Sakaidelic Musings

Thanks to all who participated in the NYC Regional Meet Up! We had representatives from four schools (NYU, Rutgers, Columbia, and St. George's), one commercial vendor (Wimba), and another open source community (JA-SIG). I think that pretty darn good for our first foray.

No one really wanted to take notes, but one of the major presentations dealt with Wimba's new Sakai tool in development that provides integration with their software suite. They already offer integrations with pretty much every other LMS out there, so this is a great step forward for their relationship with the Sakai community. However, I did find out that the great "Voice Email" tool that we loved so much only comes with the Blackboard integration (probably because it piggy-backs of some Bb infrastructure that the other systems don't have). Anyway, it looks great and I can't wait to test it out here.

The second main presentation was about Rutger's implementation of Sakai, and the challenges they faced. Like NYU, they have a large user community and not a lot of staff. Additionally, they have a disparate campus, which had a variety of legacy LMSs. It was very interesting to see what tools and versions they were using and hear about their process of moving all of their WebCT users into Sakai. I know we will probably be looking again at SAMigo and Melete based on what we saw of their implementation.

We also had some interesting discussions which I won't go into here. Suffice it to say, it was an afternoon well spent.

Yesterday Essex County College in Newark, NJ was our gracious host for another NYC Regional Meet Up. Essex, Rutgers, NYU, NYU School of Medicine, and CampusEAI were all well represented. We had a chance to talk about a variety of topics, specifically tools, adoption, and content authoring. We also looked at different Sakai sites and spoke about how different organizations have different approaches to using Sakai for teaching and learning in their respective environments.

The subject of portfolios did come up, and we discussed at length the types of use cases for portfolio functionality. Apparently both Rutgers and LaGuardia are doing some type of portfolio work, and NYU is interested. Perhaps we may have a portfolio-centric meetup at some point.

Jason and I also gave a recap of the Paris Conference and covered some of the trends that came out of it. It was great to see both new and known faces, but one of the things I was especially impressed about was variety of experience represented. There were, of course, Developers and Instructional designers, but also quite a few Faculty and Librarians!

If you're interested in particpating in the NYC Regional Sakai Group, please subscribe to the mailing list by joining our site on http://collab.sakaiproject.org (you may need to create an account first).

We had a great time at Blind Tiger last night. We had representatives from NYU, Marist, Columbia, College of Mount Saint Vincent, CampusEAI and the Sakai Foundation. We had developers, UI folks, systems people, client support and managerial types all represented. I'm including the flyer below for historial purposes.