A First Sakai Conference

This was my first Sakai conference and so my first opportunity to meet many of the major players in the Sakai community.  Coming from a background in the Moodle community gave me a good idea what to expect, but I have to say I was impressed with the amount of free sharing and comraderie I found. But most of all I was impressed by the vision of how important teaching and pedagogy are to the design of Sakai 3 and how clearly the community wants to make that a reality.

For most people, conferences are about going to sessions. But I was so busy I hardly had time to make it to many sessions. In fact, the only session I sat through all the way, was the one I was presenting at.

Sessions

On the Monday before the main conference, I spent much of the afternoon in the Teaching and Learning Show and Tell sessions, in which many of members of the Sakai Teaching and Learning Group were present.  Presentations were deliberately short and practical, but lead to a lot of interesting discussion. It was here that much of the types of discussions about teaching effectiveness and how to implement that in Sakai 3 began to blossom.

The session I was sure not to miss and enjoyed the most, was by Chuck Severance on Basic LTI. I'd wanted for some time to see how this worked technically and was not disappointed. Finally, IMS has come up with a standard that is both simple and comprehensive: and most importantly, straightforward to implement. So, no more of the confusion about what exactly is standard and not. Basic LTI promises to revolutionize the ease of integrations of outside tools, and get developers out of the business of having to build lesser versions of better tools just to fit them into Sakai. Now we will simple be able to launch those external tools-- like blogs and wikis, and in the future who knows what-- and pass them data. That ability is here now with Basic LTI. In the near future, full LTI will also allow launched external appliations to pass data back to Sakai for further handling.

Best of all, in the room with me was John Bush, rSmart VP of Engineering. He was stoked to see how well it was working in Chuck's demos. We had an excited conversation at the rSmart table after the session. It's an awesome thing to see passion in a software engineer's eyes! Good things lay ahead for us in implementing new integrations and developing solutions for clients using LTI.

The only other session I got to see most of was the Wake Forest migration overview. Technically and organizationally I saw nothing new here, rather, a talk in the hall afterward among a group of the session attendees was the highlight: we sorely lack a "one-button" migration tool of any sort from any proprietary LMS to Sakai. And everyone wants one. But no one wants to build it (or rather, them, since there would need to be different versions for each source LMS version.)

My Presentation

I was slated to be part of a panel called "Whither Sakai? Discuss Sakai's Future in the Learning Landscape." Nate Angell of rSmart came up with this idea. Max Whitney of NYU would speak on moving from Blackboard; I would talk about Moodle and its development compared to Sakai; Nate, as a member of the Sakai Product Council, would talk about Sakai 3 product development roadmap, and the one and only Michael Feldstein to sum up.

Although we did agreed on this division of labor, we did not in any way collaborate on our content along the way. Yet, Max, Nate and I had extremely similar views and in some cases even slides. In addition, all of us talked about many of the major themes that were present in the conference keynote by Anya Kamanetz.

On Monday night, I had come up with the egg metaphor, which was the center of my talk. I was looking for an image to differentiate the way that the Sakai 3 development process is fundamentally different than the Moodle 2 process: and the idea of having to break an egg in order to get the yolk to cook with came to me at breakfast.

The best thing about the talk from the audience point of view--at least to judge by the Twitter feed--was my presentation of the
Blackboardwala spoof videos that I had made a couple of years ago. I also got a lot of positive feedback afterwards about the two maps I had made with research on the LMS distribution in the California UC and Cal State systems.

People

Most of the conference for me was a quest to meet people: old clients, new clients, prospective clients, community members and leaders. I actually had a list of over fifty people I wanted to meet and spent much of the conference talking to them, going to lunch with them, having a drink with them, and tracking them down to find them.

Perhaps the greatest meeting were not those planned, but which happened serendipitously.  At Monday's T&L Show and Tell, I randomly sat at an empty seat, only to discover through the Twitter feed discussion that I was sitting next to Jenny Staley, Director of Instructional Design at APUS, a new rSmart client. We had some great conversations throughout the conference and I was able to introduce to her to other rSmart clients and community members with experience using Sakai in fully online environments.

Another highlight was the lunch which rSmart gave for government and military institutions using or interested in using Sakai.  Our long time client, the Naval Postgraduate School were immensely helpful in showing other groups how they were using Sakai for teaching and learning there.  The change in attitude in the U.S. government towards open source software was immediately evident in the enthusiasm everyone had in sharing ideas and practices.

I was able to meet most of our client schools there at one function or another, and was able to direct them to various sessions, BOF groups, or introduce them to other schools with similar experience or needed expertise. It was great to see everyone meeting and making connections that would strengthen the community and last well after the conference was over.

I also got to meet the people behind some of the companies we are working with and partnering with, including Kaltura, Big Blue Button, and iRubric.

And of course, I got to meet Michael Feldstein. I am a long time admirer of his blog and his writing. Being on a panel with him was
great, but being able to go to dinner with him was even more than I had hoped for.

The Distance Learning BOF

One of the great moments of serendipity at the conference was the formulation of the Distance Learning Birds of a Feather group by Rob Coyle, of Johns Hopkins University, an rSmart client. Rob was one of the first people I met when arriving on Sunday before the conference, and we discovered we both share an academic background in Indic Studies and have both lived in India.

Rob received so much feedback from others in fully online or hybrid online situations as a result of his talk on using an LMS migration as a chance for instructional redesign, that he decided to form a Bird of a Feather Group for this at lunch on the last day of the conference. Many rSmart clients were there at one of the four tables and made some great contributions to getting this group off the ground.  There is a clearly a lot of need for the community to start looking beyond the big residential university experience to incorporate all that is being learned from the fully online pedagogical experience.

Videos

I spent a significant amount of time at the conference doing video interviews. I was invited to do this by the Foundation because of my past experience in making video interviews with faculty about teaching and learning. I was able to assist Kim Thanos, Kim Eke and Sean Keesler in doing video interviews with faculty and other community members.

The main topics I was able to participate in and so learn about where the beta implementations of Sakai 3, especially the experience of NYU, and also many of the ongoing production instances of portfolios.

Twitter

And finally, no conference can be complete in the modern day without mention of the backchannel on Twitter. Six of the top tweeters were rSmart employees or from client schools. That was gratifying to see. A vast amount of useful information and links were shared there, but just as important, it was a great way to meet new people and seeing common interests. And if they happened to be in the same room as me at the time, even better to meet them face to face.

--Randy Thornton, rSmart Client Evangelist