e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sakai 3

  • 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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  • Sakai 3 Is Like Mac OS X

    There’s an important point about the the forthcoming Sakai 3 that probably has escaped most casual observers. It is close to a ground-up rewrite. Sakai 3 is to Sakai 2 as Mac OS X was to Mac OS 9, in the following ways:

    • The technological heart (or kernel) of the new version is completely different from the old version.
    • That kernel leapfrogs many current-generation architectures (which are really aging legacy architectures, for the most part) for software of its category.
    • Some of the applications that run on the old version will be able to run on the new version with some modest to moderate development.
    • Other applications on the old system will have to be completely re-implemented on the new system.
    • Still other applications could run on the new system with some tweaking (and probably will for a couple of versions), but they will seem awkward in the new environment until they are re-implemented.
    • Users who have lots of apps that they want to carry over in the old environment will probably want to run that old environment together with the new one in some sort of co-existence mode. New adoptees will care less about that and skip co-existence mode, provided that the new system has the apps that they need.
    • At some point, co-existence mode will go away and adoptees will have to migrate to the new system to stay current. How current adoptees respond to this transition will be largely a function of how well the migration path is done, but some users who are attached to the way the old system worked will have trouble letting go regardless.
    • The first release is likely to have some very impressive capabilities as well as some feature gaps and rough edges. It will be suitable for full replacement use by some, for piloting by others, while still others will want to wait for another release or two. (Whether the 2010 milestone release of Sakai 3 is more like OS X 10.0 or 10.1 in this respect remains to be seen.)
    • The new kernel will likely enable accelerated innovation and impressive progress from release to release, with feature gaps getting filled quickly and new capabilities that nobody has seen before coming too.

    I think there is a good chance that, within a few releases, Sakai 3 will be a trend-setter in its category much like Mac OS X is.

  • 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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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Permissions and Usability

    No Fishing....
    Creative Commons licensed; photo credit: Angus Mackie

    In a recent post, I reviewed the advantages of Bodington’s unusual system of assigning access privileges and mentioned that the Sakai community is planning to support Bodington-like permissions in a future version. There was some follow-up discussion of this on the Sakai pedagogy listserv. In particular, John Norman pointed out that the more flexible permissions structure comes with significant usability challenges. I don’t have any clear-cut solutions to these problems, but I’m going to think out loud here and see where I can get with it all.

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  • Sakai 3 Vision Document

    Via Michael Korcuska’s blog, there is a new vision document describing the proposed path for the next major version of Sakai. If you find this interesting, then you may also want to look at the documents outlining the current thinking for Sakai 3.0 RC1 in (a little) more detail.