Sakai and the University of Twente

Just a short note here, especially for those attending our meeting tomorrow that want to know the details of our status. All links in this post will give you information in Dutch, so be warned.
We are approaching the end of our pilots with Sakai at our University. Actually we have started writing our final reports that should be finished by the end of May 2007. It is currently a bit unclear to me what the next steps will be with our reports. What is clear to me is that MS Sharepoint right now is seen as a very serious alternative to Sakai at our University (which was not the case one year ago!).
{Dutch} Als je geïnteresseerd bent in de actuele stand van zaken, lees dan ons statusrapport op onze website.

Reflecting on Innovatium 2007

Last Tuesday the large Innovatium (photos) conference was held in Amsterdam. We were there with a booth (photo after the click). At first I was not so happy with our location. We were upstairs, where none of the action (workshops and presentations) was taking place. But during the lunchbreak people started moving by. Together with Stanley Portier (read his impressions), Frank Benneker and Martine Hilderink we had lots of interesting discussions with the passers-by. We handed out our official flyer, as well as other interesting articles (Morgaine and Wheeler, as mentioned earlier).
There were two conversations that I would like to make note of here. I had a rather interesting conversation with a teacher that was involved in educational projects for and in third world countries (in Africa). His questions were about using Sakai on outdated PC's (should work!) and regarding the bandwidth needed for Sakai on the end-user side (is not so high, not much graphics), as well as the horsepower needed for a server to install and deply Sakai properly (should be OK, you can do it all with opensource software for the whole stack). He already knew quite well that Sakai (but also Moodle) are opensource and therefore free to deploy, which was good to hear! This reminded me of the ITC institution here in Enschede, that has told us that they have some problems with using Blackboard with their partner institutions in the Far East (this kind of use is apparantly not allowed according to the licensing terms).
The other conversation that I found interesting was more a philosophical one: what do we, as an educational institution, really need to offer (with regard to ICT applications) to our students in this Web 2.0 world? Can we not make a proper VLE just by referring the students to stuff like Google (e.g. Gmail, Docs and Groups) and all the free content that is out there. The problem here is, in my opinion, that Google (or other Web 2.0 stuff) is not free in the same way that Sakai is free. There are a lot of restrictions that apply when using Flickr, for example.

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!

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?

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.

Some suggestions for our Sakai project

IMG_0615
Originally uploaded by wytze.

Today we had a successful lunch meeting with faculty and students regarding our Sakai project. We presented very briefly what we have done so far and what our next steps will be.
We asked for some suggestions and for next steps from the audience. We received quite a few. Some are pictured here. We also asked for questions people still would have.
We will try to provide answers to the questions by means of our wiki.
See the rest of the photos (and the suggestions) at Flickr.

How opensource works (NOT!)

Through the weblog of Alfred Essa, i got directed to a blogpost by Joel Spolsky. Joel posted his personal review of a great book (Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg). The book deals with the Chandler project. The Chandler project had been 'advertized' as the Microsoft Exchange killer app. But it didn't even get close up 'till now.
As Joel puts it: "Chandler’s original vision was pretty much just to be “revolutionary.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t code “revolutionary.” I need more details to write code. Whenever the spec describes the product in terms of adjectives (“it will be extremely cool”) rather than specifics (“it will have brushed-aluminum title bars and all the icons will be reflected a little bit, as if placed on a grand piano”) you know you’re in trouble."
Joel really makes the point that software needs to be designed properly, before it should be developed! I couldn't agree more.
I can see some parallels here with the Sakai community. How many designers do we have? The Course Management Working Group does an excellent job at documenting their design process and choices they make, I think. And there will be a lot more than that, ofcourse. But, in other areas within the Sakai community I have a hard time to figure out where the design is to be found.
So, this puts me right on the ground again about what the Sakai community still has to cover. But we will get there! Watch us.

Blackboard patent will be re-examined

Source: Software Freedom Law Center

"In response to a formal request filed by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today ordered re-examination of the e-learning patent owned by Blackboard Inc.(..) A re-examination of this type usually takes one or two years to complete. Roughly 70% of re-examinations are successful in having a patent narrowed or completely revoked."

Agenda for Jan 31, 2007

For all those that speak Dutch, please read our agenda for our next meeting. The meeting will take place in Utrecht, at the SURF offices.
I am expecting around 20 people (that is at least what SURF is catering for regarding lunch). I you are planning on attending our meeting, please let me know *by sending an email to me or * by placing a comment on this post.

Bootcamp in Amsterdam!

This is your chance! If you always wanted to know what developing and programming for Sakai is like, you should take note of the Bootcamp page on our wiki. This is the page where you will find all the information on this great workshop for programmers. The Bootcamp will take place during our upcoming Amsterdam conference. So, mark you agenda for June 12-14!
The 'faculty' are already preparing this bootcamp. This will be the first time that the Bootcamp will take place in continental (thanks for the hint, Anthony!) Europe. Previous editions during the Vancouver and Atlanta conferences, as well as in Oxford (UK) last September, were a huge success.
Update: Anthony Whyte reminded me that there was a Bootcamp in Oxford recently.

Free publicity

After my talk at the OSOSS conference, i was asked if I could make a 'transcript' of my presentation that could be made widely available. Well, actually I was asked to write an article about Sakai, based on my presentation, that could be published online at www.livre.nl. Livre has a comprehensive website where a lot of 'open' news is published.
Livre is a free and open network organisation within The Netherlands that is dedicated to the use of open source and open standards to facilitate ICT innovation. In Dutch: "Het creëren van bewustwording over ICT innovatie die is gebaseerd op de waarden open, vrij en duurzaam."
See what I have written (in Dutch). The article gives the Dutch reader a comprehensive and current overview on Sakai, as well as some insight in the Dutch adoption (rate) of Sakai.

User Interaction, work in progress

In a post on this weblog Wyzte Koopal pointed out that the User Interface & experience is an important issue to address. I think Wyzte will to glad to read that User Interaction Group is working hard to collect to use cases and to discuss them with the community. People who want to read more about the ongoing User Interface work should read the UI pages on the Sakai Wiki, http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/UI/Home

During the Amsterdam Conference a full day pre-conference workshop will bring together all the members that have a sincere interest in improving the Sakai User Experience.

The U-Camp will provide an opportunity for those interested in the design and support of Sakai to meet, learn, and contribute to the future of the Sakai user experience.
This pre-conference session will include a series of workshops and presentations in the morning where participants will discuss design methodologies, accessibility, patterns, and usability. In the afternoon, we will focus on strategies for improving user delight within Sakai and finding ways to better represent user needs within the community process. (Authored by Colin Clark)

More information: http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/UI/U-Camp+Planning

Planning of the Sakai Amsterdam conference is on it’s way

Last week Susan Hardin and Mary Miles ( Sakai conference committee) visited Amsterdam to have a look at the conference hotel and to feel the city. In spite of the rain and wind they got a good view on the conference hotel and other options in the city. The pre-conference day will be held at the University and the main conference will be held at the Mövenpick.
In February more information on the Amsterdam conference will be posted on the Sakaiproject website.

