“The time has come for a significant change in Sakai” is the opening line in a proposal document from Michael Korcuska. If you haven’t come across Sakai, it is a freely distributed courseware management system supported by a consortium of higher education institutions. But the Sakai user experience has not kept up with other web 2.0 experiences, authoring content is awkward, and the program generally needs to be more flexible. All true in my experience. I don’t have any experience with the technical back-end side of Sakai, but I have used it for a number of teaching projects and assisted other faculty with setting up class sites.
The proposal is well written, and raises a number of excellent points. What I don’t see is any recognition of the other open source projects making in roads in the classroom. How could tools like WordPress or Moodle fit into and extend a course built in Sakai? The proposal charages that as convenient as Facebook and LinkedIn might be, their use takes content out of the security and protection offered on campus — true. But we also need to recognize that students have lives outside the classroom while on campus, and even more so are building on lives that they will take with them when they move on. Students will increasingly expect to own and control their content, across the traditional boundries of a class and a semester.
I think the generation of RSS-type feeds integral for all content, and a strategy for support of mobile devices will be very important. Ideally there will be an API that would allow content to be accessed through external programs. One danger to avoid is to try to make Sakai do too much — better to decide what it does really well. What core functionality distinguishes it from alternatives? Build on that core, and include easy routes for other applications, which do other things well, to extend that core.
Sakai 3: A proposal « Michael Korcuska Sakai Blog
The group that has been working on this also has a desire for input on the vision and wants to invite participation in both the conversations and the work. And so I’ve pulled together a document with a proposal for Sakai 3
sakai-3-proposal-v08.pdf (application/pdf Object)
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Michael Korcuska added these pithy words on Dec 18 08 at 8:55 amGood points. We do see Moodle interoperability as important and would look, initially at least, at IMS Learning Tools Interoperability for that.
Something more generic like WordPress or Google Apps (I use both) will be unlikely to support LTI in the short term, so custom integrations may be needed.
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