Sakai As It Could Be
I just saw this, via Chris Coppola at rSmart.
For me, this is where the view of Sakai as a platform for innovation is really exciting. Sure the CLE is an eLearning application that can be used out of the box as easily as any of the proprietary systems like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Angel, and others. It has a place for a syllabus, a grade book, assignments, and all the standard features you need. But it’s also a platform for innovation. It gives the world’s leading institutions a way to make applications like Facebook and Google gadgets easily accessible to educators. Then, because these capabilities are built on an open platform accessible to anyone, the platform may actually make it easier for educators to experience and use these ‘2.0’ technologies.
I hope I’m not harping, but again I see a rift between what we perceive as technologists and what our students and educators perceive. Namely, we get excited by what could be, and they get excited by what is. In other words, if we want Sakai to break out of the mold of the monolithic course management system and embrace the profusion of innovation in web tools, we had better produce something to show — and fast — because our constituents will get tired of waiting, and they’ll vote with their feet.
Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant
Jim Groom has an excellent post about Sakai from the point of view of a savvy outsider.
It’s not exactly, um, positive, but I just have to post this because I think he hits the nail right on the head in terms of where we fall short.
More than anything else, however, I was extremely disappointed with the limited RSS capabilities. You would think that an open CMS would have the RSS flowing like wine, and folks could have the option to hook in to one another’s content making for a community of rich syndication much like the feed-based architecture that Jon Udell discussed recently here. However, nothing doing from what I have seen. The one RSS feed I was able to see was for the wiki, and it seemed to have problems distinguishing between particular project pages.
He also makes good points about the barriers to contributing. We need to solve these problems if Sakai is to fulfill its promise.
Sakai Featured at eLearn Magazine
The current top story at eLearn Magazine is about the proliferation, albeit slowly, of open source software in higher education. Laurie Rowell cites various studies that suggest Sakai and Moodle adoption are growing quickly, but that even so CIOs like to take their time and make sure they know which way the wind is blowing.
I think the reason it takes so much time is that open source systems are not just different products, but an entirely different kind of product. Open source is as much an approach to systems as it is the systems themselves. Rowell rightly points out that it’s not about saving money, since you’ll need staff to take a much more active role in your software strategy than they had before.
Another good point is that we can’t very well expect our instructors to start hacking the code themselves; It’s not what they’re here to do and it’s not what they’re compensated for.
Those of us in the instructional technology business need to make it our mission to amplify teaching. We should be able to put tools in the hands of our faculty to let them do what they already know how to do, but better, faster, and further.
This is a tangent, but here is the video where a young Steve Jobs says, “[A computer is] the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” This is a very worthwhile 60 seconds of tape:
Texas State: Faculty to Faculty Testimonials
When I was at Texas State and we were launching our migration from Blackboard to Sakai, one of the things we realized very early on is that our social and political challenges were far more important than our technical ones. Unfortunately there is a widespread tendency among instructional technologists to think that their job is about technology when really, that’s beside the point. Instructional technology is about instruction!
To this end, we put instructors first and foremost in our minds. If you want to be devil’s advocate, you might ask “If you’re so smart, why don’t you put students first?” It’s because we know the students are in good hands with our faculty. If we can take care of the faculty, they will take care of the students. In an academic technology department, instructors are the reason we come to work every day.
Sadly (though for a number of good reasons), faculty don’t trust technologists all that much. Too often we’re giving them solutions in search of problems. At Texas State we were looking for ways to earn trust; we knew we weren’t going to be able to take it for granted.
Faculty do trust each other, and that insight was the source of one of my favorite things we did on the project: faculty to faculty video testimonials of our Sakai system.
We paid visits to some of our best champions and early adopters and let them do the talking for us. Follow this link to see the results.
What do you think?
Book Review: Dreaming in Code
This one’s been out for a while, but I just got Scott Rosenberg’s “Dreaming in Code” for Christmas. It’s an inside view of the Chandler project, an open source effort by Lotus founder Mitch Kapor. They’re trying to create the ultimate personal information manager, a place to corral all your email, calendar appointments, notes, tasks, you name it. The project kicked off to great fanfare in 2003 and quickly got trapped in what software pioneer Fred Brooks calls “the tar pit.”
The book is about a software team, but it’s very much written for the layman. So if you have either a professional or personal interest in software, but are not yourself a coder, I can highly recommend the book as a way to get a better understanding of just what goes on to make software happen.
It’s especially good for software spouses. My wife tells me she thinks my work is very mysterious. I’m putting this one in her queue!
Happy New Year everyone.
A Weekend at No Fluff Just Stuff
I just wrapped up a weekend attending No Fluff Just Stuff. To put it in a nutshell, it was the best technical conference I’ve ever attended, from the standpoint of the value it pays back for your time and money. Its salient features are:
- it is a traveling show, so you don’t fly to it, it flies to you. This alone makes it cheap cheap cheap by conference standards.
- attendance is capped at 250, so you have real face-to-face contact with the experts.
- it is relentlessly pragmatic. This is about real projects, real clients, and real techniques. There is no vaporware and no technology that is only theoretically useful.
- it (usually) meets on the weekend. Aside from the obvious effect that it doesn’t interrupt your work week, your fellow attendees are automatically of a higher order, because they want to learn about software on the weekend. I’m not saying this makes us better people — maybe the opposite — but it does weed out the casual.
It’s very technical, and very focused on Java in the so-called enterprise, though a couple of these guys are also Ruby advocates, and there are sessions to match.
Probably the best thing about NFJS is that the speakers are all exemplary engineers and professionals, so for the purpose of career development they are very good role models. I came away with a list of things I just have to start doing better:
- automated tests: I don’t have to be sold on the value; It’s time to stop talking about it and start doing it.
