The 10th Sakai Conference is taking place from July 7-10 in Cambridge Massachusetts. Find out more and register at the conference website.If you’re not already following (or contributing to!) the amazing outpouring of videos, pictures, slides and especially tweets from the 10th Sakai Conference in Boston, just check out the Sakai Conference Social Networking and Content Sharing information page.
That’s all….
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As a result of a strategic review of its goals and activities, the Sakai Foundation has recently introduced some important changes to the Sakai Development Process. The introduction of this process and an examination of the role the Sakai Foundation should play in supporting the community resulted in the creation of two new staff positions: Sakai Product Manager and Sakai Communications Manager. I’m pleased to announce that we have completed the interview process for both of those positions and will have two excellent new additions to the Sakai Foundation staff.
Clay Fenlason has been selected for the Sakai Product Manager position. If you’ve followed Sakai at all you’ll know the contributions Clay has made as a community member, a staff member of two Sakai adopters (Boston University and Georgia Tech) and as a member of the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors. His skills and experience, coupled with his passion for and dedication to Sakai, will contribute a great deal to supporting the community and making the new Product Development Process successful.
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I’m very pleased to note University of Oxford’s recent announcement of thier successful transition to Sakai as their primary, campus-wide virtual learning environment (LMS, CMS, CLE). Here’s an excerpt from Adam Marshall’s post to the Sakai lists:
We’re using most of the core tools plus Mneme, Evaluations, Tutorial Sign-up, Search and Site Stats. We’ve also integrated tightly with our LDAP, developed a hierarchy service to allow us to arrange sites in a tree structure and using this, introduced devolved administration via the concept of Administrations Sites (admin site members are able to create new sites within any site where they are a maintainer), we’ve also made it easy to assign the .anon and .auth roles to any site to encourage Open Content. We’ve also developed a hierarchy of Guidance sites with lots of documentation and exemplars, visit weblearn.ox.ac.uk/info.
We ran a very successful pilot last year and attracted a large number of early adopters from over 60 separate departments. These early adopters have created over 700 separate sites which have been accessed by over 4500 users. The pilot has generated very positive feedback and we’re looking forward to all our users (30,000) moving their focus from the old Bodington-based service into nice shiny new Sakai!
A big congratulations to the team at Oxford!
On a side note, this also means that 4 of the top 10 universities in the world are using Sakai as their primary learning management system (Oxford, Stanford, Berkeley and Cambridge). Yale (#11 in the rankings) also uses Sakai and Columbia (#7) has been running a Sakai pilot and we have, of course, high hopes that they will adopt Sakai as their primary system as well.
Not that Sakai is only for major research universities–a wide variety of educational institutions, including community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, large distance learning institutions, K-12 school districts and even small continuing education programs are using Sakai very successfully. You can see a list of many known installations on the Sakai website (not everyone tells us they’re running Sakai).
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I’m pleased to see that the Longsight Group is now offering a new Sakai trial service. They call it their Sakai Authentic Pilot and it allows an organization to have a fully supported instance of Sakai for up to 400 users for 6 months. You get this pilot service at no charge if your organization contracts for onsite training at a cost of $3500. It sounds like quite a nice way to try Sakai on a small scale. There appears to be a fair amount of flexibility in what they are able to offer. You can find additional details on their website.
Of course there are several other Sakai Commercial Affiliates who offer Sakai trials as well. See the Sakai Project website for current hosted Sakai trial offerings.
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As part of the the Sakai 3 project (I should say, the 3akai R&D project that we intend to form the basis of Sakai 3) and the overall UX initiative, the Sakai Foundation, University of Cambridge and Georgia Tech recently engaged a User Experience Design Consultancy in the UK create a visual design. The Sakai wiki contains a description of the process and the initial results, but here’s a quick screen shot of the dashboard:
Sakai 3 Dashboard Sample
I’m personally very pleased with the direction this is heading and is an important step on the path towards delivering Sakai 3. Please take a look and let us know what you think. I hope to be demonstrating this “in action” at the 10th Sakai Conference in Boston, which is now less than 2 weeks away!
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As you may have read in a previous post, Josh Baron held a webinar about Marist’s move to Sakai last week. It was attended by over 80 people from the Educause CIO email list. I, personally, was laid out in bed with the flu and missed it!
But you can see a recording of it here. And the Sakai wiki has a list of questions (and answers) that were asked during the webinar.
Thanks to Josh for doing this! And thanks as well as to Lois Brooks, Mathieu Plourde, Michael Feldstein and Anthony Whyte for helping field questions. The best marketing for Sakai comes directly from those who have adopted Sakai.
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Wave in Sakai
A cool pic and post from Victor Maijer about getting Google Wave in Sakai. Of course it’s not a deep integration but nice to see nonetheless.
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No good deed goes unpunished. I’m sure Josh Baron is feeling a little like that after his innocent comment on the Educause CIO email list generated over 35 on-list responses. There were undoubtedly many other off-list responses directly to Josh.
It started like this (the list archives are public, so you can see for yourself):
Colleagues;
Looking for some guidance on a breakdown of roles and responsibilities for a Moodle Implementation team. I will not be assimilated by Blackborg! Any help is always appreciated.
Thanks
Scott
To which Josh replied simply:
Scott,
We’re in the final stages of a college wide transition to Sakai which has gone very well. If you are interested in another open source option at all let me know as I would happy to share our experiences.
Josh
And hence followed the flurry of “I’m interested” and “me too” emails. So Josh finds himself hosting a webinar on Thursday, June 18, from 12 noon – 1 pm EDT to discuss Marist College’s Sakai transition. You can sign up here. Read more »
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I wrote a few weeks ago about the new Sakai book entitled Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide (available from Packt Publishing). Well I’m happy to say that the book is now available for shipping and that some sample content is available:
One nice thing to note is that Packt is donating a percentage of revenues to the Sakai Foundation. Alan and I are also directing our royalties to the Sakai Foundation. So its a small way to support the project itself.
Packt is offering a 10% discount via its website and those that are attending the 10th Sakai Conference in Boston will receive a discount code for another 5% off. The discount code will be sent to conference registrants by email sometime next week when Mary gets back from a long weekend (during which she is supposed to be staying off email!). If you can’t wait just send me a note and I can send it to you.
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Michael Feldstein over at e-Literate has a clever blog post comparing Sakai 3 to OS X. I think it is mostly spot on. Personally, I was one of the “new adopters” of OS X–I was using Windows during Apple’s transition from 9 to X. When I moved back to the Mac I never ran things in compatibility mode (or whatever it was called).
You could find other similar platform changes that would be comparable, but I like the one Michael’s picked because for a few of reasons:
One important difference, of course, is that Sakai is an enterprise system and an OS X is a desktop system. So the decision-making on transition will be much more deliberative and, in general, conservative. This means our transition can be more gradual. OTOH if I really hated OS X I could have reinstalled 9 and waited. I don’t think that’s an option here–once a school rolls out Sakai 3 they won’t be going back….
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Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide is now available from Packt publishing. The publisher is paying a percentage of every book sold directly to the Sakai Foundation. And Alan and I are donating all royalties directly to the Sakai Foundation.
