e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sakai

  • The Sakai Product Council

    I am delighted to announce that I have been selected to be a part of Sakai’s new Product Council. As Michael Korcuska explains,

    The Product Council has two important roles: determining which components will be included as part of each product release, and informally advising projects as they progress from R&D to production-ready maturity. As a community-developed open source project, components of each product release are contributed from many different institutions, companies and individuals. The Product Council is the coordinating body for each release, and will work to assure the product’s evolution continues to meet the needs of the educational community in terms of functionality, production worthiness, and usability.

    The group sports an all-star cast. I am honored to be in their company.

  • 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.

  • Permissions and Openness

    I’ve been reading Opening Up Education. So far, I’m impressed. It’s hard to get all the articles in a collection like this to be consistent, coherent, and equally interesting, but the editors seem to have managed to do just that. 

    I want to comment today on the piece about Bodington by Stuart Lee. Long-time readers know that I have been a fan of this system. In the first part of a multi-part review of the system, I wrote:

    I have long complained that LMS permissions systems are usually too rigid and narrowly defined. Bodington’s permissions are more flexible than just about any other LMS I’ve ever seen. (It’s possible that dotLRN’s OpenACS-based permisions are as flexible, but if so, then they are hidden deep under the hood–typically out of the reach of most faculty members.) In most systems, you have a few pre-defined roles–teacher, student, administrator, TA, etc. These roles generally have pre-defined permissions. You can create groups that are essentially nested containers, e.g., a student group will always be a strict subset of the class that contains it. Likewise, these groups are often (though not always) mutually exclusive, i.e., a student can’t be a member of both Group A and Group B at the same time.

    Bodington works completely differently. Every object–a content bit, a discussion forum, etc.–can have an arbitrary number of groups attached to it, each group can have an arbitrary number of overlapping members, and each group can also have arbitrary fine-grained permissions for the object.

    At the time, I caught some flack for focusing on what some viewed as trivial aspects of the system. But Stuart’s essay, along with some recent comments to the Sakai discussion boards about the version 3 vision document, show that this stuff really matters.

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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.

  • Chronicle's Article on Blackboard's Competition

    Jeff Young has a great piece in The Chronicle called “Blackboard Customers Consider Alternatives“. As usual, Michael Korcuska has insightful things to say about it. I only have a little bit to add on one quote from Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen:

    I have 300 people on my development team working full time on our products and services…I don’t know if there are 300 full-time people currently working on Sakai.

    This is entirely consistent with Blackboard’s strategy,  outlined in one of my recent posts, of arguing that they are more “enterprise-y” than their competition because they are bigger and spend more money. As Michael K points out, this particular rehearsal of the argument based on developer numbers is specious in a number of ways. But another thing to consider here is that maybe the brute force that Blackboard has to apply in terms of developer numbers to produce their product may indicate that they are actually doing something wrong. 

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  • Social Constructivists and eLearning

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer

    On July 15th Luke Fernandez, Weber State University and frequent Sakai contributor, posted “Moodle and Social Constructionism: Looking for the Individual in the Community” on Academic Commons. Broadly interpreting his post about attending the San Francisco MoodleMoot US 2008, he identified two issues: (1) How does the choice of an instructional method impact the design, development, or choice and use of a learning system? (2) And implicitly from his response to this conference, what conferences and conference programs increase the adoption and use of education methodologies and technologies? Both have been topics of discussion since the San Francisco MoodleMoot; this post responds to those issues.

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