Amsterdam Conference videos online

It took a week extra but the videos of the 7th conference in Amsterdam are online. They are available at the following website: http://mediasite.uva.nl/mediasite/catalog/

under de Sakai button.
Unfortunately non-ms window users might experience some problems.
The mediasite application is optimized for microsoft file formats.
The video file format is *.wmv

Individual links to presentations listed according to the conference agenda:

Pre Conference 11 june: ( Matterhorn 2) - Morning:

Introduction Sakai (1):


Introduction Sakai (2):


Afternoon:

Introduction to OSP (1):


Introduction to OSP (2):


Introduction to OSP (3):


12 june ( Matterhorn 1,2,3)

Opening of 7th Sakai Conference June 2007


Morning (Matterhorn 3)

Inclusive Design and..


An Introduction to FLUID...


Sakai UI design patterns


Sakai technical futures


Afternoon:

Mneme: test center...


Welcome speech Paul Doop ...


13 june (Matterhorn 1) - Morning:

Learning styles and the online...


Open courseware pedagogy...


Innovative pedagogyin a dual ...


Lams V2 an Sakai ...


Afternoon:

Open-CLE an open standard...


Student interaction with ...

Matterhorn 1,2,3:

Technical demonstation...


14 june (zurich 1) - Morning:

The use and integration of Sakai ...


Off to fast start OSP in Dutch ...


Sakai/OSP portfolio ...


Collaborating in a new Paradigm ...


Gt Sakai implementation ...

Afternoon:

Sakai Accessibility Update ...


Closing and thank you ...

Final report in English (University of Twente)

The project team at the University of Twente has recently finished their pilot project Campus Blend using Sakai (CBUS in short). In this project Sakai was evaluated on different aspects. Evaluation was done on technical aspects, educational and functional aspects as well as community aspects.
Extensive results and conclusion on the aforementioned aspects are all to be found in the final report, that has been translated into English for everyone to read. Go to http://www.utwente.nl/elo, where you can download your (electronic) copy of the report.

{Dutch} Waarom geen opensource in het Hoger Onderwijs?

This post will be mostly in Dutch...
Ruben van Wendel de Joode (TU Delft) reflects on some recent research that concludes that not even one institution for Higher Education in The Netherlands uses an opensource product in when it comes to a VLE or CMS.
Ruben heeft het onderzoek van de Open Universiteit gelezen dat in het kader van het e-Learning research programma van SURFfoundation onlangs is verschenen. Hij begint zijn review als volgt:
"Met groeiende belangstelling en verbazing heb ik zojuist op een druilerige zondagavond het rapport gelezen over een door SURF foundation gefinancierd onderzoek naar de adoptie van open source elektronische leeromgevingen in het hoger onderwijs. In de inleiding, die begint op pagina 7, staat voor mij de meest essentiële uitkomst van het hele onderzoek. Van de 33 hoger onderwijsinstellingen die de enquête hebben ingevuld, maakt er niet één gebruik van open source in de elektronische leeromgeving (elo). Een opmerkelijke uitkomst."
Lees meer in Belangrijkste vraag blijft onbeantwoord.

Agenda for next meeting (July 4)

The last meeting of the Sakai Special Interest Group The Netherlands of the current academic year is scheduled for July 4 (next Wednesday). Main agenda item is the evaluation of the University of Twente of Sakai. The complete agenda of this meeting is available for you to read (in Dutch).
In case you are planning to attend, a little note by email would be appreciated.

Final reports of University of Twente

Today we have formally finished our evaluation of Sakai (regarding community, functionality of Sakai, technical aspects and financial aspects). You will find all information and our reports on our website, http://www.utwente.nl/elo. The reports are all in the Dutch language, but they all have an extensive summary in English. The final report ("Eindadvies") is being translated in English in full as we speak.
To summarize our work: we are quite happy with Sakai (version 2.3 that is), but some functionalities should be worked on before we would go into full production. Furthermore we will need to look into MS Sharepoint regarding possible components that could fulfill some of our needs. So, all in all this boils down to a final decision that will be made in the spring of next year (2008).
Our reports now go into the formal decision process. We will keep you posted.

Let's talk pedagogy?

