Sam Ottenhoff of the Longsight Group sent me this valuable clarification via email:
Your criticism of the way most CLEs/LMSs do threaded discussion is absolutely valid and dead-on. But the title you use, What’s Wrong with the Sakai User Interface, is misleading. As I understand it, the work that has been happening with Sakai has almost completely revolved around architecture (Hibernate, Spring, Java Server Faces), authentication, and APIs. Because it’s an “open-open” project, they want to be public and release early and often.
The services embedded in this release of Sakai are legacy CHEF services, developed by UMich (UMich is the only school going campus-wide live for fall). I agree completely with your criticism of the threaded discussion, but you are criticizing a legacy UMich tool and not the “Sakai User Interface” or the future of the project.
So, while I don’t yet know whether Sakai has specific plans to revamp the discussion board interface, it’s certainly only fair to point out that the developers haven’t focused on revamping specific tools yet and, further, that one of Sakai’s widely-publicized strengths is its modularity. I guess we’ll have to wait a while longer to see whether they keep the legacy interface or blaze new trails in the default installation.
