Archive for August, 2006
Via Edufilter and reproduced with permission.
Here is an interview with Brad Wheeler; a co-founder of Sakai and current serving Vice Chair of the Sakai Foundation Board.
What was the driving force behind setting up the Sakai project?
Rational economics and strategy for the future. In 2002, IU assessed continuing to advance our very popular home grown “Oncourse” system or to buy from the commercial marketplace. The public report is available - A Course Management System Strategy for Indiana University. Neither was a great option. Our economics were very favorable with great control of destiny in our homegrown system, but as an island, I knew we would struggle to keep pace with the very best innovation for teaching and learning. Michigan had reached all the same conclusions. We agreed to share code in 2002 and that ultimately led to what became the Sakai Project concept (with others) in late 2003.
What has the uptake rate been like? Is it meeting your expectations?
For the eight campuses of Indiana University, Sakai is already our default Course Management System. We’ve had over 90,000 unique logins and auto-load it with over 26,000 courses each semester. Some faculty moved last year and others are moving this year as we prepare to retire our old system.
Beyond IU, the uptake has been at the right pace. I’m delighted with the breadth of engagement from five continents. The project is only now 2.5 years old and has put out five releases. I think the 2.2 release really puts Sakai into full consideration for those that were waiting for a little more maturity in the software. Changing a CMS is a three year venture for most institutions, so many are now in the pilot evaluation year.
What is different about Sakai when compared to other OSS CMS systems such as Moodle or Drupal? Why do you think people should choose Sakai?
Since I’ve not taught with Moodle or Drupal, I can’t speak to relative strengths. I can say that Sakai was conceived as a Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for enterprise-scale use. It is being used for eScience, scholarly portals, university committees, and all forms of collaboration in addition to supporting residential and distributed education. We saw this as a way to move to a Faculty Workbench concept where many of the tools they need for their teaching, research, and service roles are all there together. Likewise, students can use it for their teams and committees beyond courses too. One of our faculty recently told others on a call with a National Science Foundation project that “we do everything in Sakai for our collaboration.” A slight exaggeration, but its use beyond courses is accelerating quickly.
The broad community is also very important. The Sakai Conferences are now really about everything it takes to succeed – training, support, system administration, etc. The explosion of sharing among the Sakai community at the institutional level has been a remarkable development during the project’s second year.
Sakai is open source - can anyone contribute to the code base or become a member of the project?
Absolutely. Sakai has a very active Developer community and many improvements have come from individuals as well as developers who work in universities. There are a set of committers and review processes just like many other open source projects. The technical community works on a meritocracy.
Can you give us a scoop on some new features/initiatives Sakai users can look forward to in the near future?
I’m very excited about the Sakaibrary work to further integrate licensed library content into Sakai. See Integrating Licensed Library Resources with Sakai. There are some very cool synchronous tools for audio/video/whiteboard being developed in the UK. The GradTools work from Michigan is also a good one to help grad students through their degree programs. Sakai is laboring hard with IMS on the Tool Interoperability and Common Cartridge work. The 2.2. release also has full integration with the Open Source Portfolio. This helps mainstream courses, portfolios, collaboration, and more into a common, open platform. Faculty and students can then readily invoke the tools that serve their needs. I knew we were on the right path when an academic department called me recently seeking for us to deploy a Sakai tool built at another university that they had seen at their professional conference.
How do you see the recent Blackboard patent award effecting Sakai development?
It is difficult to see how these attempts to assert patent rights are in the interest of students, faculty, and tax payers. IU’s deployment of these enterprise-class concepts for educational software date to 1997 and 1998 as documented in the WikiPedia entry, thus we’ve made no changes in our plans nor am I aware of changes from others who are working together through open source sharing. The Sakai Foundation has retained the Software Freedom Law Center and Eben Moglen to advise us on these matters as assess the veracity of the patent claim and other efforts to limit the free sharing of educational software that has long been a value of higher ed institutions. Our announcement.
With the emergence of companies such as RSmart it seems to me the often heralded argument that OSS does not have the same support as commercial tools is no longer valid. What do you think about the whole OSS vs Commercial CMS argument?
Is someone really still talking about that? With 13 Sakai Commercial Affiliates and competitive bidding on support and implementation services around open intellectual property, I’d say “argued, answered…dismissed.” Our commercial affiliates have no IP claims on the work of the Sakai Project, and yet they are choosing to be great contributors in many ways. In a field of sixteen candidates with .edu’s having about 85 votes and .com’s having about 11 last year, Members of the Sakai Foundation elected Chris Coppola of rSmart to the board. Why? Because rSmart had been working in the discussion groups and helping the community. Markets work. Other affiliates are doing likewise too.
