Do you kow this weblog?

{This is a little plug for a great weblog} The UBC Arts ISIT Blog is a community blog from the Instructional Development unit at the Faculty of Arts, at the University of British Columbia.

There are some interesting comparisons on Sakai and WebCT on the weblog, as well as some comments and thoughts on Sakai from the standpoint of a teacher. Just go to the weblog to see for yourself. I am curious who the actual writers are on this weblog. Anyone have an idea?

Next meeting: April 4

As you know the conference committee is doing a great job in selecting and reviewing the proposals for the Amsterdam conference. The 'results' will be available shortly.
In the meantime I have everything set up for our 5th meeting of the Sakai SIG NL. It will be held in Utrecht, as usual, at the SURF offices. A detailed agenda (in Dutch) is available. If you haven't received an email regarding this meeting, but are planning to attend, please let me know (so that I can count you in for the lunch!).

Vote for Sakai!!

Please put your vote for Sakai on the Unesco website.
As you can see, Sakai is not on the top of the list, instead of that the product Olat from Switserland is number one. They placed a voting link on there website, very clever.
Indeed….also Unesco is looking seriously into Open Source Sofware.
If you want to check out more about this, visit the Unesco website about Freesoftware by clicking on the following link: http://www.unesco.org/ etc...

The audience

IMG_2405
Originally uploaded by wytze.

Yesterday the Innovatium conference was held in Amsterdam. As said earlier here, the attendance was quite large. I received quite a few people at our Sakai booth. I will tell some more later on in this week. The printouts of articles by Wende Morgaine and Brad Wheeler were quite handy to give out the interested visitors of our booth, as well as some reports that I wrote earlier.
Another interesting report that I handed out was the Open Source Catalogue 2007 (registration required), by Optaros.

Sakai SIG NL op Innovatium 2007

Sakai SIG NL op Innovatium 2007
Originally uploaded by wytze.

This is the first slide of the self-running presentation that we will be doing at the Innovatium conference, next Tuesday (27 March). See www.innovatium.nl for all the details (in Dutch). Expected audience is 500+, and they are all more or less interested in ICT, in education, in elearning etc.
We will not do a regular presentation, but instead we have a booth where we will be presenting Sakai and our Special Interest Group. We will also promote the upcoming Amsterdam Conference ofcourse.

Wende Morgaine speaks about Sakai in Campus Technology Magazine

More than Open Source: a second look at Sakai.

The words of Wende Morgaine (faculty member at Portland State University), published in the online Campus Technology Magazine.
Check out the full article:
http://campustechnology.com/articles/45387/

Have a nice weekend, cu you all 4 april at the Surf office, Utrecht.

Another new 'member'

Last week I informed you that Oracle will be present at our upcoming meeting of the Sakai SIG NL on April 4. Peter Bavinck will present to us the latest information on the Oracle's Academic Enterprise Initiative.
This time I would like to inform you that we will have another new party at the table: 2useit.nl, that has been contracted by Hogeschool Utrecht. They will also share some more information on their assignment for Hogeschool Utrecht, which is one of the largest University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands.

Is this a coincidence?

As I was surfing away on the internet recently, I found that the Holland Open conference will be held on June 11 and 12. This is in the same week as the upcoming Sakai conference. I've contacted the organization committee of the Holland Open conference, to discuss where we can help and enhance each other's efforts and attendance. I will keep you posted!

My apologies

My apologies for all those reading this trough Planet Sakai or a feedreader. Apparantly if you edit older posts (which I did: I added some labels to some posts this morning) in Blogger, they will be featured as 'new' posts in the feed (not on the weblog itself). My 'real' most recent post was about the upcoming Sakai 2.4 release, as you can see when you visit the webpage of this blog.
Recently I read somewhere that you can avoid this typical behaviour of Blogger by adding some parameter to the feed URL, but unfortunately I cannot find this piece of information anymore.... Doe someone have any clues?

Sakai 2.4 is on it's way

Besides all the activities in organizing and preparing yourself for the upcoming Sakai conference in Amsteram (today is the last day to send in a proposals; ours have been sent in!), the 'normal' work also progresses within our community.
Yesterday the first release meeting for Sakai 2.4 was organized by Megan May. This is what she sent out: "(..) all teams have until 12:01am Eastern on March 19th to check in changes. Due to the change in date for the code freeze, the official release date for 2.4 will now be Friday, May 4. " All details on the QA cycles on this release can be found on a seperate space on the community wiki (Confluence).
The latest official release (we missed this on this weblog) was on February 12. At that date Sakai 2.3.1 was released, which was a security release. At the University of Twente we succesfully deployed this release on March 8 for our pilots. See more detailed info, also on the community wiki.

