CETIS-Same area, different goals; Sakai and the JISC Framework Programme
In a discussion about MLE between Trish Roberts and Scott Wilson of the JISC framework programme and Chuck Severance, the technical committee chair of Sakai. Severance’s response to the first question, “What would you consider the major difference in the pedagogic goals of Sakai and the JISC Technical Framework Programme?” is memorable:
“Sakai does not make pedagogy a priority. Pedagogic approaches are still very much a matter of ongoing debate, and we can’t wait for that.”
So Sakai does not make pedagogy a priority — well that’s enough to rule it out for small Liberal Arts colleges — pedagogy is our top priority; teaching is our mission .
In response to “Why should an institution go with Sakai rather than, say, Blackboard or WebCT?”
“Good question! Those institutions that can afford it have always built their own stuff. We at Michigan did that too, and we once went through an exercise of figuring out why exactly. What we came up with is this: what we do at universities is teaching, learning and research. We can’t outsource the software that supports that- you can’t outsource your destiny. You shouldn’t have to negotiate with an outside commercial provider about things that directly affect your core business.”
“So building your own MLE software allows an organization to take charge of its own destiny. But building a completely unique package for your own use is really a bit lonely and somewhat expensive. By working together in Sakai, we can control our own destinies and avoid the cost and risk involved in the solo path. Major research institutions can build the large components and the framework, smaller ones can customise the tools they need.”
An interesting comment, this. Knowing some of the background to computing history at Michigan I can’t say I’m surprised. In the late 80s the developers of the Michigan Operating System developed on IBM/Amdahl mainframes in the 60s were still arguing that the university should sink millions into a single central mainframe running their own OS code rather than decentralise to Unix systems.
So, it’s now much clearer what Sakai developers are really about. Now add this quote into the mix from the proposal Integrating Licensed Library Resources with Sakai to the Mellon foundation from IU & Michigan. On p7 we read:
“Sakai itself is rapidly evolving and still undergoing steady changes in integration of the four lead institutions’ efforts. We are in essence adding customized functionality to a moving target that is barely in production and mostly a pilot effort itself.”
An admission that Sakai is still in pilot stage.
Moodle and Sakai redux
Links:
- Zach Rosen posted this comparison Sakai vs. Moodle at Zacker.org gives some intruiging charts comparing ‘business readiness rating” between Sakai and Moodle. User comments and responses are worth reading too. Associated links:
- Moodle and Sakai - Open Source alternatives?
“In general the Open Source development community is very supportive of Moodle. The Moodle community is seen as open and inclusive with lively forums and much information available on implementing and using the platform. The opposite is seen of Sakai. No-one is quite sure what it is and where it is going, information on ten open areas of the Sakai site is sparse and the community would seem to be closed.
The end result is a great deal of skepticism - sometimes bordering ion (sic) hostility — towards the Sakai development — with a perception that it is a well funded corporate development by and for the larger universities.”
Q: Why might the Open Source community have this attitude to Sakai? What might make the OS community consider Sakai to be ‘well funded corporate development’? [analyse the Sakai site with these questions in mind] . From the replies ( Wilfred Rubens TE-learning centrum: Moodle en Sakai ):
Perhaps you could distinguise [distinguish] three models:
— Network model (or community): open, large group of similar organisations. E.g. Moodle
— Pioneer model: one organisation takes the lead, others have limited contributions. Eg. FLE3
— Consortium model (association): closed, limited group of organisations. Perhaps with a hidden agenda ;-) (e.g. Sakai)
- Moodle vs Sakai: FIGHT! is a short entry commenting on Zach Rosen’s comparison above. The comments it spawned are interesting though from many of the usual players. This rejoinder from Michael Penney is insightful:
” The long running critique of Moodle is their bloated code
Huh? Where is that a long running critique? Before NZVLE passed 45,000 users, the longest running critique I heard was it probably wouldn’t scale because it used PHP (I guess Facebook, Yahoo, etc. had something to do with putting the PHP scalability issue to rest)? “
- Sakai user interface issues
- Sakai and the Higher Education Community: The Road Ahead
- The Blackboard Behemoth
- Sakai in the UK as a VRE:(Virtual Research Environment) — Sakai VRE Project
- Le tour du monde des Plateformes d’EAD : SAKAI
- more opinion from Zach
- Sakai on del.icio.us
Application Development Environment
Moodle : essentially LAMP - Linux/Apache /MySQL/PhP
Sakai : what exactly is the actual development environment. It’s an obscure dialect of Java; but what?
Q: Is Java intrinsically more ‘scaleable’ that php? Is it intrinsically better suited to large scale implementations? What are the advantages and drawback to the Java system relative to developing with php. Bring in object oriented concepts. Moodle vs Sakai discussion has some useful commentary & links. Sakai developer Ben Brophy has some interesting comments about developing with Java
Interesting video presentations on getting started with Sakai — we could do with this kind of approach for Moodle developers!
Implementations
Portland State University - may replace WebCT with Sakai. The New version of WebCT (v 6.0) will be tested along with Samla (their ‘branded version of Sakai) , and the choice will be made July of 2007.
Cost
“Costs for each system vary, but ultimately would end up being roughly the same after five years. The new WebCT has annual licensing and data base fees, whereas SAMLA would hire a dedicated programmer to work between half and full-time on programming and development.” “If this was a slam dunk answer, we wouldn’t spend all this time on it,” said Mark Gregory, executive director of information technology. “Eventually the open source software will be as good or better than WebCT, and we know that we will have more control because we can do the development ourselves.”
Professor comments
Some professors are finding that the new Samla tool does not easily translate to meet the needs of their class. “Samla has potential, but lacks features I rely heavily upon in WebCT , such as notifications, exam functionality, grade book automation, etc. So my view is that we will need to either wait a while for Samla to mature, or be prepared to invest significantly in its development locally,” said Wayne Wakeland, associate professor of systems science who tried out Samla last term and is testing out WebCT 6.0 this term.
