Sakaidelic Musings

Due to flight delays, I wasn't able to check out "Fearless Javascript" yesterday like I had planned. However, now that I'm at the UPMC, I see that it's plastered with Sakai signs and it's pretty easy to find your way around. I love the architecture of UPMC - I'm not an expert on architecture by any means, but it has a classic late 20th century european/socialist university feel that seems straight out of a movie. As I suspected, temperature controls in the lecture rooms is also very "european."

Got a chance to meet a lot of new people last night and this morning. One side benefit of saying at the "not cool" Marriott is that I meet and socialize with people I would not normally seek out. It's forcing me to meet new people and that's always good. However, we're starting to see the results of having the sessions at UPMC as opposed to doing everything at the conference hotel - you're less likely to run into people and have those serendipitous meetings during off hours. There also seems to be some mixed feelings about the conference bar as well.

I thought today's keynote was interesting, very clear and offered some compelling arguments for teaching with technology that I will definitely be taking back home and using. However, I felt our (meaning NYU's) position in the teaching and learning with technology field is not quite a perfect match with the environment that Diana Laurillard articulated.

Like many US institutions, we are largely a Research university - our instructors (and many of our students) are also researchers. So I felt that the claim that Instructors are wholly unfamiliar with research approaches to teaching and learning slightly jarring. True, they aren't applying ALL those techniques to their teaching, but they are doing some of them. (Post continues below...)

I was very happy to attend the Content Authoring BOF and get some insight into the work and thought that has already happened with regard to this issue. I think it was remarkable how close our respective visions were and how much agreement there was. I was encouraged with how quickly people were willing to discard or admit the limitations of the current tool-focused paradigm.

I was happy that we could articulate (at least partially) the tension between content creation that is structured (and probably based on templates) and content that can be organized any which way ("wild wild west" content authoring). These approaches to content authoring are really more of a spectrum and a potential feature would have to be able to satisfy needs all along that that spectrum.

I liked the idea that we could both accommodate the ability for system-provided templates and also allow users to promote their created pages to templates.

I was also happy that while sequencing and tracking were articulated as important, everyone seemed to agree that neither were crucial for a first implementation.

I was also ecstatic to learn that the groundwork is being laid for Sakai to be aware of content/items/entities inside of tools (like discussion thread, assignments, etc.) in order to accomodate the need to place them on a page and treat them like any other piece of content in Sakai.