We’ve been talking a lot in the Sakai community in the last year about “design-led” development, but I’ve also gone on record in saying that our community members can get ahead of the design and inform it. I’ve been especially pleased to see UCD research springing up in a few areas, and in recent weeks have been promoting the maturation of the “Learning Capabilities” spreadsheet that David Goodrum has championed. At the same time I’ve been hearing concerns that such efforts might come to naught, or that they would not be listened to.

With the sponsorship of Cambridge, HEC Montreal, CSU, Georgia Tech and Berkeley we’ve contracted with a designer, Sam Peck, to lead the next stage of Sakai 3 design work, picking up from where Nathan left off last April. Relatively little has been produced in his first month of activity because so much effort has gone into understanding our domain. He’s been reading through spaces on the wiki, the Fluid project, instances of Sakai new and old, our UCD research, conversations with the long-winded, and also the “Learning Capabilities” spreadsheet. As we all know, it’s no mean feat to work through all these accumulated sources, make sense of them and tie them together. Sam has effectively been knitting together his own documentation as he goes along.

I wanted to share a recent round of his notes, both to provide greater visibility into the process and offer some encouragement that the T&L and UCD work are being factored in.  Attached is a synthesis of these various sources, arranged around flows of assignment activities and the users centrally engaged with them.  It does not claim to be complete or finished, yet although I need to be careful about expectations I offer it here all the same as an illustration of the process.

AssignmentNotes.pdf (16 MB)

On page 2 you’ll find literal quotes of the learning capability user statements that seemed most instructive in this area, and on pages 4, 8-10 you’ll also find the user journeys salted with more of these statements at particular points, followed by sketches that show initial attempts to design around these needs.

Friday night Yuki’s mom went to a concert with a friend, so it was up to me to decide where we went for dinner with her dad. In my quest to eat at every Iron Chef’s restaurants I was able to convince him that we should head out to one of Chen Kenichi’s joints. It wasn’t a hard sell. So, the three of us hopped on the train to Roppongi where Chen has one of his four places.

There were a handful of pre fix options, but none of them really had what we wanted, so we ordered a bunch of dishes in typical Chinese family-style dining.

First up was a trio of cold appetizers. On the top were Scallops cooked with chili peppers. Not too spicy, just a nice, slow, gentle burn on the back of the throat. Bottom right was shredded chicken with a sweet miso sauce. Bottom left jellyfish in a light soy. All three were very complimentary of each other and made for a great start to the meal.

Next up was Shark Fin Soup. Not the most politically correct dish, but hey, a little shark fin never hurt anything. A lot does, but a little doesn’t. The broth was a thick soy flavor and it had thin slices of pork in it alongside the shark fin.

Then came Abalone, one of the sea’s finest of all creatures! Served with shiitake and bamboo shoots it was truly delicious. Judging by Uichiro’s (Yuki’s dad) reaction when he first bit into it, I’d say it was his favorite part of the meal, next to the beer.

After that we had mixed seafood served on rice cakes. The restaurant manager poured the hot seafood on the rice cakes making it sizzle, much like the classic sizzling rice soup commonly found in American Chinatown restaurants. I need make a correction, I think Uichiro liked this dish more than the abalone. Hard to argue, the shrimp, scallops, and squid were cooked to perfection with all of the natural sweetness brought out.

Next was probably my favorite dish of the meal, beef with mushrooms and lilies in a thick ginger soy sauce. The beef was so tender it almost melted in my mouth. The mushrooms and lilies were nice counterpoints to the salty soy. The only thing missing was white rice to balance a little more of the salt. This was definitely more of what Americans are used to than Japanese. Give me this dish and a cold beer and I’m a happy man!