- mastering the tools, IDE: Eclipse and IntelliJ can do amazing things if you let them. Here’s a hint: if you do any of it with the mouse, you’re less productive than you could be. The speakers are living advertisements for IntelliJ IDEA. They almost have me convinced that $500 is a small price to pay for what it gives you.
- mastering the tools, languages: dynamic languages are in. I can’t really play with the big dogs without being able to apply JavaScript and Ruby or Groovy or Beanshell wherever they make sense.
- public speaking: stories make for good speaking, and they don’t even have to be your own stories. Even on a technical topic, people want to hear what it has to do with their lives.
- Java is not dead yet, though it has been sleepy there for a while. It is evolving to a platform for other languages, so you can shake off the limitations of Java-the-language if you want.
If you want to sample a good cross-section of the kinds of things you will see and hear at NFJS, take a look at their book, the NFJS Anthology.
By the way, the speakers are also living advertisements for Apple MacBooks and Mac OS X, but I’m already on board that train! TOOT TOOT
Who Needs Flash?
I was pretty amazed when I found out the iPhone browser wouldn’t support flash. It’s a little fishy; I can’t think of any technical reasons there can’t be a very solid flash player on there. I think Apple is intentionally locking it down because they don’t want to lose control of their platform overnight (and it would be overnight — flash developers could take over that device and put Apple on the path of commodity hardware).
So it’s kind of a drag we can’t do all the things that flash can do on an iPhone. But once again, I have underestimated JavaScript on the browser. Check out http://static.popcap.com/iphone/ for a beautifully realized version of Bejeweled for the iPhone. I’m not really saying we don’t want flash, but this just goes to show that we’re not slumming without it.
Maven 2 is a Go
Just finished my first Sakai build with Maven 2. Thanks Ian! This is going to take some getting used to: I have run Maven 1.0.2 around 10 times a day for the past three years. I may compile some notes about how Maven 2 is different.
Long Live Safari Books Online
My Safari Books Online subscription just came up for renewal, and I thought it was worth a quick mention here. There are only a few products and/or services that are so good they make me happy to part with my money, but Safari is one of those. I am a technical books junkie. I used to buy books at a much higher rate than I could read them. You know you have a problem when you buy the 2nd edition of something that is already on your shelf, unread!
After an unsuccessful bid to get my employer to spend $160 on me for a year of service, I paid for it out of my own pocket and never regretted it for an instant. It satisfies my every nerd book craving for about $500 less per year than I was in the habit of paying.
They have a higher tier of service that includes videos and tutorials, but I haven’t coughed up the money yet.
Highly recommended. By the way, they have nothing to do with Apple’s excellent Safari web browser. It’s too bad they permitted a namespace collision.
Facebook Platform
I just saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address from the Facebook developer conference. They have just announced a radical new platform for deploying social network applications, and I believe they are poised to take over the world.
I have been fascinated by the implications of online social networks since Friendster hit the scene. Friendster suffered from small-mindedness about the possibilities and has been overrun by the competition. MySpace is the current champion, but they suffer from small-mindedness about third parties playing in their “territory.” Not to mention that MySpace is just ugly as damn. I have always appreciated Facebook’s clean design, but until now I only used it find out what kind of parties my son’s babysitters go to.
The web exposes many contradictions, and one of them is that on the one hand it is a democratizing, “flattening” phenomenon, giving individuals and small groups a medium to communicate with the same reach as gigantic corporations. While on the other hand, the web also benefits from monopolies. A site like eBay is more valuable to everyone because everyone uses it. Amazon.com has such a wealth of information because people would rather write their reviews there than in a second-tier space. Up to now, the problem with social networking applications is that each one requires you to build your connections, your profile, your network up from scratch. What the web needs is a de facto standard social network. Of course, each one of a thousand of competitors has been scrambling to be the Big One.
What makes the Facebook announcement so exciting is that they are opening up their enormous network to nearly unrestricted access by third party developers. This means that an entrepreneur can create the next great viral application without having to lay the groundwork of building yet another social network and drumming up the critical mass necessary to have a hit. To be sure, you will still have to compete for attention on the Facebook platform, and the competition will be fierce, but the flywheel is already spinning. This is how low the barrier to entry is once your application is running on Facebook: someone clicks a link to your app and it becomes a part of his suite of Facebook applications. When he publishes something cool with it, all his friends are notified and if they want the application too, they just click the link… Wash, rinse, repeat.
Zuckerberg reveals some pretty astonishing facts about Facebook: at present, their signup rate is 100,000 new users per day. They get 24 million unique visitors in a 30-day period. And this one amazed me: 50% of those login to the site every day.
Here’s a prediction: in very short order, a third party developer will introduce an app on Facebook so successful, that Web 2.0 startups everywhere will suddenly decide to become Facebook startups. This is a positive feedback loop with enough generative power to turn MySpace into a footnote. It’s too early to call the race, since MySpace still has a lot of weight to throw around, but the Facebook people clearly get where this can go, and they have just lit the fuse on a rocket sled.
A couple of closing remarks: Whenever the subject of Facebook comes up in education circles, I just hear paranoia and fear. The grownups want guidance on how to make it just go away. Well here’s the thing: Facebook is no more or less safe than the world we live in, and we are perfectly capable of behaving accordingly. The question we should be asking is “How can we use it to make the world a better place?”
Final note: At one point in the talk, Zuckerberg says something like, “We don’t have a large development team. There are only 85 engineers…” I had to laugh. How do you get 10 people pulling in the same direction, let alone 85? I encourage you to sign up and play around for a while. It has the cohesiveness of something built by two people, and I mean that as the highest compliment.