variety pathways, to sustain multiple technology projects of our own, and to partner with complementary communities already demonstrates our progress down this path.
We must also measure growth by how many ways we offer to engage in our vision. Sakai has come far beyond our deep, enterprise technology roots to include more players on our stage. We now count technologists of many stripes, instructors, designers, accessibility experts, vendors, policy-makers, and more among our ranks, all hailing from widely international locations and organizations of every shape and size. New efforts are underway to reach out to students, to professional organizations, and to new policy- and grant-making bodies to further expand our constituencies. By continuing to become more, to more people, we ensure our work does not atrophy, losing touch with what matters.
Last, but not least, we must continue to enlarge what is possible with Sakai. While we have a commitment to support the activities we already have underway at our organizations, we also have the tradition and the mandate to support activities that go beyond. The continuing novelty of what our work so far makes possible should inspire us to further work that in turn generates possibilities we can’t yet imagine.
Over the next three years, we should continue—and stretch—these trajectories, until we truly grow to become not just the community that supports a technology called Sakai, but a community called Sakai that supports technologies for education, and all that can mean.
Steps We Must Take
The Sakai community must focus on three, interrelated activities to meet these challenges, grasp our opportunities, and lead us to where we want to be three years from now.
First, a very tangible, yet crucial activity: ensuring the continued health and effectiveness of the Sakai Foundation itself as a coordinating body. The unique governance structure of the Sakai community is one of our most valuable assets. The Foundation is key to our distinction. Imagine for one moment Sakai without a sustaining—and sustainable—nonprofit foundation at its center: any positive vision we have depends on the ongoing vitality of this entity, dedicated to nothing other than Sakai’s success.
Second, a governor for our growth: building and maintaining mechanisms to ensure that growth generates continuing common resources. By establishing a viable core platform and spreading its adoption, Sakai has demonstrated that this center of gravity will generate innovation and extension. We need to make sure that our growth also returns sufficient resources to support the less sexy, yet essential activities at our core.
Third, a guarantee of our promise: establishing and maintaining quality and coherence in our products and processes. As Sakai grows, we need to build on our promise that our work not only meets, but exceeds the quality and coherence of alternatives. To date, we have achieved these measures only inconsistently. We need to institutionalize processes to bring new rigor to our work and meet the expectations we set for ourselves to stand at the front.
I welcome further conversation about these ideas and my candidacy for the Sakai Board of Directors. You can read more of my thinking about Sakai on my blog at http://xolotl.org.