Here we go, the dish that brought me to Chen’s restaurant and the one that will make my brothers very envious, his famous mapotofu! There were two choices on the menu, Kenichi’s and Kenmei’s. Kenmei was Kenichi’s father, the one who brought true Szechuan cooking to Japan. It was a tough choice, but we opted for Kenichi’s since it was his restaurant and not his father’s. It wasn’t quite as hot as I expected, but it was definitely a hot and spicy dish! Packed with Szechuan peppercorns it gives an initial citrusy spice followed by a mouth-numbing burn. Yuki and I added some extra peppercorns to get the full experience, while Uichiro only ate a few pieces of tofu. I think it’s a little spicy for him. It was a little oily as it was douced in chili oil, but that’s what makes it so delicious. The funny thing is that in the middle of the night Tokyo experienced what it thinks was a small earthquake. It wasn’t an earthquake at all though, it was the effects of my trying to digest Chen’s mapotofu! I’m still not quite sure exactly what that dish did to my intestines, but it made a city of 16 million rumble a little. And somehow my chest got a little harrier.

We followed the mapotofu with a mild pork and egg noodle dish. It had shiitake, green onions, chinese cabbage, sprouts, and bamboo shoots. It took a few bites to get the burn out of our mouths, but once it was gone this dish’s wonderful flavor stood out. It’s just too bad I couldn’t finish it all because we ordered one too many dishes I think. Oh well, what can you do?

We thought we were finished when the manager brought us some complimentary dessert, Annin Tofu. Annin Tofu is a popular Chinese dessert. It’s basically just almond jelly. Very smooth, light, and creamy. It’s the perfect way to finish off a meal.

All in all, I have to say that I was a little dissapointed. After watching countless episodes of Chen creating some of the most amazing looking dishes anyone could ever think up, this meal was a very straight forward Chinese meal. Every dish was a classic that you can get at just about any Chinese restaurant. Granted, everything was perfectly balanced, but nothing was off the wall. I was kind of hoping for some Chen originals. This restaurant wasn’t the right format for him to create Iron Chef dishes. I have no regrets, but I wasn’t blown away like I was at other Iron Chef restaurants.

I have now been to three Iron Chef restaurants (4 if you count Bobby Flay, but I don’t consider him an Iron Chef and I never wanted to go to his place). I have done Sakai, Michiba, and now Chen. Next up….Kobe Masahiko.

via koopaladvies.nl vond ik Blackboard’s Response to Open Source: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Deze respons was trouwens omdat Sakai (die het ooit op de UT moest afleggen tegen Blackboard) en Moodle (te?) mooi uit een test kwamen.

First time in Musashi Sakai.

The Oakland Police Department’s SWAT team has won a prestigious competition, seven months after two team members, as well as two other officers, were shot and killed in confrontation with a wanted parolee.

“We’re very happy after what we all went through earlier this year,” Oakland police spokesman Jeff Thomason said Tuesday, referring to the March 21 incident in which the four officers were killed.

Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern announced Monday night that the Oakland Police Department is the 2009 winner of the Urban Shield SWAT competition, which was held over the weekend and drew 27 tactical teams from all over the world, including Boston and France.

Sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. J.D. Nelson said the announcement was met with a standing ovation by more than 1,500 people who attended the awards ceremony at the U.S.S. Hornet in Alameda.

He said the crowd chanted “OPD” as a show of support for the Oakland Police Department.

Nelson said the tactical teams were judged on 25 tactical situations at locations throughout the Bay Area over the course of 48 hours in what many consider to be the toughest tactical training exercise in the country.

In a statement, Ahern, whose department hosted the competition and also competed in it, said of the Oakland police tactical team, “It was obvious by the way they competed they were on a mission to win this for their fallen brothers. Everyone in the crowd was very proud and emotional at their well-deserved victory.”

Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts said he’s “very proud” of the tactical team and “this is truly a great accomplishment despite facing much adversity this year.”

The members of Oakland’s winning team are Sgts. Pat Gonzales and Roland Holmgren and Officers Frank Uu, Chris Saunders, Casey Johnson, Anwawn Jones, Shane Tarum and Marty Ziebarth.

According to Oakland police, in the March 21 incident parolee Lovelle Mixon shot and killed Sgt. Mark Dunakin and Officer John Hege when they made a traffic stop on him at 74th Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard.