Frank Benneker and Mary Veugelers (University of Amsterdam) will work closely with the Sakai Board and Community to make the meeting a huge success.

More information on the conference hotel: Mövenpick Amsterdam

Everyone can join, as long as...

This is just a quick reminder. We will be having our 4nd meeting with the Dutch Sakai community on Jan 31, at the SURF offices in Utrecht. Official starting time is 10.30 hrs. Everyone is welcome at this meeting (a short confirmation by email is appreciated), as long as you are able to understand (and/or speak) Dutch. The official language of the meetings will be Dutch, since we are the Dutch community.
Our meeting room will hold approximately 25 people. I will be finalizing the agenda for our meeting on Jan 24 (next week). I have one confirmed presentation, which will be an interesting presentation by Walter Brand (Memotrainer BV), who will tell us more about what they did for Elsevier Opleidingen.

High level exposure for Sakai

This post deals with some specifics of the way we work together within The Netherlands regarding the use of ICT in Higher Education (HE). This might be interesting for foreign readers, but it might be more interesting for my Dutch readers, I guess.
Yesterday I was invited to do a short presentation for SURF. What is SURF, you might ask? Here are some quotes from their website, that say it better than I could: "SURF is the collaborative organisation of and for the institutes for higher education in the Netherlands. (..) The statutory organs of the SURF Foundation are the General Board, the Executive Board and the Scientific Technical Council. The administrative representation is implemented within the three SURF platforms: Research, Education and Organisation."
So, SURF is in fact the (only!) national organisation where every and all HE institutions work together on the improvement of the use of ICT within our institutions. SURF is also facilitating this weblog, some of my time that I am spending on Sakai, and the meetings that we regularly have in The Netherlands with all those that are interested in Sakai.
I was invited for the quarterly meeting of the Board of the ICT and Organisation Platform on January 10, 2007. Members of this board are executives from 8 different HE institutions within The Netherlands.
I presented (presentation in Dutch), within a short timeframe, what Sakai is, who is involved within The Netherlands, what our vision is etc. I think I did a good job of informing the Board and thereby gave some more exposure for Sakai on the executive level within HE in The Netherlands. Questions that got asked where mainly on the level of "does the community really work?" or "who is actually using Sakai right now?". More specifically some of the board members were quite interested in the fact that OSP is used quite widely already within secondary vocational education in our country. The board was very pleased with the presentation and wished us luck for the future.
Oh, and there is one more thing that came up during our short discussion: Sharepoint. This is our main "competitor" within the Netherlands. And Sharepoint has a distinct advantage, that was laid out nicely in the discussion: the user interface is so familiar....people are so used to all this stuff from Microsoft. So, once again, at least for me, one more reason why the Sakai User Experience should be high(er?) on our agenda.
What do you think?

Sakai and Oracle: more news

On the weblog of Michael Feldstein, who recently started working for Oracle, you will find some more information on the way Oracle is seeing Sakai.
There are two initiatives that Oracle is working on with regard to Sakai. There is the Academic Enterprise Initiative (AEI) and there is Sakai for Oracle. A tiny quote: " “Sakai for Oracle” is not intended to be a fork; it is intended to be a supported configuration."
Please read the complete post to get to grips to what Oracle is doing for the Sakai community.

Sakai SIG NL Feed Subscribers

Sakai SIG NL Feed Subscribers
Originally uploaded by wytze.

Since the start of this weblog, we've been using Feedburner to keep track of the usage and the users. The usage of the feed of our weblog is at 22 subscribers as of today. We are steadily on the rise here (we had 10 subscribers as of October 31, 2006).
What surprises me most (in the happy sense of the word) is that the preference for Netvibes is so huge. Personally I like Netvibes very much, and I use it regularly. Is Netvibes some sort of preference within the (would-be) Sakai community? Anyone wants to comment?

Weblog has been migrated!

A couple of weeks ago I emailed all of the authors of this weblog that we would be migrating this weblog to the new Blogger during the Christmas break. Actually we migrated today. And we are up and running again.
For those who would like to be (or stay) author for this group weblog, there is one caveat: you need a Google account. If you have an Gmail emailbox, you are by default the owner of a Google account.
More info on migrating and switching can be found in What is new and improved? or Switching teamblogs.

New kid on the Blog

I am new on this Sakai NL blog. My name is Jan van den Berge and I am one of two founders of Portfolio4u. Portfolio4u has translated Sakai to the Dutch Lanquage in cooperation with the UvA (University of Amsterdam).
We are specializing in the Digital Portfolio part of Sakai by using the OSP inside Sakai. Our main customers are educational institutes in the Netherlands starting with student from the age of 12 to adults. At this moment we have more than 16 Sakai implementations and more are on there way.
I visited the last Sakai conference a few weeks ago in Atlanta and I was surprised by all the work that already has been done all around the world.
For me as a sales person of our company I found it hard to believe we can make business with free software. But now, after 1,5 years working with Sakai and the community, I am convinced about the power of Open Source Software and how to make a business of it.
We have contributed our translation to the community and got a lot of things in return from other members of the community, so...it works. It's a new way of thinking, new ways of telling our customers about Open Source Software and news ways of developing the tools and setting up our infrastructure. It's a great feeling to know people all around the world that are doing the same thing.
What I learned in Atlanta is how things are changing at the moment. Big players like BlackBoard seem to going out of business or have to change doing business in a complete other business model. I don't know if they are capable in doing that, so.. time will learn.
Ofcourse not everything is sunshine and lots of work has to be done, but what matters to our company, we believe in it. By specialising in the Portfolio part of Sakai we are one of the few people that are doing that in the world.
We believe that it is a good idea for a school to start working with portfolio's and after that slowly let the application grow to a bigger thing thats supports the complete educational process.
Working with e-portfolio's needs a real serious implementation. You need to look very carefully to the needs of the school and most importantly, what are the skills of the teachers and students. Students are mostly not the problem, but we learned in the last years that lots of teachers have problems or even fear working with digital tools and let go some of their power on groups of students.
So it is not a matter that teacher's dont want to change but lots of them are afraid of losing something. Something that they cannot explain, but it is the way the are working now for centuries. I don't think this New learning is a small change. This is something bigger, it seems to be like a learning or knowledge revolution like many years ago happened during the industrial revolution. So this will be not a easy process but finally people will be learning in an other way then they are used to now.
I believe the future of teachers will be much more interesting then it is now. They are changing from the teacher to coach. Someone thats helps the student how to learn instead of telling him/here exactly what to learn. This wil take still lots of years but you can see the change and the growing believe in this New way of learning.
Tools like Sakai will help teachers in learning to work in new ways. So it's not only a matter of developing this great tool but it is also a matter of learning how we can learn our teachers in using this new tools and finding new way's of working with students.
It seems that the use of the e-portfolio part in Sakai is very strong in the Netherlands and maybe we can tell the community more about what the developments are in The Netherlands during the next Sakai conference in June 2007, Amsterdam.
For the near future we have to develop more and new tools for connecting Sakai to other applications like administration tools and goal registration applications. That shall be a lot of work but I think we can do lots of devellpment within the community.
For now this is my first contribution to this blog and I hope you liked it. I am looking forward of meeting you at the next meeting in januari 2007. I wish you all a great Christmas time and lets make 2007 a real Sakai year.

