We'll meet again in September

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Originally uploaded by wytze

Summer vacation is now officially over here in The Netherlands. At our campus the so-called introduction period has started (see photo) for our new students. Next week, classes will start.
The first meeting of the Sakai SIG NL has also been planned, in close cooperation with Jaeques Koeman (University of Amsterdam). We will meet, at the University of Amsterdam, on Sept 19. Details about location and time: 10:00 - 14:00, room T1.10 (ground floor), Instituut voor Interdisciplinaire Studies, Sarphatistraat 104, 1018 GV Amsterdam , click for location on Google map .
Details about the final programme will be communicated later, but please block this date in your calender. And if you would like to be a presenter at this meeting, please make yourself known!

Get your proposals ready!

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

Fedora Commons gets funding!

Great news that I recently heard about Fedora. They have been awarded a $4.9M Grant to Develop Open-Source Software for Building Collaborative Information Communities. From the press release:
"Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia."
Who is Gordon Moore you would ask? He was was one of the founders of Intel, and is known for "Moore's Law". Wikipedia tells you what this law is about, in case you didn't know.

Comparing apples and oranges

If you are a member of del.icio.us you can a create a so-called 'subscription'. This means that you can pinch in some tag(s) and then get access to all the links of all the users of del.icio.us that have used that same tag(s) in their collection of links.
Through my subcription to the tag 'sakai' I found a very nice article. It is called Is Open Source Right for You?. The article clearly identifies some important factors in considering open source, and Sakai for that matter: "So what makes an organization a good candidate for open source? And is open source mature enough yet to be considered a viable alternative to commercial learning management systems, particularly for use in corporate environments?

Here's a look at several factors any organization contemplating open source should put on its "must list" to consider."
The article make an important distinction between a course management system (CMS) and a Learning Management System (LMS). I always sort of tried not to think of this distinction, but it is indeed important to have a good understanding of the differences. For one: a LMS has clear administrative functions that a typical CMS doesn't have. An LMS is therefore mostly used in a corporate environment, in contrast to a CMS, that is typically used in Higher Ed (or education in general).

Time to start writing!!!

Through the wonders of Bloglines, I came across (again!) the weblog by Scott Wilson. He pointed me to the JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. This is a great resource! I highly recommend it. And then I read this:
"The June 2008 issue of JOLT will be a special issue, centered on the topic of next generation learning/course management systems (L/CMS). (..) new technologies present diverse ideas and opportunities for engaged e-learning (..)."
Themes that are mentioned for this special issue are (e.g.) "Open source vs commercial environments" or "Best practices in teaching within the L/CMS".
Time to get writing! The proposal deadline is Feb 29, 2008.
The Sakai community should have at least one feature article in this special issue, shouldn't we?

New institution using Sakai

Sometimes you are confronted with a pleasant surprise. This time it came to me trough my email. I was asked to comment on a choice between Sakai and Moodle as possible course management system for Academia Vitae. I had never heard of this educational institution before in my life. And to make it worse: they are located in Deventer, which is quite close to my hometown.
Academia Vitae is a privately-funded institution that provides educational programmes for young professionals and more experienced professionals. They have taken the model of a classic university and liberal arts and sciences. They offer several broad programmes to the students. Their ICT strategy is geared towards opensource, therefore their shortlist contained Sakai and Moodle. Not even before I properly had responded to their questions in their first email, I received a second email that they had chosen Sakai. One of the reasons mentioned in favor of Sakai, is the educational model of Moodle that doesn't really fit the philosophy of Academia Vitae.
Academia Vitae will be working with Edia (the company that brought us Sakai on a stick) in implementing Sakai.

Standards: a lot of useful information from JISC!

The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), based in the UK, has a great Standards Catalogue. The information has been collated by UKOLN (Brian Kelly). This kind of resource is, for me, very valuable. Otherwise I would have been surfing the net endlessly.
The information is not restricted to purely 'open' standards, which (at this moment in time, that is) is understandable. The information is also not restricted to e-learning standards, but also standards in the field of text editing or images. Sometimes you need to be a little pragmatic. All standards are documented in the same way (based on a template). What is very nice that there are headings like "Risk Asessment" and "Take-up Elsewhere" for every entry. The approach of JISC with regard to standards is also explained.
I found a wiki, which is the working area, where 'everyone' can edit. And there is a website, that holds more permanent (and pertinent?) information. Go find out for yourself what you think!
Some standards that you will find explained:

1. Binary text documents, such as DOC, RTF, ODF, or PDF
2. Image standards: for example SVG, TIFF or PNG
3. Examples of multimedia standards: ACC, MP3, ASF
4. Metadata: DIDL, RDF, RSS
5. E-learning standards: Learning Design, Content Packaging, IMS Enterprise, QTI
   

The photos of Amsterdam

It is vacation time... Nothing much will happen in the coming weeks. We will be back in the middle in August.
I have created a post with some visual appeal with SideFlickr to keep you 'satisfied'. It is a slideshow from my Amsterdam conference photo set.

What are we going to do?

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Originally uploaded by wytze

In our last meeting, on July 4, we discussed improvements we could make to the operations of the Sakai SIG NL. One of the suggestions was that we should make use of locations other than the SURFfoundation offices. Also it was suggested that, when having a meeting at a certain location, the location 'owner' would be responsible for the organisation of the meeting (e.g. inviting speakers, organise lunch etc). This also fits nicely with what we have dubbed 'distributed leadership'.
The first meeting of the next year, meeting 2.1, will most possibly be held at the University of Amsterdam. But also Saxion Hogescholen, Portfolio4U and A New Spring have offered to host a meeting in the coming year. Stay tuned for exact dates.
Please read the slide and also the meeting notes in the powerpoint presentation over at our website if you want to know all the details: http://elearning.surf.nl/sakai_en/sakai_in_nl/4566.

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"

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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!