Police said Mixon then fled to his sister’s apartment about a block away at 2755 74th Ave. and killed Sgts. Ervin Romans and Daniel Sakai when they and other members of the SWAT team entered the apartment.

One bullet grazed Gonzales’s protective helmet and a second bullet entered and exited his shoulder. He was treated and released after the incident.

Mixon was eventually shot and killed by other officers.

Oakland’s SWAT team was temporarily removed from action after the incident because Romans and Sakai were unit leaders and new leaders had to be trained.

The Alameda County Sheriff’s detail handled Oakland’s SWAT calls for more than two months, but Oakland’s SWAT team went back into operation in late May.

Thomason said Sakai’s widow, Jennifer Sakai, and Gonzales accepted the award on behalf of Oakland’s SWAT team.

LINK

We have a student working for us on comparisons between various LMSes here, and we recently moved on to Sakai. We’ve been looking a bit at installing it on an Ubuntu 9.04 and boy… is this a challenge.

While there seems to be a few sources of documentation around the web (including on the Sakai website itself) on how to install it, they’re all giving a 20 pages-long guide on how to install a specific version of Java (from sources), a specific version of Tomcat (from sources) and a specific version of Sakai (from sources as well). It seems like you need to be an active Java developer, used to the Tomcat stuff to actually get a chance to install it.

Now that makes me recall our numerous users who complained about the fact that installing the videoconference in Dokeos 1.8.5 was impossible. Well, let me say that you require at least double the skills to install Sakai.

The website mentions there are packages for Windows, Mac and Linux, yet the link to the corresponding page is broken (why’s that, I wonder).

An article from a Java developer gives you the impression it is a breeze to install, yes we are talking about a previous, outdated, version of Sakai.

A big negative point for Sakai (yes, you can try it online, but obviously you might want to try out scaling and building your own site on a local server).

I often hear the problem of ensuring the relevance of development work to actual practice framed as “getting users and developers to talk to each other.” Now if by “developers” you mean anyone who has a constructive role in fashioning the end product, well, of course. That’s trivially true. But I think most of the time when I hear this it actually means getting end-users and coders to talk to each other, which sounds like a good idea but is not, I think, often very helpful.

Take the old Sakai requirements process of a few years back, which I think is generally regarded as a failure. Feature requests were itemized, voted on, and the biggest winners trumpeted, then very little happened. But I hear the failure described with variations of “developers didn’t implement” or “resource was not allocated to deliver,” and so forth. As though we had all the information we needed, and just didn’t execute. I think that really misunderstands the problem, mainly by not recognizing the design gap.

There is in fact something that needs to happen between the expression of user need and the coding, and it doesn’t get you very far to try to short-circuit it by bringing users and developers together. That approach just tends to leave you with a product that ticks off the right features, but leaves the users unsatisfied because it has poor design. What we really need is for user researchers to be talking to designers, those people who have a talent for not taking the user’s requests literally, but instead synthesize an elegant answer to several requests at once.

That’s why the old requirements process failed, not because people on the functional side couldn’t get the attention of developer resource, but because we left out the mediation of good design.

Happily, we’re doing this differently this time around, beginning by not trying to establish Sakai 3 requirements through the old pattern of feature requests. We’re instead using a model that David Goodrum championed in Boston this past Summer, with simple expressions of user need (abstracted from particular tool implementations) being mapped to the language of functions and capabilities in increasingly complex forms. It shows us how we can aim at a rich and sophisticated end goal, but still make simple and valuable steps along the way. This is the kind of information I think a designer can use, and then turn around and produce something that a (coder) developer can pick up and run with.

Google Spreadsheet of learning capabilities (open for public editing)

Still a work in progress – it might be better organized by theme, and expanded upon – but I think it’s a strong model.

A new issue of the quarterly newsletter for the UK-based Association for Learning Technologies (ALT) is out, and I’ve got a piece in there about Sakai 3 and the future of the VLE:

Back to basics: the web, academic values, and Sakai

It follows the outline of the keynote at AusSakai fairly closely.