For those who are a member of the pedagogy discussion group may have witnessed a very lively discussion going on on all matters around pedagogy (or didactics as the colleagues from Norway would say) (pedagogy@collab.sakaiproject.org). To me this is an immediate effect of the Amsterdam conference. I can't remember that the discussion has been so intensive as it is right now. That's the good thing about it. I've tried to keep up with the discussion for a few days, and also replied with some posts, but simply don't have enough time right now. Because there are so many contributions (already 35 today, and the Americans are still working at this time...) it becomes difficult to keep track of all the discussion threads that are going on. You have to read every mail to see who is replying to who, and if anyone has replied to your own contribution. I noticed one remarkable post by Clay Fenlason saying that "Just as developers can get preoccupied with the cool next thing and leave the user behind, so also can pedagogists get swept up by the vision of the big rethink". It took about some 20 further posts before someone replied to this... Hopefully things will get organised soon into relatively small working packages in which the requirements are fullfilled, instead of loosing ourselves into extensive discussions that sometimes don't have a clear focus.

Some news from last week on film :-)

Last week, www.edusite.nl, the website with lots of elearning coverage in The Netherlands, was present at our conference. They released some video-interviews on Sakai yesterday.
Check it out (in WMV format): Chuck (in English), Michael (in English) and, well, yes, and me (in Dutch).... When I was interviewed the camera was so close to my head (!), but the end-result is quite OK, don't you think?
For those who read Dutch, you can also read on Edusite the summary of the Q&A session with the Board.

Executive dinner - part 2

This is a second post on the executive dinner last week in Amsterdam. There are three more things that are worth mentioning here and are fit for publication. Some other things are also really worth mentioning, but are not fit for publication yet. Please keep coming back and you might find out!
First of all there was a quite interesting point that was made by John Norman, the chair of the Sakai Board of Directors. He told us that for them, at the University of Cambridge, one of the big benefits of joining Sakai is what he calls 'staff development'. Because you are engaged in a worldwide, very fast-moving community, your staff gets much more opportunities to develop themselves. And you also can attract more easily the people that you need, because of the Sakai work that you need to do. This is really true for Cambridge. They have indeed attracted at least two sofware engineers from outside the UK to work for them.
Another interesting discussion we had was about software licensing. Well, actually it was about freedom of choice ofcourse! Most (commercial) software licencing schemes are based on 'seats' or 'users' or 'accounts', or maybe 'campus' or 'location'. This is very confining to the way we operate as educational institutions. This will simply not hold true in our sector. Think about all the collaboration we do, within our country, or even within the EU. Or what about the guest lecturers that we invite to our campuses. Officially they most likely are not allowed to use your VLE. There was given an example of a portofolio system in the UK that caused these kind of headaches to the ones involved. Because of the Educational Community License of Sakai, I can give away as many accounts and access rights to our Sakai system as needed. And we have done that already, and we will. There is one account underway right now!
One other interesting aspect of Sakai that we discussed is that a 'surprising' amount of Sakai installations are not physically based at a educational institution. Someone said that maybe about 50% of Sakai use is through intermediaries. So, in case you feel that your institution is not capable of hosting and servicing Sakai (which is indeed not that easy), you can rely on a service provider. This is true in the US, but also in The Netherlands. Go talk to Stoas, Portfolio4u, A New Spring, Omix or Edia! They will be more than happy to assist you. And if you want more 'independent' advice, please feel free to contact me.

Executive dinner - part 1

Wednesday, June 13, was the 2nd day of the latest Sakai conference. It was a busy day, as I mentioned earlier. I had been looking forward to this day for quite some time. Mainly because Frank Benneker and myself organized a dinner meeting on behalf of SURFfoundation between the Sakai Board and representatives of SURFfoundation, plus executives from Higher Education instituions in The Netherlands. The exchange of ideas during the meeting was very open and honest. Charles Severance had prepared a very thorough, but concise, walkthrough of what Sakai is, why Sakai exists, and who is part of it. This laid the foundation for some thorough discussions that we had.
Let me just give some highlights:

1. The relation with Oracle, more specifically regarding Peoplesoft Campus Solutions, was asked for. Apparantly this good news had not travelled in the right directions: that the integrations between Campus Solutions and Sakai is being worked on quite extensively and that some results should be expected by the end of the year. The University of Amsterdam is closely involved in this effort.
   
2. Security and reliability of Sakai. I could say the same thing ('news has not travelled yet'). Twofold answer: there is very effective security procedure in place, headed by Anthony Whyte, but secondly there has not been any major breakdown of a Sakai installation due to hackers and/or very clever students. In a sense this was the question if open source software is enterprise ready, scalable and secure. We answered this very effectively, I think.

Some more highlights in a later post....

UX stands for "User Experience"

IMG_3478
Originally uploaded by wytze

Already in Atlanta I heard about the Fluid Project. At that time I didn't really understand the possible impact, ambitions and scope of this endeavour. Ofcourse not everything could have been clear at that time either, because the project team was still working ong the proposal. Eventually the project received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in April 2007 for a 2-year timeframe. The Fluid project is led by the University of Toronto, with core participation from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Cambridge, the University of British Columbia and York University..
This Amsterdam Sakai conference was the second encounter I had with the project. And I am impressed and I am really looking forward to the results.
Friday morning, while the official conference was already over, I attended an extensive session on the project and its goals. I am not even going to try to sum up all the good things I heard, also because some things are fairly technical. I will just give you my summary here.
First of all this is not just a project within the Sakai context. It is a project that actually all open source software projects should benefit from. The closest relations right now are with Sakai, Moodle, Kuali Student and uPortal. IBM and Sun Microsystems are also partners in the project. The project will provide common tools, as well as guidelines and software components for improving the usability and the accessibility of software. The goals of the project are very ambitious and are described as flexible user interfaces (what do you think of 'swappable interfaces at runtime'!). The project will also explicitly build a community around the efforts, so that it will be sustainable after the funding period. Every contribution is appreciated.
If one wants to put it a little bit differently, one could say that this project will infuse Sakai and other systems with those Web 2.0 features that everyone has come to love, combined with complete accessability, through keyboards and screenreaders. There is already (and we are only two months in the project) a very nice demonstration of what is possible, which is called Lightbox.
The first thing that will be done next, is what is called UX walktroughs. This will mean very detailed analysis of usage of the system right now. Sakai will be one of the systems that will be analysed like this. Signup for this effort is possible; I am seriously thinking about doing this. Go to www.fluidproject.org (website and wiki are being organized while you read) if you also want to give your contributions to this great project.

The countries we came from

IMG_3471
Originally uploaded by wytze

Yesterday at the closing sesssion, there were some interesting numbers. The total number of participants was almost 400. This is the splitup of the numbers. There were 89 people from The Netherlands, which is a big succes in my opinion!

Impressions on June 14th

June 14th was for me the third and last conference day. First I joined a session by Angelica Risquez from the University of Limerick. They use the rSmart hosted CLE solution. Despite the fact that rSmart did a thorough re-design of the Sakau GUI and combined functional components based on processes from the end user perspective there are still some problems. There seems to be a new version of the rSmart solution, but I don't have the details yet. Baiscally the end user requires too much navigation to get to the point where he wants to. The combination of functional components ('Learn', 'Inform', etc.) is not always logical and inflexible. Moreover, instructors tend to use it in different ways. It would be a good thing if an institute could make adaptations to the default settings that rSmart has chosen.
After that I went to a track of three sessions on the use of OSP. For me it was the first time to get some in-depth information on how OSP is used in daily practice. I saw some nice examples being presented. Marij Veugelers (University of Amsterdam) stressed that you have to organize your projects very well to be successful. Project manager, educational technology consultants, support, community of practice, communications are important components. Natasa Brouwer showed an interesting example in a 3yrs. chemist Bachelor program. The next presentation by Sara Hill adds some additional pedagogical issues to this like the issue that students have to get used to reflect on their work. Reflection should be carefully integrated into the curriculum. One of her lessons learned was the reflection intervals have to be planned in order to keep the process going one. Furthermore, it is a good thing to include peers into the reflection process. The third OSP presentation by Bergman & Poklop introduced a portfolio review tool. At Northeastern University (Boston, MA) the instructors experienced problems with finding the right portfolio in order to give their feedback/review. The Education technology department developed a PHP application that includes a reporting system. It can query the database, send alerts to the reviewer and delivers automated review reporting. All reviews are gathered in an overview matrix. One can click on every review to see what the specific details are. There was a lot of interest from the audience for this tool.
Finally I joined the presentation by Andreas Wittke from Lubeck. Although it was one of the last sessions, the title of the presentation did it's work: Zurich 2 was almost full (about 100 people)! For those who consider Sakai as a sort of religion, this presentation might have put them with both feet on the ground again. In a clear and sometimes humoristic style Andreas argued that the end users (in most cases he deals with instructors/teachers) don't care so much about architecture. That's something they can't see. They look at the front-end. The Moodle interface is much more what the teachers like and is easy to work with. So they prefer to use Moodle. Sakai also suffers from a communication (or marketing) problem, and I agree with that. The amount of people that know Moodle is much higher than those who know Sakai. In his conclusions Andreas mentioned that we might look into joining forces: Sakai has the better technical points (database, architecture), Moodle is superior from the usability perspective. Why not work together, instead of being competitors? Come together and discuss! The problem might be that the Moodle community is not as clear as the Sakai community. The people in the Sakai Foundation are easily recognized, but to whom should they talk in the Moodle community? You may want to keep posted by reading Andreas' weblog (in German).

