Since I don’t have RSS feeds for comments, I would like to point out to e-Literate subscribers that several members of the Sakai development team have commented on my earlier initial review of Sakai 2.0. I would like to thank them for their outreach efforts and invite you to check out their thoughtful responses.
Tag: Sakai
-
Now, That's What I'm Talkin' 'bout!
An excerpt from Sakai’s press release regarding a demonstration of the IMS Tool Interoperability (TI) standard:
The demonstration included four LMS systems including BlackBoard, WebCT, Sakai, and Moodle. The demonstration included three applications: Concept Tutor, Samigo(Sakai), and QuestionMark. All LMS/Application combinations worked and were demonstrated at the meeting which validates the interoperability of the IMS TI specification.
The demonstration was the culmination of nine months of significant co-design and engineering between all of the participants.
Now that the interoperability demonstration is complete, the standard is expected to be published Fall 2005. As long as the standard is finalized in time, we expect that this feature will be present in the Sakai 2.1 release in the Fall 2005.
-
First Impression of Sakai 2.0: Better Than I Expected
Given that Sakai 1.5 was a feature-impoverished, unusable wreck, I fully expected 2.0 to be unusable as well. After spending half a day with it, I think it’s safe to say that I was wrong. While 2.0 is certainly not nearly as mature as other FOSS LMS’s such as dotLRN and Moodle, I think it may just be roughly competitive with entry-level Blackboard or WebCT Campus Edition. That’s an impressive leap to make in 6 months. (more…)
-
Is Sakai a Platform or a Product?
Ben Brophy, a UI designer at MIT, muses about whether Sakai is a platform or a product. His initial answer is that it should be both. But he worries about the implications of having it as platform:
The conference ended with a Q&A session with the Sakai board members. I asked how decisions about what’s included as the ‘core tools’ will be made. The response I got from one board member was “I’d like to see Sakai include six discussion boards. The user can try them all and decide which they like best.” No other board member disagreed.
That’s been bugging me ever since. Even assuming that each school’s IT department will pick a default set of tools (a possibility mentioned by the board member), does it make sense to have Sakai include every tool built? Can there be no standards for inclusion? If I’m developing a new attendance-taking tool that I want to be able to post grades, what do I do if there are 6 gradebooks?
This isa problem, for sure. But it’s not one that I’d be looking to the Sakai community to solve for me. (more…)
-
Threaded Discussion Interfaces: A Research Challenge
In the past, I have ranted about the fundamental flaws with threaded discussion interfaces as opposed to a simpler flat interface, where all posts in a conversation can be seen on one single, scrolling page. I am going to up the ante by making a more specific claim and challenging the research community to prove me right or wrong.
My hypothesis, based purely on personal experience, is that threaded discussion interfaces lead to far less synthesis in educational conversation than flat interfaces do. (more…)
-
What Version of Yahoo Are You Using?
This great question was posed by Patrick Masson, SUNY Learning Environments’ Director of Technology Projects, to make a point about the next generation of course management systems. The design of the current generation of systems is that of old-fashioned monolitic systems. Blackboard, WebCT, Angel–even Moodle (albeit to a somewhat lesser degree)–they are all built on this model. To improve the system, you have to upgrade to the next version.
But web services such as Yahoo, Jotspot, and Salesforce.com are versionless. We don’t know what version of the product is running and we don’t care. New features are added from time to time, but that all happens seamlessly for the user. There’s no migration…no “flipping of the switch.”
So what does a course management platform need to have in order to support this kind of versionlessness? In a word, “services.” (more…)
-
Sakai Updates
Mike Kruckenberg has posted several updates from the Sakai Winter 2004 Conference: