AJET 20(2) Williams and Jacobs (2004) - exploring blogs as learning spaces in higher education

e-Literate

“Given that Sakai 1.5 was a feature-impoverished, unusable wreck, I fully expected 2.0 to be unusable as well.” What an introduction!

This whole posting and associated comments are worth reading.

Two comments about aspects which really didn’t get touched on:

• Ben Brophy’s comment here about the impact of Sakai being wirtten in Java:
  “Not only is it in Java, it’s in JSF, an obscure Java specialty. Even Java programmers have a big learning curve approaching Sakai development.”
  This is important because whereas php is relatively easy for CS students to pick up Java requires a lot more front end intentional learning. I’m planning a Moodle development project which will involve CS students who may not have any php experience but I can expect them to pick it up quite quickly. Not so with Java and especially JSF I suspect. Let’s be honest — whatever the merits of JSF it effectively rules Sakai out from much Open Source participation.
• In this post Ben contrasts the development process of Sakai with Moodle — and here we have the nub of the issue. It’s obvious from Ben’s description that Sakai is a classic example of ‘Cathedral architecture’ as described in Eric Raymond’s classic paper the cathedral & the bazaar and that Moodle is almost pure ‘bazaar’. There’s a bunch of reasons why that might be so, and choice of programming language feeds into it, but at the end of the day my feeling is that Sakai needs to become more bazaar-like to get traction in the OS ‘community’.

That being said (or wrote) it’s notable that in the conversations I have read between Sakai developers and others including Moodle developers (commented on here) there’s a lot of open mindedness. Few people seem to adopt the NotInventedHere approach and what’s exciting to me is the willingness to listen to other viewpoints; Sakai developers seem to have looked at some licencing issues as a consequence of this type of conversation. Bravo chaps!