Just in case

In case you have not been able to find our 'official' website, I would like to remind you that we have one! It is located on http://elearning.surf.nl/sakai_en (this is the English version; but there is also a Dutch version, at http://elearning.surf.nl/sakai_nl).
On our website you will find our meeting minutes of face-to-face meetings that we have on a regular basis. Our last meeting was on November 22 (minutes of this meeting; in English). Our next meeting will be on January 31, 2007. The website is equipped with an RSS feed too!

My audience in Arnhem

CIMG4873
Photo taken by wytze.

Today, as I mentioned already, I presented at the yearly Open Source symposium. This symposium is mainly geared at the local governments, of which there are more than 400 in The Netherlands. The aim is that they will start working together more closely on the exchange of knowledge on open source and also open standards. Most prominent use of open source in this area is OpenOffice and Linux, but also in the GIS application area.
My first question to the audience was who knew what a VLE (or CMS) is. Most hands were raised, which was actually quite surprising to me.
My talk went OK. I think I have shown that, besides the already mentioned Linux and OpenOffice, there are other areas where opensource software is quite succesfull. It might well be that, because local governments are quite receptive to opensource, that some of them will start trying out Sakai.
Actually most local governments are funding directly lots of primary and secondary schools. We will see who sends me an email in the coming days.

Tomorrow: Arnhem

Tomorrow I will be doing some evangelism (can I say that?) for Sakai. I will be presenting Sakai (the product, the community, our university and Sakai) at a conference (only in Dutch) primarily focused on the use of open source in local government(s). There are talks about GIS, content managements and OpenOffice.

Maybe I can get some attention and can attain some valuable contacts within this area of our society. You never know. I will keep you posted!

Brooklyn Bridge

CIMG4702
Photo taken by wytze.

Because of missing our connecting flight from JFK to Amsterdam, Allard and myself had to stay in New York for one day. We spent this day like real tourists: taking lots of pictures, riding the subway, visiting Brooklyn Bridge, Ground Zero etc. Finally we are home today (Sunday), tired as hell. Our suitcases are still somewhere between New York and Amsterdam :-(
Next time, one thing is sure: we will take a direct flight!

Moving to Stoas

This is sort of a personal announcement. I'll be working for Stoas in the new year. I was at the Atlanta Sakai Conference over the last couple of days and realized, when talking to people, that it would be a good idea to give it a little more public attention.

I have had wonderfull years at the University of Amsterdam and learned a lot. In my new position at Stoas I'll be able to work on exisiting systems like Blackboard and new systems like Sakai and other interesting initiatives.

Please feel free to contact me at 'vma {at} stoas {dot} nl'.

Victor Maijer

Mixed Sakai feelings

Although my review of the SAKAI system was rather critical I’m impressed by the devotion of the people at the conference. It is nice to see that so many people are working on a development of a system and also come to this kind of conferences. And then of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg, it is a large motivated community. But… I’m still wondering (and I think most of the people here) were we are going. Sometimes the presentations preach of a better open new collaborative world, were everything should be free and we all work together. I also heard a lot of people like myself that have problems with using the interface of the system, and that these problems are not taken seriously by the SAKAI board. So may be we all work together on the same system, the goals, expectations, and requirements do vary for each partner, and almost each individual. The fact is that developments focus on integration, in my opinion it is all very interesting to see that such big interest exists for such kind of tools, but that the investments are enormous and the question is how long these investments and interest will continue. The popularity of Moodle shows also that a large group is still interested in a easy to use, free e-learning system that can be used in a simple way… But for Sakai still a lot has to be done :-)

Do you like German beer?

"Das tolle bei Sakai ist ja immer, das hier viele kleine Tools benutzt werden und die Community wirklich funktioniert." This is the beginning of the latest post on a German weblog that has existed now for some months, where Andreas Wittke is the leading figure. I am going to do a little promotion here for this weblog... So, if you are interested in news about Sakai in the German language, then go the weblog of our collegues from Lübeck.

On usability evalation of Sakai

Jonathan Howarth is graduate student and has done research on usability of the course management features of Sakai. At Virginia Tech they also use Blackboard, which is quite good in usability.
Jonathan gave an excellent presentation. He started with some fine examples of (un)usability. And then went along with a little theory (just right!): Usability is characteristic of an interactive system that indicates ease of use and usefullness. It is not 'user friendliness' only. The system should help you accomplish something.
Then Jonathan talked about the goals of the usability testing he carried out. The setup of the testing was that of a walkthrough. The 5 participants involved had to do 17 tasks within Sakai 2.2 (they call it Scholar) and had to articulate what they were doing.
The positive feedback that came back from the users: variety of tools is great, thorough Help system, mechanisms for supporting collaboration (although the test was on the course management features of Sakai).
There was a series of usability problems, that some of us are all too familiar with. One of my collegues, Allard Strijker, came to same sort of conclusions after using Sakai 2.2 in his course. The biggest issues that Jonathan has found: terminology, consistency, sections and groups. In the presentation the problems were shown with video's that were recorded. These video's were very informative (you could see the screen and hear the user talking). Some examples: (terminology) The use of the word Roster is different in the Site Info and Gradebook, (consistency) Removing students or removing sections works completely different.
There were much more video-examples in the presentation. They are not on Confluence, because of privacy regulations. You missed something very illustrative, if you weren't there.

User Experience: the theme so far

I am just sitting in on the presentation of the featured speaker of today, Briant Cantwell Smith. He is talking quite philosophical, so far. It should get interesting, I hear from someone who has listened to Brian before. And after some more minutes, it becomes indeed interesting. Briant asserts that people are very capable of swichting their attention (they go up and down the 'attention stack'). After this we heard some interesting implications for software, and specifically Sakai.

Think about this one: "Systems themselves should not occupy our attention - except in times of failure." Most of the times this is not the case in our current systems. One other implication: "Interface should not (in the first instance) provide transparant access to the system". Another implication is that we should pay attention to holism, the overall structure. This is available by thumbing through a book, but not really in software most of the times.

Brian concluded with a conclusion for Sakai: "the experience of the Sakai user should be a) building a research station in Antarctica, or b) participating in philosophy master classes". To put it another way around: the Sakai experience should be anything from a learning system.

Earlier this morning the partner representatives came together and had their 'private' discussion with the Board in the so-called Sakai Foundation Retreat. I won't dwell too much because of the 'privateness' of the discussion. I will leave it that we discussed different subjects. One of them certainly was the room for improvement for the user interface (or the user experience). We also talked about improving our internal communications and external communications. You will see the actions coming sometime near you.

Realtime collaboration in Sakai: it gets better

Today,Miguel Gonzalez Losa from Lancaster University presented a new set of collaboration tools that they have developed to enhance the collaboration experience within Sakai. They have been funded by JISC in the area of e-Science (or e-Research).

