e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sakai Project

  • Sakai Conference: Teaching With Sakai Innovation Awards

    One of the best aspects of the annual Sakai conference is the Teaching With Sakai Innovation Awards (TWSIA). Every year, several teachers in the Sakai community are honored for their work and give presentations on what they’re doing in the classroom. This year, the TWSIA presentations were the keynote on the second day of the conference. The point of these awards isn’t to sing the praises of the Sakai software. Rather, it’s to (a) celebrate the work of some outstanding teachers, (b) remind all the people who contribute to the development and support of Sakai of why their work matters, and (c) give Sakai developers more direct exposure to how teachers are working online and what kinds of capabilities they need and and actually use.

    This year, the first place winner was Dr. Scott Bowman, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. Here’s an interview of him talking about his juvenile justice course:

    What’s striking to me is how well his course lines up with Dan Pink’s three elements of motivation, which I wrote about in my last post:

    • Autonomy: Dr. Bowman’s students are given a lot of room to take their own initiative regarding how they research their assigned cities. It sounds like many took full advantage of that opportunity, going above and beyond the minimum required of them.
    • Mastery: Because students studied different aspects of the same city over the entire course of the semester, they were able to grow their expertise. As Dr. Bowman told his students at the end of the semester, they probably new more about their cities than many of the folks that they talked to and many of the agencies that were responsible for the juveniles in their city.
    • Purpose: Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the course is that students were studying real juveniles in real places with real consequences. They knew that what they were talking about matters. It wasn’t all hypothetical textbook stuff. The students were able to “see themselves as practitioners.”

    In terms of the technology, it wasn’t anything special. Dr. Bowman was using the relatively basic wiki tool in Sakai. And that’s a fairly important point. These students needed neither fancy LMS doodads nor radically different PLEs nor the burning down of the university as an institution. This worked on good old-fashioned student-centered teaching, with the help of a pretty basic social web tool, but used in a way that subverts the expectations of the typical classroom kabuki. (Hello, Secret Revolution.)

    With all the talk about the technology, it’s easy to forget, especially when observing from the outside, that Sakai is first and foremost a community of people who are passionate about improving education. That’s one reason why I’ve been so delighted to see the TWSIA take increasing prominence at the conferences over the last few years.

    Here’s the conference keynote presentations of the first- and second-place winners. It starts with awards for Sakai Fellows—people who are recognized for their great work in supporting the community in various ways. The keynote introduction begins at around 12:00.

  • Sakai Conference: Kamenetz Keynote

    OK, this was worth the wait. I have video of Anya Kamenetz’s keynote, which set the tone for the Sakai Conference 2010 in some important ways. I also have a short video interview with her, some related video content from Dan Pink, and of course, analysis of what all this means for educational technology in general and for the design of Sakai 3 in particular.

    Be warned: It will take you over 90 minutes to consume all the content from this post. Not counting post-consumption rumination. ((Did I or did I not warn you about impending blogorrhea? I believe I did.))

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  • Understanding the Sakai Product Council

    If you have never been involved with an open source project, one of the great sources of mystification (and anxiety) for you might be how a group of people spread out all over the world with a wide range of motivations can come together to work on a complex project and produce something coherent and useful. Of course, we know that such things do happen. (For a beautiful illustration of it happening under conditions of extreme lack of visible coordination, watch Jon Udell’s classic analysis of the evolution of a Wikipedia page, Heavy Metal Umlaut.) We know that it can work. But, from the outside, it’s hard to understand how.

    The truth is that there is a wide range of governance structures that work for different open source projects, and none of them are particularly mysterious once you come to understand them better. Some projects, like Moodle and Linux, have structures that bear some superficial resemblance to normal management structures in that they have strong central managers who make a lot of final decisions. I say “superficial” resemblance because, in many cases, these managers are acting as part traffic cop and part adjudicator, rationalizing contributions and suggestions for direction from all corners of the community more than they are giving top-down commands.

    Other open source projects, like Sakai, take a more distributed approach to management. When they can, they tend to modularize the development so that small groups can work largely independently from each other and can reduce the coordination required to those areas in which their pieces have to work together, either from a technical perspective through integration or from a functional perspective through, for example, common user interface conventions. For those functions where cross-module decision-making has to happen, the community develops mechanisms that look a lot like a representative democracy. In some cases, community members will vote directly on an issue that needs to be resolved. In other cases, they will select representatives to work together in a small group to work through the issues. Just how much (and what kind) of coordination is required depends on a number of factors. Software that has a significant user interface generally requires more coordination than software that does not. Programs where the modules share a lot of technical integration interfaces or services also tend to require more coordination than those that do not. Projects that are in the beginning of their life cycle tend to require more coordination those that are mature.

    Over the years, the Sakai community has tried a number of different coordination structures. One of the most recent innovations (and experiments, really) is the Product Council (PC), of which I am a member. What follows here is my own personal meditation on how the PC came about, what function it is attempting to serve and how successful we’ve been at it so far.

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  • Academic Study of Blackboard vs. Sakai at UNC School of Medicine

    Brian Moynihan has posted his Masters Thesis on University of North Carolina School of Medicine’s LMS evaluation, which eventually came down to a shootout between Blackboard and Unicon-supported Sakai. There’s a lot that’s of interest in this paper, particularly around the complexity of higher ed IT environments and the need for integration, but these two paragraphs particularly caught my eye as being relevant to the general LMS evaluation process of many schools:

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  • Mellon Foundation RIT Project Concludes a Success

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. Apologies to Jim; this has been sitting in my inbox for a couple of weeks now.

    “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is closing a grant program that financed a series of high-profile university software projects, leaving some worried about a vacuum of support for open-source ventures.”

    – Marc Parry, “In Potential Blow to Open-Source Software, Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 January 2010

    A closer analysis suggests the Mellon Foundation’s “Research in Information Technology” had already met its objectives. This announcement should be an opportunity for reflection and appreciation of what was accomplished.

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  • Sakai Learning Capabilities Brainstorming

    This is a guest post by David Goodrum. David is Director of Academic and Faculty Services at Indiana University and a member of the Sakai Foundation Product Council. I asked David to write a post about the process that he started to help ensure that Sakai 3 will be teacher- and student-centric in its design.

    Over the last couple of months, the Sakai Teaching and Learning (T&L) group has been working on a loosely structured brainstorming activity focused around visioning teaching and learning needs for the next major version of the Sakai collaboration and learning system, often referred to as Sakai 3. There has also been excellent representation and participation from the Sakai User Experience (UX) and Open Source Portfolio (OSP) groups as well. A link to the spreadsheet can be found at http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/PED.

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