Gezocht: QA director

De Sakai Foundation heeft heel weinig personeel in dienst. Eén van de belangrijkste functies is die van Quality Assurance Director. Hier worden kandidaten voor gezocht. Zie LinkedIn: Quality Assurance Director at Sakai Foundation

The Quality Assurance (QA) Director ensures that Sakai software exceeds industry norms for defects, reliability and scalability. The QA Director is responsible for coordinating the quality assurance activities of the Sakai community and staff.(..) This position can be located anywhere in the world. The QA Director reports to the Sakai Foundation Executive Director.

Blackboard en Sakai: toch samen door één deur?

De UT heeft gekozen voor Blackboard als nieuwe Elektronische Leeromgeving, zo kan op de officiële website gelezen worden. Sakai zou niet meer in beeld zijn. Maar voor universiteiten die niet kunnen of willen kiezen tussen Sakai, Moodle en/of Blackboard, is er interessant nieuws. Er is een BlackBoard Sakai connector in de maak, en ook wordt er gesproken over een BlackBoard Moodle connector.
Blackboard heeft onlangs dit belangrijke nieuws aangekondigd: ze werken samen met Syracuse University aan de Blackboard Sakai Connector (zie hier, hier of zoek met google). Charles Severance (Dr. Chuck), de voormalige Executive Director van de Sakai Foundation, heeft een uitgebalanceerde analyse geschreven van de waarde van deze ontwikkeling. Dit is zijn standpunt:

When I look at all of this, the balance tips towards being engaged in the effort and trying to influence the direction to ultimately improve the experience of teachers and learners regardless of what enterprise CMS system their school or campus happens to have installed.

Zie Dr. Chuck's Web Log: BlackBoard Sakai Connector - Inside Higher Education.

Sakai wordt beter en beter!

Michael Feldstein is ervan overtuigd: Sakai Paris 2008: The State of the Union at e-Literate

Let me cut to the chase. If you looked at Sakai in the past and ruled it out, it’s time to look again.
This is a new Sakai.

Lees het hele bericht en hij komt met een aantal indicators die voor hem leidend zijn om te voorspellen dat Sakai veel verbeteringen zal herbergen in de nabije toekomst.

Het vrije softwareconcept

IMG_3080
Originally uploaded by wytze

Vandaag was er weer een Sakai NL bijeenkomst. Het was zoals altijd weer bijzonder informatief, met ook nu weer nieuwe (en ook bekende!) gezichten aan de vergadertafel.
We kwamen vandaag in Amsterdam onder andere te spreken over de opkomst van open source, of in goed Nederland 'vrije software'. De meeste aanwezigen vonden dat het thema steeds meer wordt besproken en ook serieus wordt genomen.
Tom Kuipers van de Universiteit van Amsterdam had het bewijs meegenomen: een artikel in het gratis dagblad "Dag". Een verslag van de bijeenkomst volgt binnenkort.

Apples & pears

The keynote of day two by Bob Sutor, VP of open source and standards at IBM was partly about something very familiar to Dutch innovators in Higher Education. Sutor spoke about something that has also been coined 'Generation Einstein' in the Netherlands. A new generation of learners entering the schools with a lot of computer skills and therefore more technological demands. But his talk 'from closed to open' was also about the role of open software in this development. Reasoning from the deception that the new generation faces when confronted with 'boring' educational software, open source developments in conjuction with the 'read/write' web 2.0 offer a possibility to start creating better educational systems that meet the demands of the new learners.

UC Berkely showed some of this in practise as they demonstrated their 'OpenCast' initiative. In collaboration with Apple they work on an architecture for producing, sharing and delivering webcasts in education. And it integrates with Youtube too, speaking about new demands. All together a far from trivial and challenging combination of technology, didactic concepts, new (open) business logic and so forth.
Like the OpenCast project, a general observation is that there are many professional and well-structured developments going on, that are either built in Sakai or integrated with it. Just take Sakai as given and you can put energy in shaping the environment to your philosophy of education.

I will be representing the Dutch Sakai SIG in the panel session “Sakai in your backyard' about organizing regional Sakai events. And it actually feels a bit like the backyard when I have to mention that in the Netherlands we are still busy comparing apples with pears in the backyard, whereas we should be reasoning about what kind of neat features and innovations we could develop within the community! Take Sakai as given, and direct the resources to make Sakai match optimally to your philosophy of education. Sometimes i think this is what it's all about: either you model the software to your organisation (open source) or you model your organisation to the software you have (closed source).

Next up for today is the technical demo of the Sign-up tool that Porfolio4U and Edia developed in the last month. A hot item because it turned out to be a classic case of concurrent development. Yale university, Stanford university and University of Michigan have or have had Sign-up projects. So what will happen? Can we agree to synchronize requirements and come up with one tool, or will there be different sign-up tools in the future? Think of it, there are in fact a lot of use cases for a sign-up tool, ranging from student meetings, tutoring sessions or even seminars and workshops.
Does anybody know a good alternative name for a tool that allows people to sign up for events such as seminars, workshops and the like?

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).

{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.