The aim of the project was to create software that was useful, simple and extendable. They didn't want to create 'the most powerful' or 'the most complete' solution.

Features available in Agora are audio/video conferencing, whiteboard, shared desktop and chat. With a very simple PC, of a few years old, you can still have a conference room with 4 to 6 participants. They found a very simple solution for the desktop sharing application: they are only transmitting an image of the screen from person 1 to the rest of the persons. This seems to be enough for most use cases. The same goes for the chat tool: it is geared of sharing simple information like URL's of email-adresses. Everything that is done in the conference room is recorded for later viewing, which is strong feature! This recording is done a the client PC, so that you can (re)view it offline.

Agora can be used with no problem on Windows and Linux computers. For Apple the problem lies in the video and audio conferencing, which is a pity. There is a Agora server needed to make use of Agora.

There are lots of thing still to be done, as Miguel pointed out at the end of his presentation, e.g. whispering mode, full Mac support, encryption and SIP compliancy. They also want to make it available for more opensource projects, like Moodle. That would be a good approach for sustainability of this nice toolset.

Oracle and Sakai: next steps

Linda Feng had an interesting presentation on what Oracle is contributing to the Sakai community. The efforts of Oracle are in the area of exchanging information between Enterprise Campus Solutions and Sakai for course,
person, and enrollment information.

It got interesting when Linda started to talk about standards. So far IMS Enterprise Services v1.0 was not really a standard, as was concluded by their market investigation (every vendor had their own somewhat different implementation) that they have done. Linda and a collegue from Desire2Learn are heading the effort to create the IMS Enterprise Services v.2.0. The scope of this specification was decided on in Heerlen.

Also interesting to see was that they did some mapping between objects between Campus Solution and Sakai. This seems to work out fine, as far as I could see.

Some interesting questions by Linda, that Oracle wants answered by us, the users of Sakai and/or Campus Solutions:

• Do we expect real-time interaction between Sakai and Campus Solutions?
• What will be the volume of transactions?
• How many enrollment transactions occur on average per hour? (during peak enrollment periods, during peak add/drop periods)

I spoke earlier with Cary Brown (also from Oracle) about the fact that they need the European input. So we will stay in touch.
Actually, in this arena there are (in general) 2 possibilities, according to another Dutch collegue in the session: you either go for the combination Blackboard/SAP or you go for Sakai/Oracle. All the rest (he means the local players in The Netherlands) is just 'spielerei'. What do you think?

btw: this is post # 100 on this weblog! hurrah!

We have got a structure!

Charles Severance just started his overview of the Sakai Foundation. His main message was that we are not sprinting anymore, we are at a slower pace, but with much more quality and much more people involved. There were some other interesting messages from his talk:

1. We now have a sort of organisation chart for the Sakai Foundation, which is good (this says that the Foundation is maturing). The Requirements process is one part of the Foundation, where users have their influence. Software coordination (including QA) and community communication are the other two parts of the Foundation organisation.
2. Adoption of Sakai is still growing.
3. There are some working principles, such as Public discourse as much as possible, meritocracy, distributed decision making. The essential principle is that there are no 'bosses' who make the decisions. There are project coordinators (and not managers!), which concept is stolen from the Apache Foundation.
   
   
4. Because of the Requirements process (Mark Norton is coordinator), we don't have to burden the developers with these kind of stuff. They can develop!
5. There is a community requirements summary for every release, so that there is a short document for everyone to read.
6. Quality Assurance (coordinator is Megan May) is making more waves. QA makes the final call for a releases. QA broadens the community involvement, because not only nerdy people are involved here.
7. Anthony Whyte is the coördinator for community communication.
8. The only thing we are non-transparent about, is security. This is only communicated to people we know (which is also copied from the Apache Foundation) before we inform the public.
9. Communication should be better :-). We are going to redesign the website and all that stuff that is behind it (seamlessly integrate confluence, jira and collab). One improvement that Chuck kept repeating: we need a document library. I cannot agree more.
10. One important document in this document library should be a Roadmap.

I will leave it here. The complete presentation is available on Dr Chuck's website.

U-Camp: a day well spent

Most of my day I was attending the U-Camp. The morning was spent with some pretty nifty presentations by different presenters. The presentations are(/will) be on the wiki page soon.
The afternoon was more interactive. We had some very interesting discussions on design and user interface issues regarding Sakai. Here are some current and future challenges for Sakai I would like to mention here, that came up during the afternoon.

1. We have, what was called the Microsoft Office effect: there is a proliferation of functionality within a tool (e.g. Resources tool) and therefore tool get less and less usable, certainly for the first-time user of a tool.
   
2. There are tool-silo's. Newcomers are asking questions like "Why is it that I should put all stuff into the Resources tool?" Wouldn't it be great that we would have Flickr Uploadr tool (a litte desktop application), with the same user friendliness, to upload stuff into Sakai?
   
3. Sakai technology is complex. Sometimes small changes seem to take forever. For example the Schedule: why is it so hard to display the title of the Month in the right place. Or another big user (support) issue: why are we still having the problem of the Back button, that doesn't behave as expected?
   
4. Shouldn't user interface issues be part of QA?
5. We should focus more on user scenario's (what does the user want to accomplish?) if we (re)build Tools
   
6. Sakai as a product is mirroring the community, maybe... It is very difficult for different (working) groups to come to terms with other groups, and that is what you see reflected in the tool-silo's.

More to come.... We still have to start talking about 'real UI delight': how much better will we make Sakai in the future!

Evaluating Sakai after some months

Early this morning, just before the conference really started, I was interviewed by a Sakai board director. The board is in the process of talking with member institutions of the Sakai Foundation, to evaluate and steer the strategic directions of the Sakai Foundation for 2007 and beyond.
I really like the fact that the Board is doing this. The Foundation should know what the individual institutions are working on and where their issues lie. So that's what we talked about. We also talked a little bit about my role as the community manager for Sakai within The Netherlands.
My biggest issue with Sakai, for 2007 (and beyond) is what I would call 'marketing'. This is where our biggest challenge lies for the coming years. And marketing is not a BAD word for me. You might call it 'decent communication', if you like that better. Here are some examples of things I am thinking of.
I am thinking about the teacher, the director, the CIO or the educational designer that has heard of Sakai. I think we should provide them with some whitepapers (shall we call them "sakaipapers"?) that answers their specific questions. These sakaipapers should be easily available from our sakaiproject.org website.
I think we also need pertinent information regarding features of Sakai. And we really need information about features in future releases. I have not been able, so far, when asked questions, to direct an 'outsider' within The Netherlands to this kind of pertinent information to be found on the Sakai website. My belief is that this kind of information is what could convince someone of going to use Sakai. And if this information is not readily available, they will revert to whatever they are using right now. And ultimately that is NOT what we want, do we?

We are in Atlanta!

CIMG4364
Photo taken by wytze.

