e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Michael-Korcuska

  • 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.

  • Sakai 3: What It Is and When To Move To It

    I have been getting a lot of questions from the Sakai-curious lately about the whole Sakai 2 vs. Sakai 3 question. When will Sakai 3 be “ready”? When is a good time to migrate? If I’m under pressure to migrate in the short term, what should I do? Should I go to Sakai 2 and migrate later? Or is that like trying to leap the Grand Canyon in two hops? These are tough questions, in large part because they depend a lot on the specifics of your institution. I’m going to do my best to provide some guidelines here and, in the process, provide some context about what Sakai 3 is as well as how the Sakai community is working together on it.

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  • Review: Sakai Courseware Management

    I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while. I promised Michael Korcuska that I would review the new Sakai book that he co-wrote with Alan Berg. This is a particularly important milestone for the Sakai community because it is the first one published about the LMS. When you have only one book on a system, it needs to cover a lot of ground to satisfy the different audiences. In contrast, because there are at least ten books written about Moodle, it is possible to have one written just about using it to teach 7- to 14-year-olds. Can the new Sakai book be all things to all audiences? Does it meet the challenge? The short answer is “mostly”.

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  • Sakai 3 As Mac OS X, Part Deux

    At the risk of sounding a little silly, I’m going to attempt to extend the analogy between Sakai 3 and Mac OS X that I made in my last post. The reason I think this exercise is worth trying is that the Mac OS X transition is a relatively clear and uncluttered example of a successful rearchitecture of a product with an installed base, and it provides us with a good model of what could happen with Sakai 3 if the initiative is executed well over a number of releases. Please understand that I am not predicting anything here. I’m just trying to model possibilities so that we can set a ceiling on expectations.

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  • Imagining a WeLE

    A while back, I noted with some interest Michael Korcuska’s screencast showing off a prototype of some functionality planned for Sakai 3. Some recent related conversation has come up on the Sakai listservs regarding the possibility of including wiki-like capabilities as core functionality of Sakai 3 and how this might overlap with and complement the capabilities in the screencast. I will argue here that, if combined carefully and enhanced with one more idea that has been floating around for Sakai 3, we end up with something quite new and interesting in the world of learning environments. I propose calling this new and interesting something a “Wiki’ed Learning Environment”, or WeLE.

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  • Nice Plug for the Oracle Academic Enterprise White Paper

    Thanks to Sakai Foundation Executive Director Michael Korcuska for providing a nice review (with some thoughtful analysis good suggestions) of my team’s (relatively) new white paper.

  • Sakai 3 Screencast

    Michael Korcuska has a new screencast up showing some of the concepts planned for Sakai 3:

     

    I really like what he’s doing here. These multimedia narratives of concepts still in development should greatly increase the amount and quality of feedback the developer community will get—before the release gets out the door.

    By the way, as far as I know, this is working (though not necessarily production-ready) code.