Introduction: This encounter began with a comment posted by Lynn Zimmerman to Tom Preskett’s latest article (“Blackboard Reinforces the Status Quo“). ETC has published variations on this theme in the past, but it seems to be a problem that defies the collective wisdom of educators at all levels. Could it be that we’re barking up the wrong tree? If we assume, for a moment, that teachers aren’t the primary obstacle to change, then who or what is? Why? And what can we do to overcome this obstacle? -Jim S

Steve Eskow, 21 Oct. 2009, 10:38 am:

I’m trying to recall a period of my professional life when “teacher resistance to change” wasn’t used as the master explanation for the failure to improve education. Education seems almost equally divided between insisters on change and resisters to change.

So: some random, hypertextual questions and thoughts for Lisa, Tom, Lynn–and me.

If an institution dropped an organizing framework like Blackboard or Moodle, and creative instructors used their own knowledge of Web 2.0 or 3.0 to shape their pedagogy, would the students taking five courses have to learn five learning systems?

Education budgets are in shock. Institutions have already moved to drastic economies, including the increasing use of poorly paid adjuncts to do most of the teaching. Will adjuncts using Web 2.0 pedagogies be able to instruct more students, fewer students, the same number?

If an institution using the old organizational structures offers 25 sections of English 101 to Freshman, should those sections teach from a common syllabus, or does each instructor set her own goals and choose her own Web 2.0 pedagogy?

A Harvard prof named Michael Sandel–you’ll find him on YouTube–teaches a course called “Justice” that attracts as many as a thousand students: so many that Harvard has to commandeer its theater building for the course. Apparently the students as well as the prof thinks the course generates “active learning,” despite these numbers. Can a lecture really generate “active learning”? (Sandel is now in the process of putting his course online.)

It’s been said before–by me among others–that it’s more useful to think of the system as eliciting the resistance rather than any one element of the system, like the teacher.

Churchill, you remember, started with the building. “We shape our building,” he said, “and then our buildings shape us.” Lecture halls, classrooms, offices, dorms: those structures resist change at least as insistently as teachers.

When teachers leave the existing system–when campus faculty become part of an all-distance learning initiative, for example–their “resistance to change” often ends.

We need to consider changing our explanations for teacher behavior. And that might require overcoming our own resistance to change.

Jim Shimabukuro, 21 Oct. 2009, 12:49 pm:

Steve Eskow: If an institution dropped an organizing framework like Blackboard or Moodle, and creative instructors used their own knowledge of Web 2.0 or 3.0 to shape their pedagogy, would the students taking five courses have to learn five learning systems?

Good question, Steve. The answer’s yes and no. The underlying issue in online learning seems to be ease of use. On the one hand, CMSs (Course Management Systems) such as Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai are responses to the problem of learning how to move courses online, either fully or partially. The assumption is that an integrated system, or a CMS, is the best method. It’s the Swiss Army knife approach, the all-in-one. Learn one system, and you have all the functions that you’ll need to teach and learn online.

The problem with this all-in-one approach is that users are locked in to a limited set of features. If we compare teaching to building a house, then a CMS is a closed construction system that provides basic tools and materials. The instructor, as carpenter, quickly discovers the limits of her/his tools and resources. After a while, it’s obvious that the house can take on only a limited number of shapes — and it ends up as a little box in a virtual landscape of boxes that all look just the same.

Teachers are, if anything, fiercely independent. They want to own their courses, and they do so by selecting their own required textbooks and resources and developing their own syllabi and learning activities. They demand the freedom to set up their own schedules, assignments, learning activities, and grading systems. They often demand a specific room in a specific time slot. This is what makes teaching an art and so personally fulfilling. The CMSs, for all their purported simplicity, run counter to this independent spirit.

On the other hand, a completely open system such as Web 2.0 is, at least for the novice, bewildering. Where to begin to build a course? How? In comparison, a CMS is a haven of order and simplicity.