The second day

Unfortunately I was only able to attend the morning sessions, since I had to join an important executive board meeting from the 3 technical universities in the Netherlands. The morning started with an interesting breakfast talk with Prof. Rolf Granow from Lubeck. I met him the first time during the Lubeck conference, and it was good to talk to him again. One of the things that came out was a further exploration concerning the possibility of developing a joint studyprogram on industrial engineering. This can be well related and embedded into initiaves that fit the Bologna process. After that I joined a presentation on Learning styles and the online environment by Susan Roig and Melissa Zhou (click here). On the one hand the presenters explained about the eight types of intellingence by Gardner and how that could reflect onto the instructional design of a course. They showed a nice example of a biology course, which was originally developed with another tool however. The course was presented in Sakai, but it could also have been another system. I was hoping to hear more specifically about how Sakai functionality was used in relation to specific learning styles. Maybe in terms of predefined sets of functionality that is required for a typical learning style (e.g. verbally oriented). On the other hand Zhou presented about a functional evaluation of Sakai. This was interesting, especially in relation with our own pilot project. It turned out to be a very critical analysis, although some of the points were more related to organisation instead of Sakai. I think it proves that the Sakai still has to deal with a major challenge from the end user perspective. Roig and Zhou argued that the emphasis is still too much on the development perspective and not on pedagogical issues. They hope that activities on pedagogy issues will increase further on Confluence.
After the coffee break I joined the session of Wytze Koopal. Obviously I was already well informed about the contents of his presentation, but was interested to hear from other experiences. The tips and tricks offered are already listed on Confluence, so I won't list them here again, but I think there are some quite useful issues among them. Today (Thursday, June 14) will be my third and last conference day. I will probably join some more sessions in the teaching and learning track, and of course Andreas Wittke's presentation, which has the challenging title "Why German Universities Choose Moodle instead of Sakai". Tommorow I will work in the quiet surroundings of my home office, trying to finalize on of our Sakai reports and prepare an internal Sakai presentation for next Monday morning.

Photo of today

Harriet and the Sqkaiger
Originally uploaded by dr-chuck

Harriet Truscott and the Sakaiger. I am wondering when and where the Sakaiger was invented. Was it in Cambridge (where Harriet is from)? And was it during QA for Sakai 2.2? Any answers would be appreciated...

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....

Sakai on a Stick

Sakai on a Stick
Originally uploaded by dr-chuck

Edia, a small company here in The Netherlands, have produced a great gadget. It is called Sakai on a stick. This is Jaeques Koeman showing it to Charles Severance.
Check out Edia's services around Sakai at their website, www.edia.nl.

Some first day impressions

The impression of the first day is rather good. More than 300 people were present and showed to be very much engaged with the Sakai community. I had two short meetings with the new Sakai executive director Michael Korcuska. One right at the registration desk and the second one after my presentation late in the afternoon. Although I reported some critism from the end user perspective, he thought it is very valuable that this kind of feedback is brought into the community. Another example of how the community is focused on helping each other on a variety of issues was my talk with John Norman. The was also present at my presentation and thought that the improvement issues we have identified in our pilot projects can be overcome. He did a direct offer that the Cambridge people are most happy to support our development staff and help to solve the issues we are dealing with. An open invitation to come over to Cambridge and work together on a number of issues: great!

A last impression I'd like to share here was a morning session I attended which was presented by Paul Warwick (University of Cambridge) together with one of his students. This presentation was very much of interest to me, because of the student view that was presented here. It was a nice and clear presentation, and what is more important a lot of issues correspond with our own experiences. The Cambrigde guys explicitly mentioned the need for consistency of the user interface and the lack of usability. This is assumed to be a barrier especially in a situation of distance education, i.e. where you have limited access to your instructor or mentor to help you in case of a problem. A rather surprising remark I heard was that students (considering themselves as a member of the net generation) still require some student training in Sakai. Maybe this is related to the usability issue? Sakai should be further improved to help 'searchability'. Students consider themselves also a search generation: just type in a word or (part of) a phrase and receive all relevant results. Some other issues are primarily related to the organisation of Sakai sites. Beware of consistency in the use of tools. E.g. teacher A sends e-mails outside Sakai, teacher B sends e-mail with attachments insided Sakai, teacher C sends e-mail but refers to a resources folder for finding the 'attachment'. This can make it very confusing for a student. A nice suggestion is to use specific site templates (depending on a pedagogical scenario) which created a pre-defined site structure.

Preview of our evaluation of Sakai

IMG_3332a
Originally uploaded by wytze

Yesterday, my colleague Stanley Portier delivered a 30 minute overview of what we did in the last 16 months with Sakai. He presented our (almost) final evaluation results based on our three criteria, which were technical, functional and sustainability.
For all the details you can download his presentation and audio. In a few weeks you will find all our reports (in Dutch, but with English summaries) on our website, which is at http://www.utwente.nl/elo.