Others, such as Wende Morgaine, prefer its simple process. “For me, uploading an assignment for my students using WebCT was a multi-step process that wasn’t intuitive. When I use Samla, I just have to click one or two buttons. I could figure out SAMLA with no training at all, so I prefer it.” Morgaine is the faculty team leader for the PSU Eportfolio Expansion, and an instructor for the University Studies Program who has taught eight classes using Samla.
Student comments :
Student Katie Mahoney, who took a Samla course during winter term, had a frustrating experience. “It was very hard to navigate the system and was not user friendly … until the university figures out how to use the program and can provide information about how it is used to the students, it should not be used.”
“It added a lot of issues for many of my classmates … and there was often a negative buzz about Samla during the class time … maybe they should have a better understanding of the programs they are providing before letting us do the leg work and possibly have our sanity suffer because of the frustration,” Mahoney added.
More thoughts:
- It’s really quite an effort to make a good recording in the lecture room, although I think I have that more or less sussed with my setup.
- If there’s a tech failure in the classroom it can be fixed in the podcast, eg a link to the spreadsheet or a screen shot of the same.
- Any lecture really does need to be ‘chapterised’ into sections. This is rather time consuming and should really be done by the prof.
- With this amount of effort going in, you really want to have students do something with the podcast, to interact with it:
- One could ask a number of questions or issues to reflect upon in a blog posting. Problem here is situating the response. Whereas text can be copied/pasted and quoted, how do you do the equivalent for audio?
- Possible solution : how about ‘podlinks’ or ‘podnotes’? The same mp3 file could be referenced by a different XML file (in the student’s web space too boot) and notes and links inserted into this. Hmmm. And what about social commenting on a single podcast? Hmmmm.
Today I attended Atindra Sen’s Economics class, at his request, rather than Meg Streepey’s to record it for a podcast.
Several thoughts struck me:
- Of course, ‘technology’ struck back and for the life of me, I could get the projector to display the screen of his Dell laptop.
- As a result I missed recording the first few minutes of the lecture and so it was hard to ‘place’ it. I realised that rule #1 would be :
- have someone else record your lecture. Don’t try doing it yourself. I am going to have to follow my own advice when I do my CS182 next year.
- Atindra took a wee bit of time to warm up and then he got going. I thought that he really engaged the students. I know that I was engaged. Certainly a good model for me of how to teach a lecture — don’t sit behind a podium , come out and interact with the masses.
- He scribbled some diagrams on the board and wrote a list. If you weren’t in the class or paying attention and taking notes you’d miss these. Plus I forgot my digital camera so I couldn’t take any pictures as I did with Meg (and anyway Meg S is way better looking :-)
- At one point he wrote the word “EQUITY” (in capitals) on the board, but he referred to “this” as he wrote it. Listeners to the podcast who were present will remember what “this” refers to; those not present will wonder what he’s talking about. Thought #2:
- Wouldn’t it be cool if students could interact with the podcast?
Blogs as Personal Learning Environments Presentation now Live at incorporated subversion
Comments on Blogs as Personal Learning environments Higher Ed Blog Con 2006 by James Farmer of Incorporated Subversion fame.
Remembered quotes:
“[Blackboard / WebCT] are tools geared towards transmissive models of education — great to put up a Word document but rubbish if you want to communicate with people”
“Difficult to foster a community of enquiry on a discussion board”
PERSONAL learning environments
Garrison, D. R., & Anderson, T1 talked about communities of enquiry consisting of cognitive, teaching and social presences building together to form the educational experience. The following is a great illustration of the power of blogging I think:
I like these illustrations as well as:
This presentation is flash based Camtasia Studio. It struck me while I was watching this that the presentation could equally (as easily?) been in the format of an enhanced podcast. The advantage of the latter is that then each ‘screen shot’ would act as a chapter marker. As it was there was no way to jump around the presentation and revisit bits I wanted to recall.
The other thing that struck me was that having critiqued ‘transmissive models’ of education, here he was using one. There was absolutely no way for me to interact with this screen cast short of doing screen capturing (which I did). That is not to say that podcasting is any better per se but it may have potentialities for note affixing, commenting and multiple access — think XML.
1 Garrison, D. R., & Anderson, T. (2003). E-Learning in the 21st century. London: Routledge.
The first thing I’ve been meaning to point out is that the Business2.0 story on Digg claims they have 180.000+ registered users and 6 million page views a day. And you know what it takes to get to the front page? Sometimes fewer than 100 “diggs.” Even the most popular stories only get a few thousand. That is less than 1%. The moral here is that the people don’t want power. They don’t want to vote. They just want to be in the know. So they read the site, but they don’t participate. There is no wisdom of crowds or power of the masses or anything else. It is the same model as old media, except the editors are now self-appointed. It reminds me of the Despair.com poster on conformity. The tagline is “when people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.”
I have also tagged this article on del.icio.us. I wonder which location will get the most use?
The Community Engine Blog: Safari U: Great Idea, Right Way to Market?
In many ways, they are tied to their book publishing model. A lot of the recent content is not really available because it has not been converted for custom publication. Also, the custom book has to be ordered in quantity, no one-offs.
Exactly. It’s almost impossible for us at a small college to make use of this service because the classes are so small (all < 20 students) that the expense can’t be justified.
From the drupal.org site, in response to a comment about podcasting with Drupal:
Lullabot Drupal Podcast No. 1 | drupal.org.
It’s dead easy in 4.7. Enable upload module, create a node of any type and attach the audio file. That’s what we’re doing on Lullabot.
www.lullabot.com - making open source easy