From the perspective of an administrator, a CMS is a simple and logical way to move classes online. The alternative is, apparently, chaos.

But is this true?

I’d argue that it’s not. A quick exploration will reveal that all the functions available in a CMS are also available on the web. The difference is that they are not roofed under a single CMS. In a very real sense, the world’s largest, most flexible, most open, and most powerful CMS is the web itself. Instead of just one format for discussions, you have scores; instead of just one format for submitting or presenting papers and projects, you have countless; instead of just a handful of ways to present course material, you have a nearly infinite number.

The point is that once you’ve seen what’s available in the world’s market place, there’s no going back to the single store in your neighborhood.

From the perspective of IT folks who are assigned the task of guiding neophytes into the brave new e-world, the prospect of putting all their effort into a single closed system versus a nearly infinite variety in an open system is very attractive.

But looked at another way, this one-answer approach is shortsighted and ultimately noneducative. If learning is empowering, then this approach stifles learning. In the end, you have instructors and students using a very limited subset of what the web has to offer, and the transfer of learning from the single CMS to the worldwide web is nil. The web remains a scary, chaotic place, and the users are back at square one when it comes to web proficiency.

Returning to your question, Steve: Yes, the students taking five online classes in a web-wide or open CMS (OCMS) would have to learn five different OCMSs. But the critical difference is that all of the parts of the different OCMSs are on the web and the student will quickly learn how to categorize and use them. It’s like getting your bearings in a strange city or highway system. You learn that they all have the same features, and it’s just a matter of adapting to slight variations.

In the end, the student and teachers learn to be at home on the web rather than in the limited confines of a single, closed CMS (CCMS). It’s the difference between being at home in the world and being at home in your neighborhood. Opportunities for creativity and development are unlimited. The outcome is empowerment of the student and the teacher.

Are there problems in guiding faculty in the use of this open approach? There are, but they are far from being insurmountable. In fact, the process can be quite simple. It’s the same ones we use to teach general skills that need to be applied in different ways for different settings. But that’s for another discussion.

Are there other problems, such as security? Yes, of course, but, again, solutions aren’t all that difficult to develop.

When it comes to technology, freedom of choice is a critical factor. Examples abound. All we need to do is look at our choices of cars, cell phones, entertainment, travel, computers, software, etc. The movement is always toward more options than less. We can expect no less in education, in teaching and learning.

Steve, I was planning to respond to some of your other points, but I’ll need to do that some other time.

Bonnie Bracey Sutton, 21 Oct. 2009, 12:55 pm:

I enjoyed the GAID Global Forum in Monterrey, Mexico, because every time a person blamed it on teachers. I queried:

Who decides what the curriculum is that teachers use and what flexibility is there in your system?

Who creates the infrastructure for teaching and learning in digital ways and what is the way, the method of teacher professional development?

Is it like a vaccinatioin — one shot and that’s it, or is it sustained and supported?

Access to information: Is it there? What speeds are there? So many teachers don’t have broadband at home.

What access do teachers have (in the US, too) to broadband and the rich resources on the web? Do they have it in school and at home?

What time is allowed to update practice and to learn new media?

The professors from Latin America were saying that the computer should not replace the teacher. I asked how would that be possible or do you mean you have a problem with elearning initiatives while you are being webcast? Why one technology and not the other?

Infrastructure, content, community of practice and support, sustained support for devices and programs, use of tools like T Pack, understanding of Bloom’s taxonomy, digital understanding of cyberbullying and resources — who makes these decisions and are they known?

There is a lot more. What really gets my goat is that other people tell us how to teach and then when it does not work we get the blame. For example, the last 8 years of no science and all of the groups that have gone to Washington complaining about it.

Ms. Spelling killed the teaching of science with NCLB. Example: the teachers in Washington, DC, following the practices that DC accepted have now been weighed by Ms Rhee and found wanting. So who is to blame when schools don’t have a website or teachers don’t have email. Hello?