Some new blogs on the block

Through the latest newsflash I found out that there are two new blogs within the Sakai community. Incidently both blogs are maintained by Sakai Board members. So for some more news on the current Sakai conference and related stuff, you could go to Mara Hancock or Chris Coppola.
Both blogs are not (yet) on planetsakai, where ofcourse this blog and numerous other already are aggregated.

Pedagogy is key!

This afternoon I sat in a very interesting session here at the Amsterdam conference. It was titled “Practical Pedagogy - Using Sakai Tools in Diverse Teaching Scenarios”. Session leaders were Hannah Reeves and Joshua Pacifici. See http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/hqc for more details. What was nice is that we were asked to split up in groups and to think about Sakai from a teacher perspective. Some very nice suggestions came out of different groups regarding tools to use. What was fascinating to hear is that Agora is considered a tool that is very much usable for different teaching situations.
Agora is a contrib tool, that is in development at Lancaster University in the UK.
You can still go to a presentation on Agora here in Amsterdam, if you are interested (Wednesday, 14:05 - 14:35, Matterhorn 3, Setting up the Agora Online Meeting Tool for Sakai by Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa). Agora will let you do synchronous audio/video conferencing within the Sakai framework. It also lets you archive the session, for later use.

Not busy yet at registration desk

IMG_3266
Originally uploaded by wytze

This pictures the registration desk this afternoon. Not so busy, but I am sure it will be tomorrow morning! I heard that there will be 30 nationalities at this conference. The total number of registered participants is also above the expectations of many: more than 375 and still counting!
After taking this picture we went to the Blackboard reception at their offices on Dam Square. Jan Day welcomed us (that is, me and Jan van den Berge of Portfolio4U) and almost immediately we got presented our first 'bitterbal'. We enjoyed some beer with some Blackboard employees. I also had a chat with Chuck, as well as with Michael Korcuska, the new executive director. This was a very interesting conversation. Michael was very interested in the situation regarding Sakai in The Netherlands, as well as the results of our pilots with Sakai at the University of Twente. He wasn't surprised that in our evaluation the most critical factor was the functionality and usability of Sakai.
Furthermore Michael invited me to give my opinions on different things regarding Sakai. I emphasized that, in my opinion, our marketing and communication should be better. And furthermore that it is important that the number of production deployments within Europe should get higher.
After thatI had a great dinner at De Waag, together with the guys from Portfolio4U (thanks Jim and Jan!). And now it is time for me to go to bed!

sakaiamsterdam07

I just arrived in the Mövenpick hotel. First impression: great hotel! The wireless internet in the room works perfectly (well.... not so, it is getting slower now). My view is facing West: the IJ with the ferries going up and down.
I have just uploaded a few pictures to Flickr, tagged "sakaiamsterdam07". You will find them (and other pictures from other users with the same tag) in the sidebar. Or go directly to http://www.flickr.com/tags/sakaiamsterdam07.

Reception at Blackboard offices in Amsterdam

Just a copy of a message that just came in from Jan Day.
---------
From: Jan Day
Subject: Sakai Conference Amsterdam: Reception Monday, June 11
Date: 2007-06-07 19:36:19 GMT (12 hours and 28 minutes ago)
Dear fellow Sakai Conference attendees,
Allow me to welcome you to Amsterdam with a reception at
Blackboard's European headquarters located in the heart
of Amsterdam. Please join me on Monday, June 11 from
5:30 - 7:30. Come and enjoy drinks and light fare
in the heart of one of my favorite cities.
--------
Complete message, including route description.

Interesting presentations, part 3

Today the last recommendations for the upcoming conference. I will point to three sessions that promise to be interesting. I must admit that I am really really looking forward to our next conference. I hope to see people I already know, but I also hope to see and meet people that don't have familiar faces. YES, I really expect and hope to see lots of people that are not part of the Sakai community (yet). I hope that the experience of the conference will make them feel at home too.
My first recommendation, mainly also as a note for myself, is a panel discussion called "Models for Project Teams" (Peter Knoop and others) where several recent examples of how project teams have expanded their membership and adjusted their structure, will be shared. (June 12, Zurich 2, 12.oo hrs)
The second recommendation is a presentation by Jim Farmer, who always has interesting angles to his subject, based on facts and figures. He will present The Public Face of eLearning. Jim will 'prove' that "eLearning does improve retention and completion--two goals of U.S. and U.K. government". (June 12, Zurich 2, 2.40 PM).
And the last recommendation is the public Q&A with the Sakai Board. This is your chance to ask your question that you always wanted to ask. (June 14, 11.30 AM, Zurich 2)

New Executive Director for Sakai Foundation

John Norman, chairman of the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors, has announced today that we have a new Executive Director: "After a thorough search I am pleased to announce, on behalf of the Board of Directors, that Michael Korcuska has been named Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation, effective July 23, 2007. In this role, he will lead the Foundation's activities in developing technology, sharing best practices, and fostering collaboration on behalf of the Sakai community."
Michael (link to this current position, including picture) will be present in Amsterdam, so that he can meet with the community.
See sakaiproject.org for the complete announcement.

