e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Ian Dolphin

  • LMS Outage: Exclusive view of UC Davis contract with Scriba

    When I first heard about the recent LMS outage at UC Davis – which left the school with no LMS access for a full week and without a fully functional LMS through the remainder of the spring term – it was quite clear that this was an unusual situation. There have been plenty of other LMS outages, but with this one not only did UC Davis lose days of system access, during the outage they had no idea if and when the system would be restored. Any useful communication with the vendor ceased, and the school had to scramble and invent their own disaster recovery on the fly.

    What we didn’t know at the time was whether UC Davis staff had planned for such a contingency and had reasonable controls in place. Thanks to the media relations and IT teams at UC Davis, we at e-Literate now have the contract with Scriba to help answer these questions. I have also talked to Ian Dolphin, executive director at the Apereo Foundation that runs the Sakai project, and Michael Sanders, CEO of Scriba, to gather and verify the data in this post.

    In a nutshell, this was a screwup of colossal proportions by Scriba and Scriba alone. Furthermore, Scriba is no longer a Sakai Commercial Affiliate. (more…)

  • The Future of Sakai: My View

    As a member of the Sakai Foundation Board, I have at least the appearance of conflict of interest in any analysis I write about Sakai. That’s why I encouraged Phil to write his own, independent analysis of the recent developments around Sakai OAE. I was happy to support him as one source for the article but not as editor. In fact, in keeping with his previous coverage of the Sakai OAE woes, Phil did not show me his post draft before he published it. This is as it should be. We strive for objectivity and independence here at e-Literate.

    But now that Phil has done his work, I would like to offer up my own personal reflections on the current state of the Sakai software and community and where they could go from here. In the process, I will do my best to make my relationship to the project clear.

    (more…)

  • Ian Dolphin Appointed Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation

    I’m delighted to announce that Ian Dolphin is Sakai’s new Executive Director. Ian is an old hand in the community, having served two terms on the Foundation Board. He’s no stranger to open source and open education, having served on the boards for Jasig and Curriki as well. Most recently, he worked at the JISC in the UK, coordinating the multi-national eFramework project. Ian is a great guy who brings lots of relevant experience, an international perspective and, above all, the passion of a lifelong educator to the job.

    During the job search process, the Foundation really had an embarrassment of riches in terms of qualified applicants from both inside and outside the Sakai community. There were several candidates who I thought would have made fine choices that didn’t even make the first interview cut. The fact that Ian rose to the top of this impressive group says something about both his strengths in general and the fit between those strengths and the needs of the community at this juncture.

  • Review of Oracle AES White Paper

    Ian Dolphin, the International Director of the e-Framework program, has posted a review [PDF] of the white paper that my colleagues and I recently wrote for Oracle. As usual, Ian brings fresh perspective and insight to the topic from his perch in an international organization promoting standards for education, where he gets views into multiple projects across a number of countries. His analysis about the overlap between eLearning and eResearch needs is particularly interesting. Well worth the read.