Bonnie Bracey Sutton, 21 Oct. 2009, 1:08 pm:

Great questions. I even get bewildered from time to time with so much on my plate. I was single and so time was not a problem. These days I don’t have the time, though I am an eager advocate of what works. Some things are not to my liking, but in a K-12 school system we usually don’t get to make those kinds of decisions.

Some informed practice requires teacher involvement, reflection, and understanding. Everyone tells me teachers can’t program. That is not true, but programing takes an investment of time and support.

Here is an interesting take from an Edutopia Blog: “Let’s Get Real About Innovation in Our Schools,” by Suzie Boss 10/12/09.

Steve Eskow, 21 Oct. 2009, 1:40 pm:

I have to brood some about your provocative comments, Jim.

One question occurs immediately.

Does your thinking about LMS’s and free choice square with your picking a particular blogging program for us to use? I, for one, with my limitations, find much to dislike with the program: I don’t like how it handles replies, and that it doesn’t automatically notify me via email when someone replies to a piece of mine.

Isn’t WordPress exactly the kind of system you criticize?

On the other hand. . .and there’s always another hand:

The system is professional, tested, flexible. . .and allows you and the rest of us to concentrate on ideas rather than systems and technology.

Jim Shimabukuro, 21 Oct. 2009, 2:28 pm:

Steve Eskow: Does your thinking about LMS’s and free choice square with your picking a particular blogging program for us to use? I, for one, with my limitations, find much to dislike with the program: I don’t like how it handles replies, and that it doesn’t automatically notify me via email when someone replies to a piece of mine. Isn’t WordPress exactly the kind of system you criticize?

Good question, Steve. Yes, I think my choice of WordPress (WP) for ETC fits with my views on using the web as an open CMS. ETC uses WP as part of the web — not part of a closed CMS. WP, as used by ETC, is available and accessible to everyone. Anyone can use it to set up a blog for an endless number of purposes. Use it in ETC and become proficient, and the tool is also yours to use for your own purposes. Transfer of learning? Yes, definitely. And it’s free.

I explored four different blogs before deciding on WP. Two were part of packaged systems, a social network (Ning) and a closed CMS (Sakai). The fourth was freely available on the web, Blogger, which is easier to use but not as stable or powerful as WP.

There are other blog programs, but for me, it came down to Blogger and WP. I chose the latter. If there are better open web, free blog platforms, I’d like to explore them.

Is it perfect? Definitely not. But improvements keep coming, and in time, it ought to address many of its shortcomings.

WP doesn’t have the feature you want — email notification of a reply or post — but it probably will someday.

We could shift ETC into the Ning social network (SN), and that would give us the feature you want, I think. I’m not sure how powerful Ning’s blog is. My first impression wasn’t very good. Or we could pour ETC into a Ning discussion forum setup to get the feature you want. But in my mind, we win a battle but lose the war. There are so many more advantages to ETC in the WP environment than in Ning.

This is not to say that WP doesn’t need to beef up its discussion features. It does. But my guess is that WP isn’t fully aware of the potential of discussion in blogs. In time, though, hopefully it’ll learn and turn the discussion feature into a powerful tool that surpasses that found in Ning.

WP’s discussion feature is on a par with most open web blogs that feature posts by selected writers. If a reader comments on an article, he/she doesn’t usually receive notification of comments from other writers. This notification feature seems to be standard for SNs, but not for blogs. But this could change.

I’m not sure if I’ve answered your question, Steve, but if I haven’t, please let me know.

Harry Keller, 21 Oct. 2009, 2:48 pm: In public schools in this country, teachers are the problem and the solution. Because so many classroom decisions are left to the teachers, they can stymie reform and innovation. These days they are underpaid and overworked. When your school sits in a difficult neighborhood and your class size has ballooned, you are a miracle worker if you can have any learning take place. It’s not particularly surprising that they resist new ideas. Besides, many new things get funded for just a year or two. The teachers put in the time to learn about these things and then find that they’ve wasted their time when they disappear.