So, we are here in Atlanta. We, that is Allard Strijker and myself. We had some problems with synchronizing our train schedules, but finally we met at Schiphol airport right on time. After that we had a smooth flight to Atlanta. The biggest hassle (if you can put it that way) was the very strict security measures at the airport.
But once you are through that (no pictures!) security, you can hop right on the MARTA, which brings you almost straight to the conference hotel. Which is HUGE, btw!
Here you see Allard studying the map of MARTA.
Our collegues from Amsterdam should be here already. But haven't seen yet. I have seen Steve Githens already!

Critical Sakai review by Allard Strijker

My colleague Allard Strijker will give a presentation at the Atlanta Sakai Conference next week. Within a pilot of Sakai at the University of Twente in the study year 2006/2007 Allard used Sakai within an international master course on knowledge management systems. Together we collected the user experiences which are given from a teacher and student perspective. It's especially interesting to hear about Allard's experiences because he was closely involved with the design and development of TeleTOP, which is currently still the standard virtual learning environment for the University of Twente. Besides being a teacher at the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, Allard may be considered an expert in the field of e-learning. At this moment I will not give away too much information about the presentation, you should hear it for yourself. But be sure there will be some critical remarks. However, I think we shouldn't react too defensive about that, referring to Chuck Severance's statement in Luebeck that the focus should now shift towards the user perspective. This is the only way we can learn from our users and it will help to improve Sakai into a better system. So for those who attend the Atlanta Conference: visit Allard's presentation in the Pedagogy track on Dec. 6th (10.30-11.30 INTL 1).

Busy schedule for Atlanta

Finally I had some time to take a look at the schedule of the Atlanta conference. The schedule is pretty dense and impressive. There really is a lot of good stuff! What strikes me (still!) is that almost all sessions in Atlanta are done by our fellow Americans.... I hope this has changed a bit when we are in Amsterdam. To have at least one genuine 'european' session in Amsterdam, we will have a Birds of the Feather (BOF) meeting for all fellow Europeans in Atlanta.
Besides this BOF, there are some other session that I most certainly will blog about on this weblog.
On Tuesday, Dec 5 (Sinterklaas!), I will be spending my day in the U-Camp: "(..) will provide an opportunity for those interested in the design and support of Sakai to meet, learn, and contribute to the future of the Sakai user experience." The University of Twente already did some preparation for this, which can be found here.
On Wednesday, Dec 6, the day will start of with a keynote by Eben Moglen. This talk will certainly deal with the Blackboard patent. Right after that (at 10.30 AM) my collegue Allard Strijker will present his first experiences with Sakai. At the same time, I might also go to a lecture on "Supporting a Sakai Roll-out". This might provide us with some valuable info on a possible roll-out at our campus some time next year.
At 11.20 AM on this same Wednesday, there is a session on the subject of bridging the gap between Sakai and a Student Information System. Sakai 2.3 has some new services and utilities to make bridging this gap easier. Later on that day (2.20 PM) there is another interesting session on this same theme. This session, from Oracle, is called Sakai Course Mgmt API and Oracle Enterprise Campus Solutions: Oracle will share strategy and architecture to support out-of-the-box integration between Enterprise Campus Solutions and Sakai for course, person, and enrollment information. We will also present analysis and prototyping results of course management integration based on the proposed Sakai Course Management API.

Patent should be reexamined!

Official press release on sakaiproject.org: "November 30, 2006 - The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today announced that it has formally asked the Patent Office to reexamine and ultimately cancel all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent on e-learning systems (SFLC Press Release). The SFLC filed the request for reexamination on behalf of the Sakai Foundation (sakaiproject.org), the Moodle Community (moodle.org), and the ATutor Community (atutor.ca), three open source software projects which develop online educational systems."
There is also a Patent FAQ available.

Sakai Webinars by Unicon

Yesterday I received an email from Unicon, Inc. inviting me to attend one of their upcoming webseminars on Sakai. I do not have the time right now, but maybe you have the time. Then please read on:
"Unicon offers Webinars for anyone who wishes to attend. However, seats are limited and an RSVP is required to reserve a seat.
Upcoming Webinars Provided by Unicon
Sakai Guided Tour Webinar. 11/30/06 (Tomorrow!)
Sakai Cooperative Support Webinar. 12/14/06
Sakai Guided Tour Webinar. 12/15/06"
So, if you are interested, please follow the link above to register.

Sakai: measuring against Educause

Charles Severance wrote an interesting post on his weblog. He reflects on the status of Sakai (the product, the community, the maturity etc), in relation to the attention that was given to Sakai during the last three annual Educause conferences.
In essence Chuck concludes that we have become just one the options within the playing field. Just saying that Sakai is opensource doesn't win any contract any more. Check out Dr. Chuck's Web Log: Status Update: "So I take the occasion of Educause to reflect on things to make sure that I remain grounded in what we are doing and why we are all here."
Here is my little reflection on the status of Sakai. The time is now to indeed change some things: more emphasis on communication (or 'marketing') is one of the things that is on the top of my mind. But also the pure product information on Sakai (what is available? in which version of Sakai?) should be readily available. Quite a few of the questions that were asked during my presentation and demo (text is in Dutch, but presentation is in English) at the Tilburg University yesterday were exactly of this nature. For example: "There is no versioning capability within the Resources tool? How can we then seriously consider Sakai? Blackboard already has versioning, and this is a requirement for us!" Fortunately I could answer that in Sakai 2.4 we will have versioning. But how sure is this answer?
I guess, maybe, just maybe, we should have some sort of product manager role within the community that really can take responsibility for the product releases... My impression is that we still let releases happen too much dependant on the availability of developer resources. Just my 2 cents...
If you have some more spare time, then I would recommend to start reading the great conversation developing on the Sakai dev list on the 'need' for a 'community roadmap'. Check out the public version of this thread.

Sakai SIG NL at the Podium

Today I have presented for the Podium group of ICT experts of 7 different institutions in The Netherlands (University of Utrecht, University of Maastricht, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Free University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, University of Groningen, University of Twente). There were very relevant questions by the audience. One of the most prominent ones: "How do you go about with migration from Blackboard to Sakai (or any other VLE)?" I have referred to Confluence.
Check out the attachment at Sakai op het Podium, if you are interested. Next Monday I will be doing a reprise, based on the same presentation, at the Tilburg University.

We had a great meeting today!

Today we had our 3rd face-to-face meeting of the Sakai Special Interest Group The Netherlands (Sakai SIG NL). We had quite a bunch of new people at the table, which is great. We even had some Belgian collegues from Gent. There were some great stories and experiences that were shared. I was pleasantly surprised by the great number of institutions that are working with OSP, mainly due to the efforts of Portfolio4U.
I have tried to capture most of the meeting in the notes. Check the website for all the nitty gritty details. I am awaiting eagerly the stuff that Jaeques and Ferry shared with us :-)
For (y)our convenience here are some URL's that were mentioned today:

1. Translation of Sakai into Dutch: http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/7W4
2. Overview of all QA servers to be found on http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/ZT8
3. Styleguide for the Dutch translation: http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/8G4
4. Our wiki: http://www.sakai-pilot.utwente.nl/sakaiwiki/
5. Video Alfa College (featuring Jim Doherty): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3462508180886557891

See you all next time, on Jan 31, 2007!

