Michael Korcuska Sakai Blog

I have so much to say about what went on in St. Paul at the JA-Sig Spring Conference that I hardly know where to begin. I’ll start with a meeting that some Sakai folks had with the folks from Bedework. If you don’t know about Bedework, it’s a higher education-based community source calendar project. It’s built in Java and has an intense focus on complying with calendar standards like CalDAV. It’s currently based at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

After their excellent presentation, we (John Lewis from Unicon, Clay Fenlason from Georgia Tech, Mike Osterman from Whitman College and myself) met with three members of the core project team, Mike Douglass, Gary Schwartz and Arlen Johnson. Mike, Arlen and Gary are very knowledgeable and passionate about Bedework and their work with the standards bodies is extremely valuable for the entire higher education community. Higher Education does have a different emphasis than your average company (e.g. public events are far more important) and even some unique use cases (e.g. faculty office hours need to be made available across multiple classes). Even if your campus is not going to use Bedework you should send a big “Thank you” their way for keeping higher education use cases front and center in the standards committees. And if you’re looking for a new calendaring system, check out Bedework.

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Well it seems like a long time ago now but the JA-Sig Spring Conference was a big success from my perspective. This was pitched as a “Community Source” event and included participants from a variety of higher education open source projects including:

• uPortal
• CAS
• Sakai
• Internet2
• Fedora Commons
• dSpace
• Kuali
• Fluid
• Bedework

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I recent spoke with the online learning team at Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU). They let me know that in May of this year, Sakai will become the enterprise learning management system at SVSU, replacing Blackboard. It’s great to see another smaller school (<10,000 students) using Sakai as an enterprise course management system. They are also joining the Sakai Foundation as a member, which is the icing on the cake.

SVSU made the following announcement to the Sakai email lists, so instead of my describing what they are doing….

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In case you don’t follow the Fluid lists/blogs, I want to draw your attention to an extremely high quality blog entry from Colin Clark, Technical Lead for the Fluid project. Colin’s post goes describes why you should use JavaScript toolkits rather than rolling your own and why, after considerable exploration, the Fluid Project chose jQuery as its library of choice. The criteria they used to make this decision included:

• Cross-browser support
• Easy debugging
• Event abstraction
• A solid DOM manipulation library
• A strong community and clear roadmap for improvements
• Accessibility

Thanks, Colin, for taking the time to articulate this. I encourage you to read the entry, read the latest happenings on the Fluid Project and check out jQuery.

I’m extremely pleased to announce that Diana Laurillard, Professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at the London Knowledge Lab, will be the keynote speaker for the 9th Sakai Conference in Paris. Diane is a recognized authority in technology-based teaching and learning and author of the excellent book Rethinking University Teaching: A conversational framework for the effective use of learning technology.  She will be speaking on Wednesday morning, July 2nd. You won’t want to miss it.

I’m also pleased to note that we have confirmed two excellent featured speakers. James Dalziel, Director of the Macquarie E-Learning Centre Of Excellence at University of Macquarie and the creator of LAMS, will be speaking on Learning Design and pedagogy. Wendy Mackay, Research Director with INRIA, Futurs, in France, will be speaking about some of her lab’s work on interaction design. The lab is called In|Situ| and has a cool blog (check out the pico projector video…I want one of those).

And now is a great time to register for the conference and reserve your hotel room. For those who have submitted proposals we hope to get acceptances out by the end of next week.

See you in Paris!

Photo by Pedro Simões

Sakai board member Josh Baron drew my attention to a recent controversy in the MySQL community. The article describes MySQL’s plans to withhold some key features and source code from the community, reserving them for paying customers. I won’t weigh in on the controversy since I don’t really know much about the MySQL community.

I’m not surprised, though. MySQL is a business (now owned by Sun Microsystems) and as a for-profit enterprise they will need to find a way to make money. The standard way to do this in the software industry is to have different editions of the software at different price points. Here are a couple of examples:

• MySQL
• Salesforce.com

You get the idea. More features, more cost. Nothing wrong with it.

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I thought I was done blogging about the Rhode Island Sakai Conference, but just before I left I attended such a fantastic session that I can’t resist another entry. The session was led by a history teacher at Warwick West High School and three of her sophomore honors students. They are using the discussion tool for a few class assignment. The students spoke about some of things they noticed about this process, and it was a terrific endorsement of even light use of learning technology in the classroom. Here are a few things they mentioned:

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On Tuesday and Wednesday I participated in the Rhode Island Sakai Conference in Newport, RI. The conference has a K-12 focus and is, as far as I know, the first K-12 Sakai conference. The conference was organized by RINET, the Rhode Island Network for Educational Technology.

Rhode Island is doing incredibly important work with portfolios. The accountability pressures on schools threatens to degenerate into a curriculum based on multiple choice tests. I could go on and on about this (and have been known to on occasion) but I think Tom Chapin says it perfectly:

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So those of you from outside the United States probably don’t really understand the mania involved in major college athletics here. And I’m normally immune to most of it, but I have to admit a strong loyalty to my undergraduate institution, Stanford University, and especially the women’s basketball team. (Stanford is a founding member of the Sakai Project so I’m using that cover to slip this entry into my blog. It’s a pretty weak justification but the video below is worth watching.)

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I was pleased to see an announcement from Brock University’s Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies (CTLET) that they will be moving from WebCT to Sakai between now and the 2009 academic term. Brock, located in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, has an enrollment of 17,000 students. Brock University was founded in 1964.

Brock conducted a formal pilot, complete with student and faculty surveys. They’ve build a very nice site describing their pilot, including results from their surveys. One nice tidbit is that 50% of students in the pilot found Sakai either “better” or “much better” than WebCT (another 22% found them “about the same”). While we’d like that number to be even higher, I think it is a testament to the Sakai development community that it has been able to build such a capable system so quickly (Brock appears to be running Sakai 2.3.1). We all have lots of criticism of Sakai and are working to make it better. But we should also remember, amid our criticisms, that we have a capable, usable enterprise system. We wouldn’t have the opportunity to critique the system if it wasn’t being used…

In any case, we hope to see them at the 9th Sakai Conference in Paris. Remember that submissions to the conference are due Friday, April 11th. I’d encourage the folks at CTLET to submit a presentation proposal describing their pilot process.

Congratulations to Brock! Please join me in welcoming them to the Sakai community.