Teachers are the solution for plenty of reasons that I don’t have time to explore now.

I’m getting ready for CSTA (California Science Teachers Association) and have lots more to do before I leave.

Claude Almansi, 23 Oct. 2009 12:05 am:

[Steve Eskow, 21 Oct. 2009, 10:38 PM:] If an institution dropped an organizing framework like Blackboard or Moodle, and creative instructors used their own knowledge of Web 2.0 or 3.0 to shape their pedagogy, would the students taking five courses have to learn five learning systems?

[James N Shimabukuro, 22 Oct. 2009, 12:49 AM:] Returning to your question, Steve: Yes, the students taking five online classes in a web-wide or open CMS (OCMS) would have to learn five different OCMSs. But the critical difference is that all of the parts of the different OCMSs are on the web and the student will quickly learn how to categorize and use them. It’s like getting your bearings in a strange city or highway system. You learn that they all have the same features, and it’s just a matter of adapting to slight variations.

Personal experience: in 2007 Università della Svizzera Italiana foresaw an “intensive French module” for their Master course in Intercultural communication, but they have re-used the same URL for the 2008-10 course), to be given in French and English. I was put in charge of this module (which took place Apr. 16-20) rather late, and with indications about number of participants varying from 3 to 15 until the day before it began. Actually, there were four participants, all already inserted in professional life.

When I asked for access to the Master’s Moodle CMS to store info so that students could concentrate on oral activities without having to take notes all the time, the organizers told me I couldn’t because training in the use of the CMS was only foreseen for after the language modules. I thought it was odd to have to train folks in using (managing maybe, but using?) Moodle, but there was no time to argue, so I made a wiki instead (click here to see what it looked like when we started).

When I showed the wiki to the students, their first reaction was, “Why not the Moodle CMS?” I explained, they raised their eyes to the ceiling, then went at the wiki. None of them had ever actively used one before, but it took them under 5 minutes to get the hang of this one. They liked the idea of not having to take notes all the time, particularly the two (a grand 50%) who had broken their writing arm.

I guess nowadays, a new web app is no problem either for younger students who grew up with Web 2.0 things that are all similar due to their XML basis – see Michael Wesch’s classic video “Web 2.0 . . . The Machine is Us/ing Us” (1).

[Steve Eskow, 22 Oct. 2009, 1:40 AM:] I have to brood some about your provocative comments, Jim. One question occurs immediately. Does your thinking about LMS’s and free choice square with your picking a particular blogging program for us to use? I, for one, with my limitations, find much to dislike with the program: I don’t like how it handles replies, and that it doesn’t automatically notify me via email when someone replies to a piece of mine.

(en passant: apart from the RSS solutions I mentioned in the thread about notifications, another work around is to make a comment yourself and check the box for “Notify me of follow-up comments via email.”)

Isn’t WordPress exactly the kind of system you criticize? On the other hand . . . and there’s always another hand: The system is professional, tested, flexible . . . and allows you and the rest of us to concentrate on ideas rather than systems and technology.

Blogs can be used as LMS, but wikis – which nowadays are just as easy to use – are definitely more adapted, because they don’t have the linear constrictions of blogs (2). Moreover, wikis keep the history of changes, so if you or a student bungle/s, you can always revert to the former version – most free wiki platforms enable download as a zipped file in 3 clicks of the latest version of the whole thing, some even of all the history. Fewer bloging platforms offer this possibility.

__________

(1) If you’re already using intranets in your work: re “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video (also see the thread in this list about folks annotating stuff “on” one’s page with tools like Sidewiki and Diigo): there are several Diigo annotations on the video page, collectible in 2 clicks – including one by Wesch himself about adding the video to Mojiti (where the video actually disappeared under several layers of comments, which you could fortunately disable if you wanted to see the video).