Sakai SIG NL: Agenda for 22 november 2006

{Dutch} Iedereen is welkom op 22 november 2006 in Utrecht. Agenda voor 22 november 2006: "De agenda voor onze derde bijeenkomst is bekend. Zie het attachment. We hebben een aantal nieuwe gezichten aan tafel en er is een interessante bijdrage van Walter Brand (Memotrainer)."

SURF Onderwijsdagen 2006: Sakai stuff

The last two days have been quite busy for me, as I was visiting the SURF Onderwijsdagen, the largest conference and tradefair regarding ICT in Education in The Netherlands.
I had tried to prepare myself properly with regard to sessions that I would like to participate in, but this proved quite difficult because of the clumsiness of the conference website. And during the conference the sort of same feeling struck me: so many people, the lack of food during lunchtime, the very crowded trade floor and the heat in some of the conference rooms! Maybe the conference needs a different format.
Anyway, this blog is about Sakai in The Netherlands! I had some interesting conversations with regard to this subject during the conference. Let me share with you some new insights and interesting developments.
First of all I had a chat with a representative of Dokeos Nederland. This was after the very interesting presentation by the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (in Belgium). They have implemented the Dokeos course management system (opensource ofcourse) and have formed a large consortium with mainly Belgian partners, but also partners in Chile, Spain and France, to sustain developments for Dokeos. This reminds me a little of the Sakai Foundation, although there are major differences regarding governance I think. And ofcourse the scale is much smaller. To the best of my information some of the institutions on the partnerlist are also using (of have used or evaluated) Sakai and/or OSP.
Then I talked a while with a representative of a large community college who just have dediced to go with Sakai. Great news!
And thirdly I got introduced to a university in Belgium, that is using WebCT right now. They are very keen to get more insight in the possible alternatives. And since there is quite an active opensource movement in Belgium, they are seriously considering Sakai and other opensource systems.

OSP within the Netherlands

OSP (Open Source Portfolio) might be relatively unknown, but sometimes you can read something about it, even within The Netherlands. There are two things I would like to point to. [what follows is partly in Dutch]
1. Zo schrijft Wilfred Rubens: Ervaringen met eportfolio bij Gilde Opleidingen: "Na een selectieprocedure is gekozen voor Open Source Portfolio (OSP), dat geïntegreerd is binnen Sakai. Gilde Opleidingen heeft ook binnen OSP een web-based formulier gemaakt dat deelnemers moet aanzetten tot reflecties."
2. Jim Doherty (Portfolio4U) has been interviewed by Chuck Severance regarding their experiences with OSP. I hope to see the video real soon!

{Dutch} Ga je stemmen of kom je naar Utrecht?

De uitnodiging die ik het gemaild naar iedereen waarvan ik veronderstel dat ze enig belang zouden hebben om op 22 november aanwezig te zijn. Ook lezers van dit weblog (die de mail niet hebben ontvangen), mogen mij mailen of ze gaan komen!
================
From: Koopal, W.Y. (Wytze, ITBE)
Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2006 10:10 AM
To: {removed}
Subject: [Sakai SIG NL] Ga je stemmen of kom je naar Utrecht?

Hallo mensen,

De tijd schrijdt voort. Het is herfst geworden. Volgende week zijn de SURF Onderwijsdagen. Op 22 november gaan we stemmen voor een nieuwe Tweede Kamer.

Maar he, wat zien we daar in onze agenda's staan? Op 22 november is ook de derde bijeenkomst van Sakai SIG NL. Ik hoop dat deze datum ook in jullie agenda's is terecht gekomen. Zo niet, dan hierbij de herinnering!

Op 22 november zullen we in ieder geval 1 of 2 praktijkverhalen gaan horen mbt het gebruik van Sakai. De agenda voor 22 november begint dus vorm te krijgen. Het 'rondje langs de velden' is natuurlijk ook een agendapunt, evenals een staande lunch. De definitieve agenda zal uiterlijk op 16 november op onze website (elearning.surf.nl/sakai_nl) verschijnen.

Graag hoor ik via een kort antwoord (svp voor 14 november) op deze email of je ook van plan bent te gaan komen op 22 november.

Regards,
Wytze Koopal
University of Twente
SURF Sakai community manager, The Netherlands
=============

Must-reads on Sakai

On our website (of the Sakai SIG NL), I have created a short message (in Dutch) a few days ago with links to three important documents regarding Sakai.
The most readable (at least for me) is the document that Charles Severance wrote with Joseph Hardin, entitled "Strategic Directions for Sakai and Data Interoperability". (direct link)

Sakai 2.3.0 is available!

Today, Nov 3 (2006), Sakai 2.3.0 has been officially released!
Sakai 2.3.0 is the first release to promote successful provisional tools to the enterprise bundle (Rwiki and Calendar Summary). It also includes three new provisional tools. Sakai 2.3 introduces a significant number of feature enhancements to existing tools as well, along with over 450 fixes. See the release notes for more details. You can also download a Sakai Demo
Sakai has not yet been thoroughly tested with either Firefox 2.0 or IE7, though early testing has not revealed any issues.

Who is going to / Wie gaat er naar Atlanta?

It would be nice to have some idea which Dutch collegues are going to Atlanta for the 6th Sakai Conference. Please respond by commenting on this post. You can also send an email to Wytze in case you don't want to be known :-).
I am planning to have the following travel schedule (nothing final yet):
To Atlanta on Monday 4 dec, KL621
To Amsterdam on Friday 9 dec, KL9289 and then KL644 (via JFK)
Disclaimer: this is just for informative purposes... I am not going to act as your travel agent!
Tags: travel, atlanta, conference, sakai

Candidates for Sakai Foundation Board published

Candidates for the 2006 Sakai Foundation Board election have been announced today. You can view the candidates bios and statements at https://sakaiproject.org/election. Board members will be elected by the institutional and corporate representatives as specified in the Sakai Foundation bylaws. These are the candidates (names link to their bios and statements about their candidacy and vision for Sakai): Lois Brooks , Michael Feldstein ,Clay Fenlason ,Rolf Granow, Joseph Hardin, Michael Korcuska, Deon van der Merwe.
This list shows some very very well respected people (at least by me!), as well as that Sakai is really international (Rolf Granow is from Germany and Deon van der Merwe is from South Africa).

WebCT versus Sakai? Read this!

During my travels around the web, I sometimes find some interesting treasures. A few months ago I found the UBC Arts ISIT Learning Tools Community Blog. I cannot really find out who the authors are, which is a pity. I guess that UBC stands for University of British Columbia.
Because they use categories on their blog it is quite simple to point you to all relevant posts on this blog that give you some insight in differences between WebCT and Sakai as seen through the eyes of an enduser. Just go to UBC Arts ISIT Learning Tools Community Blog - WebCT versus Sakai.

Interviewing in Dallas

Every year a large group of Dutch elearning professionals visits the annual Educause conference somewhere in the US. This year the group traveled to Dallas. Keith Russell (University of Utrecht) got hold of Charles Severance and conducted an interview for the Edutrip 2006 weblog which also has been recorded.
Thanking Keith for pointing this out for us.

