e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sakai

  • Connecting Blackboard to Sakai and Moodle

    I didn’t intend to post about this, but people keep asking me what I think, so I guess I need to get something up. For starters, you should read Michael Korcuska’s post on the subject. I agree with everything he says. Beyond that, here’s what I think:

    (more…)

  • At EUNIS and Sakai the Next Two Weeks

    I’ll be at the EUNIS conference this coming week (arriving Monday morning on the red eye) and the Sakai conference the next week (arriving in Paris on the night of Friday, 6/27 and leaving on Friday, 7/4). Feel free to track me down if you’re at either event and want to chat.

    If you do track me down and we have met before, you should know that I’m really bad at remembering names and faces. There’s a good chance that I will remember our prior conversation once reminded of it. I just may not remember its sensory connections to the physical world.  It’s  the way my brain works. (Which is why I tend to walk–and drive–into things.) Please don’t be offended if I need a little help making the connection. It doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy our last conversation.

  • Cost of Exit

    A while back, I picked up on D’Arcy Norman’s complaint about how Moodle doesn’t export content to a standard. In a response to one of the comments on my post, I suggested that open source LMS communities like Moodle’s should encourage adopting institutions to consider the cost of exit as a selection criterion for their LMS. Doing so would encourage them to invest in export capabilities at the time when their commitment to the platform is high.

    Well, as Chuck Severence notes, Oxford is considering doing exactly that with Sakai. Check out his post for some good notes on the pros and cons of various export strategies.

  • At the JA-SIG Conference Next Week

    I’ll be traveling to St. Paul, MN on Sunday for the JA-SIG conference. I’ll be there all week, including the post-conference Sakai planning sessions on Thursday and Friday. I’m a co-presenter for one session with Unicon’s Cris Holdorph on integrating Sakai with Peoplesoft. Other than that, the most likely place you will find me during the day is in the sessions from the “Community Source Management/Governance” track.

    Feel free to ping me or just track me down if you want to meet up and chat.

  • What the Sakai Announcement Means

    Barry Dahl read the Sakai Foundation’s recent announcement about the Blackboard patent pretty closely and is concerned that it sounds like they think the fight is over. I completely understand why he interpreted it that way, but I read it a little differently. If you look closely at the specifics of the legal situation, the Foundation’s position begins to make a lot more sense.

    (more…)

  • Mashing Up the LMS the Google Way

    I have mentioned before Cambridge’s My Sakai project which, writ large, can be seen as an attempt to make Sakai more compatible with Web 2.0 by supporting development of widgets, gadgets, Facebook applications, and so on. Well, they’ve made some substantial progress of late, inspired in part by the Apache Shindig implementation of Google’s OpenSocial API. They’ve created a development paradigm that mostly eschews Java in favor of the HTML, Javascript, and RESTful web services that most Web 2.0 developers will find very familiar. The work, still very much in the experimental stage, recently culminated in a four-day workshop in which 4 Sakai schools (Cambridge, Michigan, Georgia Tech, and U of Toronto) created a new and more user-friendly interface for file sharing within Sakai.

    Here’s how some of the participants described the effort and its results:

    (more…)

  • The Sakai Foundation's Response

    Executive Director Michael Korcuska has posted a response on his blog. In my opinion, it hits all the right notes and is well worth reading in its entirety. I’ll just highlight one particular point Michael makes that I think is particularly important:

    One of the main reasons the Sakai project was started in the first place was to provide more choice for the higher education community. We hope that D2L will continue to offer its product in the United States. We do not want to see this verdict result in less competition and fewer choices in the marketplace.