What are the technologies behind Sakai?
Enterprise Java is the core, but we’ve got connectors for tools in other programming languages as well. We are database agnostic. We use web services, Spring, and Hibernate.
And let me add one more…..
Sakai has shown colleges and universities how to invest together and develop software using open source practices. We are repeating that with the Kuali Financial System that will have its first release in early October, and a Research Administration System announcement is forthcoming. These projects, more than anything, represent a new Coordination Model for higher ed to pool and leverage its resources. It is working because it is held together by incentives rather than contract. Everyone has walk away rights to the code at any time. The value of the community entices them to participate.
August 31st, 2006
I’ve been working this week on the European funded MOSEP project, which is researching and piloting the use of e-Portfolios, primarily for vocational education and training for the 13 - 16 year old age group.
The project is undertaking initial research into existing, innovative and effective practice in the use of e-Portfolios. As part of this we want to undertake a series of case studies.
The case studies will provide us with material to explore the following research questions:
Using e-Portfolios
How are e-Portfolios being uses for the training of young adults (age 13-16) by whom, for what purpose and with what outcomes?
What experience do we have with use of portfolio with vocational learners /socially disadvantaged learners? Are there any country specific and/or cultural differences?
Frameworks and competences
How interrelated are the use of e-Portfolios with European initiatives for standardising the proof of competences (e.g. Europass Framework)?
What framework of standards is influencing the broader uptake of e-Portfolios in the educational and vocational training field?
What skills and knowledge are needed to be a “supportive and reflected” trainer in this process - both pedagogical and ICT skills
Pedagogic approaches
What are pedagogic processes of use of portfolio, how are they integrated with the curriculum and with the overall pedagogic approaches.
What is the relationship of portfolio to informal learning, work-based learning etc. How can a trainer support this developing process? What are the learning objectives for mentoring/coaching learners in the process of developing e-Portfolios
How does the use of portfolios encourage learner motivation
Critical success factors
What are the structural success factors of introducing e-Portfolios in a school environment.
What are the barriers and needs of the trainers and their related institutions while introducing a new teaching process enhanced by an e-Portfolio software (in combination with existing learning environment).
What is the added value of e-Portfolio software and what type of tools support reflective teaching and counselling process.
I would be very grateful if anyone could suggest possible case studies in this area, preferably form European countries.
Technorati Tags: e-portfolios, eportfolio, European_projects, MOSEP
August 30th, 2006
What is Rapid e-Learning?
Need for e-learning content is increasing every day. We need to find out ways for better, faster and with lower cost e-learning development. The “Rapid e-learning” which introduced in year 2004, seems to be a solution. Before proceed we need to clarify what is “Rapid e-learning”. There are three unique characteristics in rapid e-learning:
- Authoring of content should be simple using web based tools and services
- Primary role in content development is on subject matter experts (SME) rather than instructional designers
- Each learning organization must have a content repository for sharing
Common factors of Rapid e-Learning:
- All the tools/services for content creation from SMEs are web based. Produced content will be delivered to the learners as html, flash and other media formats. Common tools for web authoring are not being used.
- SMEs need training for using authoring tools/services
- The learning contents are in smaller “chunks” usually, say, less than 30 minutes of studying time for each “chunk”. Then the course creator will “assemble” these “chunks” into a self contained courseware. These chunks can be viewed as learning objects.
- The learning content can be delivered in synchronous, asynchronous and mixed mode learning environments.
- The contents must be learner centric instead of the “instructor feeding” style.
- Each content module must have a clear theme which allows the module to be presented as a stand alone learning object thus the production time for each of these objects can be “pumped out” on a efficient time basis.
August 29th, 2006
It has already been a month ago since I attended the EU eLearning conference and presented at the EU consultation at the Lifelong Learning Institute Dipoli in Helsinki, Finland. During summer months time simply flyes by!
As project coordinator I gave a presentation about our ambitions and aims of the Bazaar project. I received a lot of enthusiastic responses to my presentation and our project. It would be great if the Bazaar website as a community portal for all kinds of learners, teachers and other facilitators in the field of elearning is seen as a useful place for people to get connected.