(2) These linear constrictions can be bypassed: in 2005, I made a mirror of a Tunisian Human Rights site that was being blocked by censorship in Tunisia, in a blogger.com blog: I made a “table of content” entry I dated something like 2100 so that it’d stay on top, then linked in it to the other entries where I copied the pages of the site. But a blog is short for web log, and logs are intrinsically linear, because they are time-based, like diaries. Wikis *offer the possibility* of a time-based reading, through the history feature, but they don’t impose it.

A month back or so we were at the Bathurst campus of CSU in New South Wales – my first trip to Australia. The keynote addresses, including those from Michael Korcuska, Ian Boston and myself, are now up. I remember I was still working on my slides when Michael was talking, and I saw Ian working on his while I was talking. Or maybe he was continuing his cat and mouse game with National Defense. Hard to tell.

Not too far down that same Vimeo page for sakaivideo you can see clips from an interview with Matt Morton-Allen (taken during the Boston conference in July), one of our gracious hosts at CSU.

As a label for the front end design work for Sakai 3, ‘3akai’ is now frowned upon in all the important circles. Me, I still like it for twitter and texting, and the fact that no one knows how to approach it phonetically just cements its value in my view. ‘Course then there is the issue of whether it means anything anyone can identify. Probably going to have to give it up.

In any event, the next stage of serious design work for Sakai 3 is now really getting off the ground. CSU in Australia, UC Berkeley, HEC Montreal as well as 3akai veterans Cambridge and Georgia Tech have joined forces in sponsoring and supporting the work of a lead designer, Sam Peck. I expect to share fragments and insights as we stumble across them along the way. More polished announcements and presentations will probably go out to the Sakai community as well, but the blog can be my scrapbook where even half-formed an incorrect things can be tacked up.

Consider this a first installment. A couple of things that Sam has worked up during our conversations to help us be clear with each other what we’re talking about.

The Sakai Universe (click to see full image)

The Sakai Matrix, the first screen, is a kind of picture of the Sakai universe reminiscent of old diagrams in Science texts, like the ones that talk about different cosmological phases of the early universe. No? I guess we took different classes. Some of the graphics here are meant to be suggestive rather than precise (e.g. the lines of connection between types of users aren’t meant to show specific relationships), but if you don’t harp on the detail it’s a nice sweep of the ecosystem

The second one is an admirable representation of the regions of the Sakai application in the new UX framework. There are details in some of those little screens there to flesh out the picture, but the trick is not to get lost in them. It’s the overall picture and the regions that reveal different user journeys that I think is significant here. The area outside in ‘The World,’ for example, is meant to indicate the public representation of the internal site.

Sakai Regions and User Journeys (click to see full image)

Not designs just yet, then, but good centerpieces and points of reference for discussion.

I spent a couple days last week with what seemed a big chunk of the IT operation at the University of Florida.  UF went through an extensive LMS review and selection process early this year, the two finalists were Angel and Sakai, and Sakai won out in the final analysis, but only by a hair. This was contentious for about a week, at the end of which Blackboard brought everyone back together again by buying out Angel. Now UF is on a very familiar hurried migration track because the WebCT license is going away, but let’s not linger over subjects that can trigger my PTSD.

I went representing mainly Georgia Tech, as a kind of welcome-to-the-neighborhood for Sakai in the Southeast. They were very gracious and friendly hosts, but seemed suprised and grateful that I would make the trip, as though this was altruism on my part. I almost didn’t want to explain how much it meant to have a Sakai collaborator within driving distance, to have someone nearby to lean on and work with – how I hope to use them. Probably too soon in the relationship to say, “we need you.” Maybe even creepy. So I didn’t.

A central figure in this initiative is Doug Johnson. Yes, that Doug Johnson. That’s where the vision for cooperation in a volatile environment comes from. And he seems to be something of a foodie, if our restaurant picks were any indication. As if the practical reasons for being excited about this collaboration weren’t great enough.

This link provides us with a low cost ($.01 a day) chat room widget. A chat room would allow for instant communication with fellow bloggers on the site. Our experience with chat rooms on Sakai has been positive.