Interdisciplinary studies (UvA) supported by Sakai

By:
- Jaeques Koeman, Universiteit van Amsterdam (IIS), Edia
- Roland Groen, Edia

The Sakai implementation www.iis-communities.nl is the learning environment for interdisciplinary lecture series at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (IIS, www.iis.uva.nl) of the Universiteit van Amsterdam. A broad population of students including alumni, contract students and students at other universities participate in these lecture series, which cover topics ranging from conflict studies, religion, quantum lessons and China.

The use of Sakai in supporting the lecture series offered ways to overcome bottlenecks and meet new demands and opportunities at the same time. The environment has been configured to meet demands such as facilitating experts at distance to contribute to the educational process and have a level of public accessibility to allow the communication and transfer of academic knowledge to a broader audience outside the university. By doing this, the achievements made during these lecture series (e.g. a Wiki containing future scenario’s about the city of Amsterdam) will also not be deleted at the series’end, but remain publicly accessible and serve as a reference point for future students, thus creating a community around interdisciplinary topics.

The Sakai implementation www.iis-communities.nl was done by Edia - education technology (www.edia.nl) . Edia is an Amsterdam-based company that develops educational software, implements (open source) e-learning technologies and advises in the field of ict in (higher) education. Since 2005 Edia has monitored the developments of Sakai and now has version 2.2.1 in production at IIS. Next to adding various bug and issue reports and some translation work, Edia has developed a tool for versions 2.1.1 and 2.2.1 that combines the register, join and login functions in one.

Both Edia and IIS are now joining forces with the Computing Centre of the Universiteit van Amsterdam, exchanging experience and ideas on applications of Sakai within the university. For example, 2007 will see Sakai in action supporting online academic introduction courses for scholars (Webklassen).

Anonymous browsing in Sakai

Last Thursday Charles Severance was one of the keynote speakers at the "Over de grenzen van de ELO" conference, where Stanley already reported about in this blog. His official announcement of the 7th Sakai conference to be held in Amsterdam, next June, was great news!!
But there was more news than that of course. I will share two news items with you. I have some more, but i am not able to share them here.
The first newsitem newsworthy item was spawned by Keith Russell of the University of Utrecht (mentioned earlier on this blog), who raised the question of anonymous use of Sakai during the Q&A session with Chuck. The answer by Chuck was very clear: in the near future it will be possible that (part of) a course or project site can be made public. That is: you could make the Announcements public, so for everyone to read (including Google!), but the rest of your tools in Sakai private (so only for site members). See Jira for more details on Google indexing. This feature would really be an great improvement for Sakai. Actually we have exactly the same problem with our current VLE.
One other newsitem (from the hallways) is that one of the larger institutions for vocational education in The Netherlands will start piloting with Sakai real soon.
If you want to read more on "Over de grenzen van de ELO" conference, please go to Wilfred Rubens (in Dutch) or Marc Dupuis (in English) or Scott Wilson (one of the other excellent keynotes that we were offered!) And maybe Willem van Valkenburg will be ready to share some comment with us, once the VVD congress is over :-)
More pictures at Flickr

Sakai Foundation present at Dutch ELO Conference

The Dutch conference "Over de grenzen van de ELO II" (Beyond the boundaries of the electronic learning environment), held on Sept. 28th-29th, included two interesting contributions made by Chuck Severance, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation. See http://stanleyportier.blogspot.com for a reflection of the first conference day.

Sakai Announces June 2007 Amsterdam Conference

The Sakai Foundation is pleased to announce that the June 2007 Sakai Community Conference will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The dates will be Tuesday -Thursday, June 12-14, with pre and post conference sessions and activities on Monday the 11th, and Friday, the 15th. This will be the first European venue for the Sakai Community Conference and we look forward to working with all our community and especially the Universiteit van Amsterdam on the conference. The site will be the new Movenpick Hotel Amsterdam City Center for the Tuesday-Thursday meetings. See you in Atlanta this December, and Amsterdam next June.

- Joseph Hardin, Sakai Conference Chair

The Universiteit van Amsterdam and the City of Amsterdam are very pleased that Amsterdam will host the Sakai 2007 June conference. The university will work closely with the Sakai Foundation and the Sakai Community to make the meeting a huge success. The conference itself is happening in one of the most modern buildings of Amsterdam in an astonishing setting on the waterfront, next to the canal area and the city center, and we intend to host the pre- and post- conference meetings in university buildings in the historic center. The open cosmopolitan spirit of Amsterdam fits perfectly with the open source spirit of the Sakai community.

- Frank Benneker, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Keith's take at Sakai 2.2

Keith Russell (University of Utrecht) contacted me a few weeks ago. I provided him with some testing oppurtunities on our Sakai pilot installation. He quite hits the right spots, I think, in his review: "I had a go at the new version of SAKAI (2.2.0) which was so kindly provided by Wytze Koopal. It was very interesting to give it a go and I learnt a number of new things. So here a quick resume..." I left some comments on his weblog.
Keith will co-lead the Dutch delegation to the upcoming Educause annual conference in Dallas, with a special emphasis on coursemanagement systems. Check out the wiki of this Dutch bunch for the different themes that they will be focusing on. They also have a weblog. Both the wiki and the weblog are in Dutch btw.

Shift towards multi-channel learning

The september poll by Brandon-hall.c0m shows that 78% of the respondents predict a further shift towards a multi-channel learning paradigm. Multi-channel as an alternative for the traditional tell-test model of e-learning. Even the definition of "content" becomes broader as in any online experience or task that leads to learning (Woodill & Brandon Hall Research, 2006). The focus is now on mental models through the cooperative an collaborative construction of knowledge based on discussion and guided exploration (Jochems et al., 2004). Provided that this is the educational development mainstream for the next couple of years, I think this provides excellent possibilities for Sakai. As stated in Luebeck - two weeks ago- especially the collaborative and groupware functions are considered USP's in Sakai, which perfectly matches with current and future educational paradigms.

References
Jochems, W., Merrienboer, J., and Koper, R. (Eds.) (2004). Integrated E-learning: Implications for pedagogy, technology and organization. London: Routledge Falmer.

Check out Planet Sakai!

While in Luebeck i heard the newest buzz! It is called Planet Sakai. And Steve Githens is THE driving f0rce behind it and has just released it 'officially. He says: "Planet Sakai is a wonderful world of aggregated camaraderie amongst Sakai users, coders, pedagogy folks, admins, etc etc."
So check it out at http://www.planetsakai.org ! (and yes, this weblog gets aggregated too!).

Meeting notes available

Yesterday we had our second official meeting of the Sakai SIG NL. I was pleasantly surprised to see some new faces at the table (well actually this is what I am aiming at ofcourse!). We heard some great stories about Sakai. I have tried to capture anything of interest in the meeting notes (that are in English, for our non-Dutch speaking friends around the world).
Sakai SIG NL: Verslag 13 sep (editie 2): "Op 13 september was de tweede officiële bijeenkomst van de Sakai Special Interest Group NL. Het was een interessante bijeenkomst met nieuwe en bekende gezichten.
Het verslag is te vinden in de bijlage. Volgende bijeenkomst is gepland op 22 november 2006. Iedereen met interesse in Sakai is van harte welkom."

