It’s also a great learning tool, since you have a working tool in less than two minutes and you can start playing around with modifications.

As before, new videos are posted here: http://aeroplanesoftware.com/sakai-training-videos

Here is your link.

I wrote the underpinnings of IMS CC support for Sakai over a year ago while the spec was still a fledgling. I have hope that I can complete the work that I started, and make Sakai a first-class Common Cartridge citizen.

With my new membership, I have access to:

• Demonstrations of common cartridge use
• Sample cartridges to open up and study
• Implementer tools and sample code for testing our implementation
• Conformance tests
• Webinars
• The latest versions of the spec

I’m excited, but allow me a ten-second rant: if the success of information standards hinges upon their dissemination and use (as I am convinced it does), the IMS Global Learning Consortium is clearly brain damaged for locking their specifications up behind a pay wall and a “do not disclose” directive.

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.

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.

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:

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?

OpenID is one of those Internet Things that has to get big before it can get big. A blog firestorm like this is just what a little spec needs to overcome the inertia of the Network. John Udell famously said that what’s remarkable about blogging is that it creates a globe-spanning neural network that spontaneously promotes ideas for further transmission. Sites like http://technorati.com are the functional MRI of this new brain.

So this blog entry is my humble contribution to the sum of the activation potentials for the OpenID idea (do I have to say “meme� to be a real blogger?). Go forth and multiply, little guy.

In the spirit of this week’s discussion on the Sakai dev list, I give you the first installment of something I’m tentatively calling “Flat Spin.”