Sakai conferentie in Australië

Op dit moment vindt aan de andere kant van de wereld de regionale Sakai conferentie plaats in Australië. De conferentie wordt gehouden op de Charles Sturt University.
Er zijn in Australië vier universiteiten die Sakai actief inzetten in hun onderwijs: The Australian National University, Charles Sturt University, University of Melbourne en Monash University.
In de rechter sidebar van dit weblog staan de actuele tweets vanuit Australië.

Sakai op Educause (Orlando)

Op de komende Educause conferentie in Orlando zijn er veel sessies en evenementen die gerelateerd zijn aan Sakai en open source in het algemeen. Zoals altijd gaat er een grote groep Nederlanders naar de Educause conferentie via de zogenaamde Edutrip, die altijd zeer zorgvuldig georganiseerd wordt door SURFfoundation.
Voor die mensen is dit overzicht wellicht handig om af te drukken en mee te nemen.

Day One in Newport Beach

Today the main Sakai conference started in Newport Beach, about 55 miles south of Los Angeles. The hotel and surroundings (picture taken from the hotel) provide an excellent environment for the coming days. I have been told that 411 people have registered for the conference, and I have counted three Dutchmen among them.

So what was on this morning? The day started off with an inspiring key note talk by Joel Thierstein, Executive Director of Connexions and Associate Provost of Rice University. The Connexions platform is definitely worth some further investigation. From a conceptual point of view, one could compare it with Dutch activities within the ‘educatieve contentketen’. Like in the Netherlands , (business)models of open content, re-use and sharing within a community are new, and therefore also require new and challenging forms of governance and leadership within such communities.

In another session, 'converting from an existing course management system to Sakai' by David Melone, I heard some interesting remarks on integrating Sakai with an existing Question Mark Perception instance. I turns out that they are interested in sharing an LDAP between the two systems and possibly report QMP grades to the Sakai gradebook. Since the University of Amsterdam now uses a QMP instance for their ICTO - Digital testing programme, I think it might be something to keep on our radar.

The Sakai Foundation executive director Micheal Korcuska gave an update on the Sakai Foundation in the third session. It seems that there has been a good debate within the foundation about the mission statement of Sakai and the priorities of the Sakai Foundation. The mission could be ‘Beat Blackboard’ , but Michael came up with a few more thoughtful statements:

· Create flexibility for education
· Facilitate innovation
· Reduce total costs of VLE’s
· Increase user satisfaction
· Promote openness

Next to that the two top priorities of the Sakai foundation should be to ‘create the highest quality core software’ and ‘Seek to engage new members of the community’.Regarding the last point, there is in fact some debate about the adoption of Sakai. The question is whether it is desired to have ( a lot) more institutions new to Sakai at this moment and seeing the complexity of managing the already large community rise.
This discussion also relates to the type of institutions, e.g community colleges, corporations etc. that are moving into the direction of Sakai. Mike Zackrison, vice-president of marketing and strategy at rSmart also touched on the debate in his session. rSmart has done a survey investigating various types of institutions and their future plans with regard to (open source) VLE’s, and they found some interesting issues. Those who are interested should contact rSmart to get a copy of the survey results. What made the talk especially interesting is that there seem to be differences in views on open source across different types of institutions. For example the rSmart survey concluded that community colleges (in the U.S) see open source as risky and do not tend to be interested in Sakai. Well, we all now that in The Netherlands community colleges have the largest install base of Sakai-OSP in the Dutch educational system, using the hosted solution by Portfolio4u. That shows the need of more market investigations throughout different regions and sharing them with the community, because the Sakai Foundation is debating these issues! The general idea however about the adoption of Sakai is that an increase of institutions using Sakai would be the preferred development. And in the end that is no surprise to me.

Make me jealous!

Unfortunately I cannot attend the current Sakai conference. So my question is: is anyone taking pictures at the conference (and outside the conference)? Can I see them?

[Dutch] Kom je naar onze pre-conference?