On the EU consultation meeting and the EU elearning conference itself, interesting and lively discussions were held about the use of internet and computers for learning and the place where ‘learning’ happens. What struck me was that a lot of the discussion still seems to boil down to whether or not the computer will ever replace the teacher!
And I thought we were already past this…
But it’s important. We cannot discuss the role of computers in learning if we don’t want to discuss the role of teachers.
I had an interesting discussion with a man who said that the use of computers in the classroom should be as small as possible, because children should learn from ‘the real world’.
The real world? The real world! My ‘real’ world has computers in it. The role of computers in the real world is growing faster than ever and I strongly believe that we cannot learn to understand the real world of today if we don’t learn to understand computers.
The real world is filled with computers, but just because you can’t see them, that doesn’t mean they’re not there…
The creators of this website (http://www.realworld.org/) are clearly very concerned about the use of computers for learning, but between the lines I read a fear for the inevitable. Of course ‘computers can gobble up time’, just like watching television and reading books, but we recognize those timegobblers as part of the real world.
I bet that a great majority of people would rather see their children spending a rainy day by reading a book, than by chatting and socialising with their friends on MSN.
I think that the young learners of today, who grow up with access to computers, broadband, new technology understand the real world better than some of their teachers. Maybe it’s time for the teachers to be replaced by learners…
August 27th, 2006
Sometime in the spring - can’t remember quite when or who said it - there was a flurry of posts as to whether Personal Learning environments were the new e-Portfolio. The discussion has too slants. One strand questioned whether there was any real difference between e-Portfolios and PLEs. The second worried about the hype over PLEs and pointed to lack of evidence that the previous upsurge of interest in e-Portfolios had resulted in much real change.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been noticing a resurgence of interest in e-Portfolios. OK, maybe I’m being a little subjective. Last week I was at the launch of a new European project - site still under construction - on e-Portfolios, tomorrow I am traveling to Austria for a workshop on ELGG. But I think it goes beyond projects and workshops. The real driver of the recent discussions is simply the fast approaching new school and college term. e-Portfolios are moving beyond the first adopters, beyond the pedagogic researchers into mainstream use.
Coming back to the first question regarding the difference between e-Portfolios and PLEs, I am not sure of the answer. I don’t think my idea of an effective e-Portfolio is much different form my take on a PLE. But not everyone in the learning technology community shares my views (probably a good job). What we all seem to have agreed on at the e-Portfolios meet up in Manchester in June was that we needed more grounded and small scale experiments in how we might configure and develop PLEs. (for discussion on ideas from Manhester workshop see PLE wiki pages maintained by Marc van Harmelen). We did not need yet another monolithic system called a PLE ( and anyway some ***tards would only try to patent it).
The good news about e-Portfolios coming of age - if my suspicion is right - is it will provide us with a rich landscape to experiment and develop new pedagogic approaches to learning.
Technorati Tags: Personal Learning Environments, social software
August 22nd, 2006
This week is quite an easy one - the Internet has been rife with discussion around the Blackboard patent. As crazy as this patent seems, are we that surprised and can you really blame Blackboard? Like most commercial ventures they want to put any competition out of business - that is the way business works - the fact the patent was awarded is the crazy part!
You can find comprehensive discussions here:
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=35267
http://davecormier.com/edblog/?p=67
http://www.technorati.com/search/blackboard
http://www.knownet.com/knownet/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell/entries/6193224930
August 3rd, 2006
Sean Mehan (http://www.weblogs.uhi.ac.uk/sm00sm/?p=229 and http://www.weblogs.uhi.ac.uk/sm00sm/?p=228) posts an interesting analysis on the Blackboard patent application.
This is just one of many examples that illustrate the problems with software patents (more: http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/). It is a perfect example of how software patents threaten independent innovative software design and technology enhanced learning.
Need more examples? Look at this: http://webshop.ffii.org/
It also shows how an abstract legal decision can have deep (and irreversible) impact on a very personal level. What would happen if other VLE’s, LMS’s and other learning systems have to pay license fees to Blackboard? That would probably kill 80% of them and it would leave the other 20% crippled.
That would surely kill innovation in this area, the same way as we have seen in other area’s where the market is overshadowed by one major monopolist.
I’m sure that the Lisbon Agenda and the commissions Lifelong Learning policy are not helped by this.
I would like to refer to the petition on http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=don-t-allow-software-patents-to-threaten-technology-enhanced-learning-in-europe that was signed by over 500 concerned people. (http://flosse.dicole.org/petition/)
August 2nd, 2006