Interesting presentations, part 2

Registration for the Amsterdam conference is still possible. In case you haven't decided yet, let me put the spotlight on two more presentations (well actually 3) that seem very interesting. And these presentations are just a few of the many non-technical presentations that will be available in Amsterdam:
1/ James Dalziel will be doing two presentations. But he will not be in Amsterdam! He will be presenting new developments around LAMS (Learning Activity Management System), but also RAMS (Research Activity Management) through a live videolink. I think that RAMS is a very interesting development in itself. RAMS builds on the LAMS V2 architecture for sequencing of collaborative activities and applies it to eResearch processes such as team meetings, peer review and research lifecycle management. RAMS integrates with Sakai.
2/ In the Teaching and Learning track there is some very interesting stuff. For example a presentation by Paul Turner (School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at University of Missouri-Columbia, USA). Paul will share his latest findings from research on how Sakai can be made more ‘sociable’ to enhance formal and informal social interaction and collaborative learning experiences.
I have linked in this post to the respective pages on Confluence (the wiki of the Sakai commmunity), where the session presenters will post their stuff. If you want to have a complete overview of the day-to-day conference schedule, you should go to https://sakaiproject.org/conference/admin/schedule.php.

Meeting notes available (30 May 2007)

As usual, the meeting notes of our meeting are available on our website. Our last meeting was held on May 30, 2007 in Utrecht. Wytze and Frank provided some details on the way things work within the Sakai community. We had a seperate presentation by Portfolio4U.
Some photos are also available, ofcourse.

Come to the U-Camp!

Just a quick note: come and join the U-Camp! This is the email that Tim Archer from Australia sent out yesterday.
-----Original Message-----
From: Archer, Tim [mailto:TArcher@csu.edu.au]
Sent: Wed 30-5-2007 02:05
To: announcements@collab.sakaiproject.org
Subject: Amsterdam U-Camp
Hi All,
It would be great to see a wide range of people at the U-Camp at Amsterdam, both in terms of skills and geographic representation.
Currently, we have 22 people who have indicated that they are attending but only 6 from outside Northern America, and we would particularly like to see more Europeans, Dutch, South Africans, Australians etc :) so that we can enrich the whole experience!
If you are coming it would be a great help to add your name to the Attending U-Camp Roster page, at
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/OXU
Tim (Chief U-Camp Herder)

Question of the Week

Recently a new initiative was started by Peter Knoop (great idea!) within the Sakai community: you can vote on a question of the week through a poll.
The second poll is titled "Which three areas of Sakai do you think are the most important for your implementation?"
To respond, please access the Polls tool in the "DG: Open Forum" site on Collab. (Note: you need an account on Collab and have to be a member of this site to access the poll. If you need an account, go to Collab's home page and use the New Account tool to self-register for an account. If you are not a member of the site, then use the Membership tool in your MyWorkspace to join the site). Or click here and you will be (re)directed.
The question of the previous poll was: What version of Sakai do plan to be running in production in September 2007?
The results were
Sakai 2.1 (n=0) 0%
Sakai 2.2 (n=0) 0%
Sakai 2.3 (n=26) 24%
Sakai 2.4 (n=34) 76%

Contrib(utions) from The Netherlands

While browsing through Confluence, I came across a (new!) Contrib bool from The Netherlands, Sakai Maps. I am not sure if this is really the first Contrib tool from The Netherlands, but is certainly worth a note here.
The SakaiMaps tool integrates Google Maps into Sakai and allows users to define and browse points of interest (POI) on the map. Each POI has a name, a short description, a type and optionally a url with more information.

Interesting presentations, part 1

As was promised earlier on this weblog we would like to highlight some interesting presentations that will be given during the upcoming Sakai conference in Amsterdam.
In this post two promising presentations that I would like to recommend:
1. An Open-Standards-Based Collaboration and Learning Environment. The Open-CLE project is a collaboration between Rice University and IBM. It aims to develop an open-standards-based, service oriented architecture to help educational institutions loosely tie together open source applications (such as Sakai, Connexions, and D-Space). Angela Rabuch and Mustansar Mehmood will be the presenters in this session. Go check it out on Wednesday, June 13, 14.05 hrs (in room Matterhorn 1). Some more info I found is at IBM and Rice.
2. Why German universities choose Moodle instead of Sakai is a presentation by Andreas Wittke and Rolf Granow from Germany. I myself can imagine some reasons why Moodle is chosen over Sakai. But this is still a presentation worth visiting, since this will also give some insight in how the Dutch Sakai community should be move forward. I will be there on Thursday, June 14, at 14.05 hrs (Zurich 2).