This is about the pre-conference that you can attend on Nov 13 in Utrecht (Jaarbeurs) at the SURF Onderwijsdagen 2007.
========== Begin press release ===============
"Iedere bezoeker van de SURF Onderwijsdagen zal wel eens van Sakai gehoord hebben. Maar nog weinigen hebben Sakai zelf aan den lijve ondervonden of er mee gewerkt. Een goed oordeel vellen over Sakai is dan moeilijk. Zowel de Universiteit Twente als de Universiteit van Amsterdam hebben uitgebreide ervaring met Sakai. Door middel van kleine opdrachten zullen we de deelnemers laten ervaren wat Sakai is.
Maar we gaan meer doen in deze pre-conference: we gaan ook uitleg geven over community source, over de Sakai Foundation, over het hoe en waarom van opensource etc.
We verwachten enige voorbereiding van de deelnemers. Zie http://sakai-nl.blogspot.com."
========= End press release =================
Onze pre-conferentie is een co-productie van Wytze Koopal (Universiteit Twente), Jaeques Koeman en Frank Benneker (Universiteit van Amsterdam) en Jan van den Berge (Portfolio4u).
Als je je wilt opgeven, ga dan naar http://www.surf.nl/owd2007. Als je onderwerpen of suggesties hebt voor de pre-conference, laat het ons dan weten. Bijvoorbeeld via een reactie op dit bericht.

Anyone going to Berlin?

Something I also sent out to Euro Sakai mailing list recently. Please reply ASAP.
What started out at the bar in Amsterdam as just an idea, seems to become something real...
What am I talking about?
I am talking about a great marketing opportunity to make ourselves and Sakai known, by doing some promotion at the Online Educa conference in Berlin, on Berlin (Germany), November 28 - 30, 2007. See http://www.online-educa.com/.
At this largest elearning conference in Europe there is a possibility that we can use the booth of the SURFfoundation and JISC (they have a combined booth) at the trade floor. If so, then we need a few (between 5 and 8) people that will be answering questions, show some stuff etc at the booth.
So, my main questions are:
1/ Who is going to the Online Educa conference?
2/ Who is willing to spend some hours in the booth to do some 'marketing' stuff?

Ofcourse, if we are going to do this, we will need to do some preparation (posters etc), but that should not be an issue.

Please respond ASAP, as we need to finalize our arrangements with SURFfoundation and JISC soon.
Thanks in advance!

Get your proposals ready!

The next Sakai conference is already in the making (did you notice that the domain is "sakai.educonference.com"?). I have heard about some great names as possible keynote speakers (Michael tells something about it).
But before i lose you: this post is about us, you and me. We can submit proposals and the deadline is September 15, 2007.
Shall we use the tag "sakainewportbeach07" for all news regarding this upcoming conference in Newport Beach?

It has been a busy day

Today was a very busy day, just as I already had foreseen that it would be. Last night I had dinner with the colleagues from the University of Amsterdam, which was time well spent (thanks guys!). I was back in my hotelroom at around 10 PM. Then I needed to upload my photos and wrote a post on Stanley's presentation on this weblog, as well as a warm welcome in the Sakai blogworld for Mara and Chris.
I went to bed well after 1 AM, and stood up at 7.30 AM. Took a shower (woow, that felt good!) and then went straight to my laptop finishing up my presentation. Then phone home and some 10 minutes left for the breakfast, before the sessions would start.
I had an interesting chat with Marc Brierley and missed the first batch of sessions. Marc was curious if and when we would be choosing Sakai. This seemed a returning theme today. I had many people ask me this question. And I just don't know. But we will keep you posted on this weblog as well as on our website, http://www.utwente.nl/elo.
After my chat with Marc, I was introduced to John van Dongen, who works at KPC Groep (website only in Dutch). We talked about barriers to blogging and barriers in general in education in The Netherlands for making innovative use of ICT in education. In his work, he more than once found that schools are blocking all sorts of IP traffic and ports, just because their IT department or external IT consultant says that it is much safer then.... How bad is that for innovation, you would say?
So, then my own moment of truth was there. I will let others blog about that :-)
Finally, in the afternoon we had organized an important meeting. More on that in a next posting....