e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Patrick-Masson

  • Announcing the Apereo Foundation Advisory Council

    Long-time readers know that I have had a close affiliation with the Sakai Foundation at teams and served on the Board of Directors relatively recently. This year, Sakai merged with the Jasig Foundation to form the Apereo Foundation. The purpose of the new organization is to become a sort of Apache Foundation of higher education in the sense that it is an umbrella community where members of different open source projects can share best practices and find fellow travelers for higher ed-relevant open source software projects. In this merger, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, last week the foundation just announced that the board of the Opencast project, which supports the Matterhorn lecture capture and video management project, voted to effectively merge with the Apereo Foundation. (The decision is subject to discussion and feedback by the Opencast community.) On the one hand, Opencast probably wouldn’t have joined the Sakai Foundation because they want to interoperate with all LMSs and wouldn’t want to be perceived as favoring one over another. On the other hand, had they joined Jasig prior to the merger, they would not have had access to the rich community of education-focused technologists that Sakai has to offer. (Jasig has historically focused mostly on tech-oriented solutions like portals and identity management solutions). The fact that the Opencast community is interested in joining Apereo is a strong indicator that the new foundation is achieving its goal of establishing an ecumenical brand.

    And in that context, I am pleased to tell you that I will be involved with the foundation in a more ecumenical role. Specifically, I will be facilitating an advisory council.

    (more…)

  • The IMS’s New “Caliper” Learning Analytics Interoperability Framework Is Deeply Interesting

    The IMS has announced the initial public release of something they call Caliper, which they characterize as a learning analytics interoperability framework. But it’s actually much, much more than that. In fact, it represents the functional core of something that my SUNY colleagues and I used to refer to as a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS), and is something that I have been hoping to see for eight years, because it promises to resolve the tension between the flexibility of lots of  separately developed, specialized learning tools and the value and convenience of an integrated system.

    Let’s take a peek at the framework to see why I’m so hopeful about this framework. But before we do that, you should fasten your seat belts and strap on your aviator goggles. It’s going to get geeky in here.

    (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…)

  • How to Understand and Follow the Sakai Foundation

    Machu Picchu
    cc photo credit: AlejoC

    My friend Patrick Masson has started an EDUCAUSE wiki page to develop a working definition of “openness”. I’m going to sidestep the hot debate around that topic and focus instead on the distinction he makes between openness and transparency, which he defines as “provid[ing] the stakeholder community access to–and perhaps even a platform to inform–the reasoning, debate, considerations, outcomes, etc. that affected an authority’s organizational, operational or strategic decision, whereas openness shifts authority for decisions to the stakeholder community.”

    Transparency is a highly underrated virtue that often gets lost in conversations about openness. If you have the theoretical right to influence the direction of an open project, but you can’t practically exercise that right because you don’t know what the heck is going on (never mind why it is going on), then the value of openness to you is diminished greatly. Transparency is also vitally important for people and institutions that don’t care that much about open source per se but want to minimize their risks in adopting a product, whether it is open or not.

    It turns out that meaningful transparency his hard to achieve, particularly in an open source community, where decisions are communal and distributed. You can’t expect everyone to have the time, knowledge, or skill to follow the listserv discussions closely (assuming that all the important conversations are happening on the listservs and not in chat or face-to-face), understand the context of the conversations, and follow all the implications. I think that’s one reason why some people get nervous when they consider adopting open source software. It’s very hard for them to understand how the software actually gets produced. And if they can’t understand it, then they can’t really trust it either.

    Open source projects can be organized in a wide variety of ways. In Sakai, the community has a dues-supported foundation that facilitates the collaboration among the participants and generally tries to make the work going on in the community as visible and comprehensible as possible. What follows here are some suggestions for the Sakai-curious—as well as current members of the Sakai community who may feel like they’re a little bit out of touch with what’s going on—about how to better understand what the Sakai Foundation and community are up to.

    (more…)

  • Great Little Conference in Upstate New York

    My buddy Patrick Masson is running his second annual 2-3-98 conference in Delhi, NY on August 6th and 7th. The first day is all about open source in higher education with a keynote by Bob Sutor, IBM’s Vice President of Open Source and Linux. The second day is a Moodlemoot. Last year’s conference was great—good presentations, interesting attendees, and good food. If you get a chance, you should go to this conference. It’s good—and good for you!

  • Oracle's New Academic Enterprise White Paper

    The product group I’m in at Oracle (Academic Enterprise Solutions, or AES) has a new white paper out on the company’s vision of the future of the academic enterprise. A lot of this is aspirational, but it does give you a sense of the general direction that the company would like to take in terms of product development. Also, being Oracle’s vision, it focuses on Oracle’s view of academic IT and how Oracle products fit in. If you don’t like enterprise-y approaches or you don’t like Oracle products, then this document probably won’t be of much use to you.

    I’d like to acknowledge the influence of a number of outside folks on the thinking behind this paper:

    • My former colleagues at the SUNY Learning Network, especially Patrick Masson and Bernie Durfee, were co-creators of the Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) concept that the white paper specifically invokes.
    • Much of Oracle’s specific vision of the future of learning environments is heavily derivative of the excellent work begin done in the Sakai community around Sakai 3. 
    • Oracle’s thinking about academic analytics has been enlightened by the work of John Campbell’s team at Purdue University.

    I apologize to any others I may be missing; there are a lot of smart people working on these problems, and the AES team has tried to listen closely to as many of them as possible.

  • Openness: Finally, We're Getting Somewhere

    Update: The Sannier vs. Wheeler smackdown is available on video here. Microsoft Silverlight is required.

    As I sit on the flight home from the EDUCAUSE conference thinking back on the themes of the week, it is clear to me that various flavors of openness have finally arrived in a big way in higher education, with more on the way. Certainly, a critical mass of universities are recognizing the value of open standards and accepting that open source is a viable and important approach. Open access and open educational resources are coming on too, although they are much earlier in their adoption cycle. Further down the road, open governance and open business practices are looming on the horizon.

    (more…)