Agenda for next meeting (May 30)

Next week we will see the sixth meeting of the Sakai SIG NL. As always, we will be meeting at the offices of SURFfoundation in Utrecht. Check out the agenda (in Dutch; the meeting language is also Dutch), in case you are interested. If you are planning on attending, it is advisable to send a little note to me, so that I can plan for the appropriate number of 'broodjes'.

Sakai 2.4.0 is available

Today, May 22, the latest version of Sakai has become available. There is lots of new stuff in this release, that has been thoroughly tested by the community, as always.
There is a new and significantly improved Chat tool, but also some completely new tools are now in the core release: Mailtool, Page Order Helper (in Site Info), Polls and User Membership. Furthermore there is new functionality that can be used by means of the Provisional tools, namely Messages, Forums (as two separate tools) and Post'em.
More info is available on the website, as well as detailed release notes on Confluence.

Speakers from The Netherlands

We are only three weeks away from the next (the 7th) Sakai conference, which will be held in Amsterdam. Registration is still possible (only $395 for three days of Sakai!).

In the coming weeks we will present some highlights from the upcoming conference on this weblog. This first post will have some statistics.

First of all the number of sessions: there are 125 sessions in the schedule right now. So there is something for everyone! The number of sessions with (one or more) Dutch speakers is considerable. On my last count there were 3 sessions planned on the first day, June 12. On June 13 there is one session, which is mine. And on the last day, June 14, you can attend 4 Dutch-oriented sessions.

Sakai conference 2007 Logo, Dutch Design!!!!

Portfolio4u and some of the members of the Sakai Foundation (Susan Hardin and Joseph Hardin) worked together to design the new Sakai Conference logo.

Dutch Graphic Designer, Rik Laurentzen, did the design. so..this is really Dutch Design.

We went to lots of designs with Windmills, Wooden Shoes and finally the one with the Tulips.

The Tulip stands as a central point and reflects one of the main (export)products of The Netherlands.

You can also see the wavy blue Sakai lines, they represent the water in The Netherlands. And maybe you know, but there is a lot of water in The Netherlands.

The new logo will be seen on all the conference items like poster, programs and t-shirt's.

The Portfolio4u team is proud the Sakai community choose the Dutch designed logo.

Zoom in on the Sakai Google map and see what is happening in The Netherlands

Portfolio4u and the University of Michigan work together to fresh up the Dutch Sakai Google map.
So check it out and zoom in to The Netherlands to see how many Sakai installations we did over the last year. And the number of schools that are starting with Sakai is growing fast.
Link to Sakai map: http://sakaiproject.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=588

Sakai and/or Sharepoint?

As Wytze mentioned in his last post, yesterday there was a workshop at SURFFoundation initiated by the coordinators of the SURF SIGs Sakai-NL and Sharepoint. Some of the participants were expecting a sort of product comparance between Sakai and Sharepoint (SP). Probably the two are basically the two mainstreams in Dutch Higher Education that have a high amount of interest at the moment as possible alternatives for current VLE's like Blackboard, TeleTOP, N@tschool, etc. In some discussions the two are considered to be equal alternatives. Simply stated: when we are looking for a new VLE we might consider Sakai or Sharepoint. Or can we also think of a combination of both? As a reader of this blog you probably know that the University of Twente is conducting a profound pilot project in which Sakai is taken into consideration. There were some attempts to include Sharepoint in the final phase of the pilot project. For several reasons, we did not include that in the current project because the deadline says that it has to be finalised by the end of May. Moreover, a similar investigation should be taken seriously and not as a sort of epilogue of a Sakai study. But can you actually compare them? Sharepoint - already starting in 2001 - could be found in the support of business processes, workflow optimalisation and quality assurance processes. I remember being the external consultant for a Dutch water management company which had a primary goal to organise their document management (especially version management, make specific employees responsible for a workflow process. They also wanted a portal page in which documents, and information from other resources could be displayed.

