I've finally uploaded my pictures from the Sakai 2007 Summer Conference in Amsterdam. You can see all my photos tagged with SakaiAmsterdam07 or browse all 110 photos from the whole Amsterdam trip (including a special appearance by dancing fish flakes!)
Alternatively, you can see all the photos on Flickr tagged with SakaiAmsterdam07, or relive the magic with slides and podcasts from the actual sessions.
Firstly, just wanted to post a link to this entry about Blackboard: Blackboard Is Losing Customers, but What Does It Mean? Basically, its too early to tell anything yet, but its interesting nonetheless.
Now, I wanted to recap the current state of Resources in Sakai. I've actually been able to make it to two conference calls, so I feel pretty plugged in right now.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the core "Resources" tool in Sakai is a key area for improvement in user experience, and it's definitely an important issue for us at NYU. We have articulated it as something like "course material organization and presentation," and many new tools or approaches are currently in various stages of work. Here is a summary (especially useful as we approach the Newport Conference):
So far, the things that seem the most interesting to me are Resources Viewer and Citations Helper. I was happy to hear that two of my three dealbreaker issues for Resources Viewer have been fixed, and that soon Resources Viewer will be able to handle content not strictly in Resources (like Assignments, etc.)
Also, it was interesting to hear a tiny bit about Mark Norton's POCS. It's interesting that some of these tools are defined by purely functional requirements (Resources Viewer, Citations Helper, rWiki) and others are more to satisfy a certain pedagogical approach (Melete, POCS). It's interesting (but not surprising) that I find the former more interesting.
In other news, the Resources WG will probably have a meeting in Newport on Friday, possibly sharing a half day with Fluid, but nothing is confirmed yet.
The Full Schedule for the conference has been posted.
Jason and I will be taking part in a Sakai Community Panel called "Sakai in your Backyard: Panel on Organizing Regional Sakai Events" on Wednesday, Dec 5th, in the Newport Coast room from 1:30 PM to 2:10 PM.
Other presentations that I am excited/curious to see:
Web Services in Sakai
Large Scale Sakai
Tips and Tricks with Spring and Sakai
Optimize Sakai Server - Java Memory, Performance and the Garbage Collector
Intro to the Sakai EntityBroker
Strategic Pragmatism for Running Sakai - A Technical Perspective
Sakai and Reporting - Exploring Approaches to Extracting Useful Information
Sakaibrary Project Update - Subject Research Guides
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.
I have just learned that the official tag for this year's Blackboard conference is #BbWorld09.
What is the official Sakai tag? #Sakai2009? (Since we're one conference a year now, and it's good to be Y3K compliant.)
Update: Looks like the official tag is #sakai09.
Although a session/panel/discussion on this is scheduled for later today, I wanted to capture some thoughts from the BOF yesterday on Sakai 2->3 migration.
The old idea of "hybrid" mode is still going strong - in fact, it's really the only idea going for transitioning users from one to the other. We're still operating on the idea that we can run Sakai 2.x "headless" and show Sakai 2.x tools inside of a Sakai 3 container. However, my concern is that at some point, there has to be some mapping and migration from a Sakai 2 tool to a Sakai 3 tool.
User data that relates to a particular instance of a course in a particular semester is not so important - although we have an obligation to retain that for a certain period of time. The data that really does have to be migrated to Sakai 3 tools is what Lance called the "structure" of the course. By that, we don't mean the particular layout - which would obviously be pretty different in Sakai 3 - instead we mean the content, but also the assignments, and the forum topics (although not the posts themselves), etc: anything an instructor would need to bring over to teach the course again to a new group of people.
Could we migrate this data piecemeal based on Instructor course copy? That is to say, when an Instructor is ready to teach a course in Semester B, and they want to copy old content from Semester A (we already have this metaphor in Sakai and Blackboard), the course copy process will migrate any tools to their Sakai 3 versions if those tools are available. For the other tools, Sakai 2 versions will be nested inside.
And then, when the Instructor is ready to teach Semester C, she initiates another course copy (from B->C), and now any remaining Sakai 2 tools are now migrated to their Sakai 3 equivelents (which are now available).
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