vrijdag, februari 23, 2007

Sakai lunch revisited: your help is appreciated!

In our Sakai pilotproject at our university (University of Twente) we are striving to be as transparant, open and communicative as possible. We are trying very hard to let the end-users be part of our evaluation process. Therefore we organized our first Sakai lunch last January. This was quite success, as I mentioned earlier on this weblog. Therefore we will organize a second lunchmeeting (announcement in Dutch) on March 13 at our university, for all those people that could not attend.
The format we used for the meeting was quite interactive. Ofcourse we started with some information that we wanted to share. But then we turned 180 degrees: we asked the participants to write down their questions, but also their tips. And we turned those questions (with our corresponding answers) into seperate page on our wiki. Check it out (page is in Dutch).
There were lots of questions and some very interesting tips. I'd like to highlight a few here:
1/ Visual appearance of Sakai (or the UI). This was identified as a factor that should be improved within Sakai.
2/ Make some effort in training the faculty in using Sakai. Actually this might a broader issue: the use of our current VLE (TeleTOP) is quite diverse. Students would like to have some sort of baseline use of the VLE. E.g. that in every coursesite the Schedule is filled in a consistent way etc.
3/ How do we go about in the transition period, when the old VLE and Sakai both are available? What are best practices?
And, for this last question I would like to invite the community to respond. Any thoughts?

maandag, februari 19, 2007

Starting up

I am just starting up my work stuff, as I returned from a vacation in Sri Lanka.
Three things to get this weblog started again:
1/ The meeting notes of our 31 Jan meeting are already available. We had a great attendance and some interesting news that was shared. Not everything is in the meeting notes... so, please be present next time (which is on Apr 4, in Utrecht, as always).
2/ The Sakai Foundation seeks to recruit a UX (User eXperience) Lead, which is great news! Everything can contribute money to make this happen.
3/ On March 27, the Innovatium conference will take place in Amsterdam. We will be present.