My basic statement is that the conceptual design behind SP is completely different compared to Sakai. SP originates from a business approach, Sakai was developed in an educational environment. Examples show that SP is missing typical educational functions. We already see pilots in which SP is combined with a VLE like It's Learning. Is it any use to compare Sakai with SP as if they were completely interchangeable? Isn't it comparing apples with pears (as we say in Dutch)? A product oriented discussion is always difficult. What are the functional and technical criteria and what about bridging different policies? We have seen that in our recent efforts to achieve a virtuel learning environment for the three technical universities (3TU). Our current approach is to take it from the archictecture side: first define business processes (functional services), then functional components and finally decide which (parts of) applications may deliver a specific function. This rather open approach also enables us to include other information processes (student adminstration, HRM, finance) and build a truly integrated environment.

Basically, the lack of integration is what is truly bothering most of the end users: searching for information in system A gives a different result from searching the 'same' information in system B.

It's interesting to hear how others perceive these issues. Anyone commenting?

Diverse needs for our IT systems

Yesterday I facilitated a workshop for around 60 people, representing quite a few (>15) institutions for Higher Education from The Netherlands, as well as a few commercial ICT-partners that have some affinity with (Higher) Education. This workshop was part of a yearly event that SURFfoundation organizes for the special interest groups that are facilitated by SURFfoundation. The workshop was jointly organized by the coordinator for the Sharepoint Special Interest Group (Nico Juist is his name) and me, as the acting coordinator for the Sakai SIG NL.
Just our joint announcement of the workshop was a big success; within a few days after the online announcement we had more than 70 registered participants! Since we wanted to keep things organized and workable we decided to shutdown the online registration for this workshop after that. In the end we had approximately 60 people in the room.
I will not dwell too much on the non-interactive part of the meeting, where we presented our Special Interest Groups. The workshop-part (for which you really never have enough time!) was much more interesting. We grouped the participants in 10 groups. We asked them to imagine being someone else, for example an undergraduate student, or the administrative staff, or the Chief Information Manager, or the faculty in the institution. From this standpoint we then asked the groups to look at processes and IT-components needed for these processes with regard to an optimal IT-solution.
There were some fascinating results actually. There was an enormous amount of very diverse suggestions that people came up with. Some highlights that stood out for me:

• The post-graduate student has a urgent need for incorporating study and work. So IT stuff should be efficient and should cover both work and study (ideally).
• The administration people wanted a completely integrated system.
• The faculty would really great IT applications with which they can collaborate outside of their institution.
• The CIO-perspective is the ‘most’ challenging, because they need to balance all the needs that do exist.
• Several groups asked for better (synchronous) communication tools within our IT infrastructure.

In conclusion I would say that we need flexibility in IT (and thereby providing the right stuff for the very different actors and roles within our institutions) and on the other hand there is a need for structure and stability. I would argue that the Sakai framework might well be the structure on which the need for a lot of different tools can be fulfilled. I am thereby thinking of all the great tools that are in development or will be promoted for the Sakai 2.4.0 release. Unfortunately Agora from Lancaster University, which is a toolset for online collaboration within the Sakai framework, is not yet ready for production.
Some pictures of the workshop are at Flickr.

Twee wegen naar Rome

Twee wegen naar Rome
Originally uploaded by wytze.

{Dutch} Next wednesday I will be facilitating a workshop (Het grote ELO spel 2.0) for quite a large audience (>75 people are expected). I am doing this together with the community manager for the Sharepoint SIG. We will be focusing on the trends in our society and the impact it has on education, and vice versa.
During the workshop we will be asking the audience to step into another perspective (e.g. adminstrative staff or CIO) and think about the innovative use of ICT from these perspective.

See the SURFfoundation website for more information (in Dutch).

Some questions answered

Updated on April 13. During Peter Bavinck's (Oracle, The Netherlands) talk on April 4, some interesting questions were asked. Peter has been so kind to gather the answers to the questions that were asked on content management, eportfolio and more. The answers will be sent directly by email by Peter to those that had questions.

What do you think of Sakai conferences?

In case you missed it: there is an intensive and open discussion on when, where and how often Sakai conferences should take place. This is what is so good about Sakai: the open, positive athomospere that shines through in every discussion like these.

Our meeting was great fun!

Today I had a great day. This was due to the great weather (at least if you were behind windows), but even more to the great meeting we had today with the Sakai SIG NL.
The following institutions were present: University of Amsterdam, University of Twente, Free University, University of Utrecht, University of Applied Sciences of Utrecht, Mondriaan Onderwijsgroep, Saxion University, Hotelschool The Hague and the Leidse Onderwijsinstellingen. Quite an large list, or not?
But not only that, also present were quite a few commercial parties involved in Sakai (in no particular order): Edia, Stoas, Oracle, A New Spring, Portfolio4U and Omix.
I would dare to say that Sakai is quite known in The Netherlands. The next step is that we all start using Sakai!
The concise meeting notes are available at our website. Some photos at Flickr.

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!