e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sakai

  • 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.

  • 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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  • Sakai, Small Schools, and Pedagogy

    Update: Michael Korcuska has a blog post up about some small colleges that have been successful with Sakai.

    Sakai has a reputation for being technology-driven and focused on the needs of large research universities. There was some truth to both of those claims in the early years of the project. However, the recent election of the Sakai Foundation Board Chair and Vice Chair are strong indicators that neither claim is true anymore. The community recently elected the Sakai Foundation board members and the board members, in turn, elected Josh Baron and Maggie McVay Lynch as Chair and Vice Chair, respectively.

    Both Josh and Maggie come from small schools. Josh represents Marist College, a small liberal arts school in Poughkeepsie, NY with about 4,200 undergraduates. Maggie represents College of the Redwoods, a community college in Eureka, CA with 6,774 students. These are not tiny schools, but neither are they huge. Both of these schools hire an external support company (rSmart) rather than managing their Sakai instances with their own IT department.

    Equally importantly, both Josh and Maggie are teachers and not technologists. Both have advanced degrees in education. Both run their educational technology programs at their respective schools. And both came to prominence within the Sakai community for their contributions to developing the Teaching and Learning committee and, more generally, bringing pedagogy to the forefront of the Sakai community’s work and focus.

  • 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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  • 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.

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  • A Brief Word about the Mellon Foundation and Sakai

    Update: Sakai Executive Korcuska has a more detailed blog post about what the Mellon Foundation is actually doing and the impact (or lack thereof) on Sakai.

    There’s been a fair bit of hand wringing online about today’s piece in the Chronicle indicating that the Mellon Foundation will be “eliminating” it’s Research in Information Technology grant program “as a stand-alone entity.” Chronicle writer Marc Perry has positioned this as a “potential blow to open source software.” It’s not terribly surprising that Mellon, like many foundations, is forced to trim and focus its grant giving in this tough economic environment. As is noted in the article (but buried halfway down after a few paragraphs of somewhat breathless reporting), Mellon is not planning to stop giving money for the development of open source educational software altogether. They are reorganizing and trimming, but not stopping.

    Perhaps more importantly for the Sakai community and the Sakai-curious, Sakai has not received Mellon funding (to my knowledge) for a few years now and is not dependent on it. So this announcement, while unfortunate, has no impact on Sakai’s development or its future.

  • 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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