Is Dell really listening to Ideastorm?

Ideastorm is a website, courtesy of Dell, that asks us for some suggestions and ideas that could make Dell an even better company, with better products. The idea is very simple: just ask your (potential) customer what they want!

Not surprisingly (*at least to me*) is the fact that the number one suggestion on the list is "provide us with PC's that have a Linux distro installed".

There is also an online questionnaire that you can fill in, to provide Dell with some more details on our wishes. I strongly suggest you to do so!

Researching a little further I came across the weblog of Mark Shuttleworth ("the father of Ubuntu"). He also comments on Ideastorm. And then it gets funny... he refers to the bugtracker system for Ubuntu. Their #1 bug has the following title "Microsoft has a majority market share" (and has as nickname "liberation")! The bug is still not resolved..... But I think we are getting there.

Just a thought: would Shuttleworth be a keynote speaker we would like to have in Amsterdam? Just chime in.

Portfolio4u joins Sakai commercial Affiliate program

Portfolio4u -- Sakai Hosting, Training and Implementation Services for Schools and Organizations in the Netherlands

Portfolio4u delivers for-fee Sakai implementation and hosting services to schools in the Netherlands. There are more now more than 40 schools and organizations assisted by Portfolio4u in their experiences and experiments with Sakai! Portfolio4u provides consulting, training, customization and Sakai hosting in a professional data center in Amsterdam. These services allow schools to get started using Sakai quickly and professionally. Portfolio4u maintains partnerships with fellow Commercial Affiliates IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems and has been dedicated to educational portfolio software since 2001.

"We see the opportunity to formally join the community as a way to financially support the efforts of the Foundation and to enhance our cooperation. We look forward to working more closely with the community as a Commercial Affiliate and seeing many members of the community in June in our home city, Amsterdam."
Jim Doherty,
Director Portfolio4u b.v.
jim@portfolio4u.nl
www.portfolio4u.nl (website is in Dutch Language)

Oracle joins Sakai SIG NL!

The last couple of weeks were full of exciting experiences and thoughts; I won't share them all with you (just check my photostream for a little more).
The most important newsitem was the fact that representatives from Oracle here in The Netherlands have informed me that they want to join forces with our Sakai SIG NL. I think this is great news for all of us in The Netherlands.
Ofcourse Oracle is a commercial affiliate since a couple of months. They are working hard on their efforts that can benefit all of us that have a special place in their heart for Sakai. Next week there is a BIG Oracle conference in Orlando, where Sakai and Oracle will be discussed also, I hear; anyone going?
Anyway: Oracle has confirmed to me that they will be present at our next meeting, which will be held on April 4. And they not only will be present, but they also will share some our their thoughts and ideas with us. So, if you want to hear this first-hand, please be present in Utrecht next month.

Some results of OSP trials

I read Seb Schmoller's (from the UK) weblog regularly. Recently he posted some results and viewpoints from trials that have been done with Open Source Portfolio in Southern England. The post itself is well worth a read for all those involved in eportfolio's, OSP and Sakai. See Whose world is it? OSP/Sakai, Moodle and Web2.0 in Further and Community education.

Our proposals for sakaiamsterdam07!

Although it might seem that the Sakai conference in Amsterdam is far away (it is in June!), preparations for the conference are well underway. Actually the first deadline is approaching fast, which is the deadline for sending in proposals (link to the online form). The deadline I am referring to is set on March 15, 2007 (so that is only 13 days away).
We will send in at least two proposals.
The first one will be focused on our experiences so far with Sakai. This will be a sort of 'off-site site visit'. This will be geared at those of our collegues that have contacted us for through email requesting a site visit to Twente. We think this would be too time-consuming (on our side organizing it, but also for the people that have to travel to our university which is about 160 kilometers - or 100 miles- east of Amsterdam).
Our second proposal will be more of an overview presentation of what the Sakai SIG NL has been doing since the official start in August 2006. I will look back in time, but will also try to look into the future a bit in this presentation.
In sincereley hope that there will be whole bunch of Dutch presentations and poster in Amsterdam. The record so far for the number of Dutch presenters at a Sakai (to the best of my knowledge) has never been more than 5. Let's aim at 6 for Amsterdam!
BTW: shall we all use the tag (or label) "sakaiamsterdam07" for all our tidbits on the upcoming conference? the URL http://www.sakaiproject.org/sakaiamsterdam07 is even working now!