Sakaiger in Amsterdam

IMG_8747
Originally uploaded by wytze

Just before all Sakaigers boarded their private planes to Newport Beach (where the next Sakai conference is held; I will not be there, unfortunately), one of the bunch visited the Portfolio4u offices in Amsterdam. He (or is she?) was talked about......
Do you want to see where Sakaiger(s) have been so far? Check out the photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sakaiger

Thoughts on the Sakai future...

It is the time of the year again. No, I do not mean Christmas etc. I mean the Sakai Board Elections are underway.
Michael Korcuska has set up a space on Confluence, where current Board members and candidates have posted a vision for the future of Sakai (at least for 2008). Michael himself has also written out some interesting thoughts on this page. Absolutely worth the read, even I you don't have the privilege to vote.
One candidate, Michael Feldstein, uses his own weblog to communicate with us, the voters. He recently wrote an interesting analysis regarding the Sakai future:

Within every university I talk to these days, I find three factions with respect to instructional technology. How big or powerful each faction is and who is in it varies from place to place, but the factions are always the same.

Faction #1 ("give me something off-the-rack") is the biggest faction in most institutions, also in The Netherlands.

Presentations available

SURFfoundation has been so kind to put our presentations online on SlideShare already (they are in Dutch).
So here's the introduction by Wytze:

| View

And the presentation by Frank that gives some more details about the history of Sakai and the way the software is produced:

| View

Exhausted after the pre-conference

owd2007_dinsdag002
Originally uploaded by Gerard Dummer

Yesterday we (from left to right: Jaeques Koeman, Jan van den Berge, Wytze Koopal, Frank Benneker) delivered our pre-conference at the SURF Onderwijsdagen. Gerard Dummer was so kind to take a picture of us after the pre-conference. I must say that I was quite exhausted after the 3 hour session (can you see it?).

We will have enough participants!

A few weeks ago I put up an announcement that we would be doing a pre-conference workshop on Nov 13 (tomorrow!) at the SURF Onderwijsdagen (one of the largest conferences on elearning in The Netherlands with some 600 people in attendance). A little less than 20 people have signed up for the pre-conference workshop, which sounds like a reasonable amount to me.
So, today we are heavily preparing our workshop. The agenda (in Dutch) can be found online (a Google document).