Pedagogy, education or...

During the European Sakai Days I noticed that the term pedagogy was mentioned a few times. Personally, I believe this is not the best concept to use in the Sakai context. Although it is nowadays used in a broader context, the emphasis is still on teaching children. Moreover, pedagogy includes a lot more issues about raising children from birth till they are adults. I have another reason not to prefer pedagogy instead of concepts like education, learning or didactics. In the context of education, pedagogy is most times referred to as the correct use of teaching strategies or the science of teaching, i.e. the teacher is in control. However, in the context of Sakai and the Bologna issues the focus is on learning. The educational process becomes demand driven: the student is in control of his own learning process. Collaboration and groupwork are key issues. How to organise groupwork is not a matter of pedagogy but of educational or learning design.

European Sakai Day in Free Software Magazine

Alan Berg wrote a nice article in the newsletter of the Free Software Magazine.

Link to article

Further Luebeck impressions

In addition to the posts that were already submitted by Frank and Wytze, for me it was a key issue (e.g. explicitly stated by Rolf Granow and confirmed by Chuck Severance) that the focus within the Sakai community should now shift from the development approach to the user approach. The learners and instructor are the real stakeholders, although development should continue for further improvement of Sakai. Perhaps the European partners should take a lead in this. I think this approach fits perfectly well within the approach we have taken in Twente: starting with the educational user requirements and then see how ICT can facilitate.

I had an interesting talk with John Norman, right after my own presentation. It comes down to an offer by Cambridge to help with the startup of a development workflow process. What issues do you have to deal with when starting up, how to deal with requirement lists, releases, setting priorities, deployment to the community are some aspects that could be addressed. The Cambridge people are willing to come over if we like. It may also be considered to relate this to a possible development group within the Dutch SURF Sakai SIG.

A third point which became clear to me is that there's a market for commercial affiliates. Several people I talked to are interested in using Sakai, but simply don’t have the expertise for development and support capacity within their own resources. Hosted solutions (based on major releases), integration with existing infrastructure (e.g. student administration), implementation support and helpdesk are a few services that would help out to make these organisations use Sakai. It's good if organisations would join the community on that basis, because it's important for the future of Sakai to have as much as possible a large install base.

For further impressions by the CBUS team from Twente look at: http://www.sakai-pilot.utwente.nl/sakaiwiki/lubeck_impressions

Oslo and Stockholm

Oslo and Stockholm where the universities that sent out very thought-provoking (and excellent English-speaking) presenters for the first European Sakai Days (ESD). Susanne Koch from Oslo University talked about three tasks that we have as the Europeans within the worldwide Sakai community:
1. Identify European challenges and ideas about pedagogy and education; these can be derived from the Bologna process and EU's Lisbon process
2. Ask ourselves seriously: "Does the Sakai framework currently or potentially help us better than, say, Blackboard, and why?" So, for example how well does Sakai support lifelong learning and other things.
3. And if and when the previous questions are answered positively, then we should ask ourselves: "How do we format, maintain and cultivate the network?" One thing that Susanne mentioned (and that was also said at our Euro BOF in Vancouver), was that we could try to apply for EU funding. The complete presentation by Susanne can be found online.
And after this very interesting talk by Susanne, there was even a more interesting one by Frerik Oldsjö from Stockholm University. He really gave us a thorough insight in the Bologna process and the pedogical implications. Fredrik made very clear that the Bologna process will result in a pedagogical shift in our educational systems for higher ed! The purpose of Bologna process (which started in 1998) is to create one European Area of Higher Education (EHEA). And don't be fooled: this is not a EU endeavour. The Bologna process has been ratified by 45 European countries! There are ten operational goals, all revolving around comparability, compatibility and transparancy of the systems for Higher Education.
One of the most mindboggling things that I heard is that this whole process essentially means that there should be focus on learning outcomes and assessing these, instead of content. Or take this consequence: much more focus on (peer) feedback!
Fredrik very neatly had translated the Bologna process into some basic requirements for a VLE / LMS or CMS:
1/ should at all times be possible to have an open dialogue over time
2/ full integration of online and offline activities
3/ discussion / dialogue between all involved
4/ summative and formative assessment -> combine in portfolio, but also basic simple assessment tools (!)
5/ seperate group discussions (threads, visual structure), fora, blogs, chat etc
6/ inspiring and secure (socialization): they need to get to know their peers, present themselves to the group
7/ the teacher (the tutor) should have tools that allow for getting a picture of the learning process.
Fredrik's presentation will be online shortly hereafter. I recommend it!
So, all in all I really liked both contributions a lot!

Lubeck, Valencia and Porto

In the title of this post you will find the universities that delivered their presentations last afternoon over here in Lubeck.
Lubeck is a very interesting case, you could say. Under de Oncampus brand they are delivering very much distance learning programmes (80% distance, 20% f2f), using Sakai. They depend heavily on online content in their network of partners around the Baltic Sea.
Valencia is another special case: they need to provide their ICT tools in two languages, being Spanish and Catalan. This is why they did some work in realizing this in Sakai.
The last presentation was of our collegues from Fernando Pessoa (Porto, Portugal). They had a lot of the same issues we have encountered in our preparation for our pilots. But also they created some provisional tools, that we are deploying right now in our pilots. For example Site Stats.

Looking back

In his keynote address at the European Sakai Day in Lubeck Chuck Severance took the audience on a history ride. Going back to the days before the Sakai project started he provided the listeners with the reason why the collaborative effort of all the universities that are working together in the Sakai Foundation provide them with true control of their destiny.
Being an eloquent speaker Chuck told about the route the people had planned in past, the detours, the undiscovered "lands" and the sometimes difficult decisions that had to be made. He combined this with his nice sense of humor and appetite for good food and drinks.
The scaffolding is removed and Sakai is now ready for the real thing. It has to prove itself as a sustainable solution as a collaborative and teaching solution for our campuses.

A link to the website with the slides of Chuck Severance presentation

We are in Luebeck right now

CIMG4493
Originally uploaded by wytze.

The European Sakai Days have just officially started. There is a great audience of about 100 people. Even people from Africa have taken the effort to come over. Prof Dr Rolf Granow is delivering his talk right now. I you want to see the powerpoint, then go to confluence, go here.
Last night we had a great walk around the old town of Luebeck. The weather was very good. And Luebeck is a nice city to walk around.

A promising week lies ahead.

1st European Sakai Days
Originally uploaded by wytze.

This week is a very significant week. First of all it is the week where our prime minister officially opens our academic year. Secondly this is the week where our first two pilots with Sakai are starting.
And thirdly this week marks the first European Sakai Days, that will be held in Luebeck, Germany. In this weblog you will see extensive coverage of this conference. So keep coming back (or read our RSS or Atom feed through your feedreader)!
Oh yeah, also this morning in the news-headlines was a manifest of all our Dutch universities to invest more in higher education. Why now? Well, our parliament elections are coming up (next November).