Up until now, it would have been fair to call Sakai 3 a mature experiment. Two years of work have been invested, mostly by Cambridge, to test out some ideas about the design, architecture, and development ecosystem of next-generation virtual learning environments. We have learned a lot from it, but the level of commitment to turn it from an experiment into a product system has been somewhat vague.
That changed a couple of weeks ago at the Sakai conference in Denver. We now have a much clearer idea of when Sakai 3 might be deployable as a production system to meet different purposes.
(...)Read the rest of Sakai 3 Roadmap and Progress (379 words)

Scott Wilson , Paul Sharples, Dai Griffiths and Kris Popat have an article up on their work embedding Wave-enabled widgets into Moodle using Wookie. (Try saying that ten times fast.) What they envision is very similar in a lot of ways to what my former SUNY colleagues and I were thinking about when we proposed a Learning Management Operating System. Of course, that was 2005, so we were thinking about portlets rather than widgets. The lower barrier to entry and client-side nature of widgets are game changers.

This post is a bit of a tease. Our special issue of the On the Horizon (OTH) has been published. OTH is neither open access nor Creative Commons licensed, but they do have a very liberal policy about authors retaining copyright. I intend to find a venue in which all the issue articles can be published under some sort of Creative Commons license, authors permitting.

I have a terrible backblog of posts that I will try to catch up on over the next few days, starting with my obligatory Sakai conference summary. Since last conference represented something of a watershed, I wasn’t sure if I would use the same categories of comment or come up with something new. I think I will stick with the same categories for at least one more year, with more emphasis on the Sakai 3 effort.

At the risk of sounding a little silly, I’m going to attempt to extend the analogy between Sakai 3 and Mac OS X that I made in my last post. The reason I think this exercise is worth trying is that the Mac OS X transition is a relatively clear and uncluttered example of a successful rearchitecture of a product with an installed base, and it provides us with a good model of what could happen with Sakai 3 if the initiative is executed well over a number of releases. Please understand that I am not predicting anything here. I’m just trying to model possibilities so that we can set a ceiling on expectations.

I suppose it was inevitable. At a time when even The Chronicle is asking whether Blackboard can be replaced by WordPress, a slick demo of a super-cool product like Wave was bound to trigger breathless speculation about the demise of the LMS. Equally predictably, the most enthusiastic predictions that the LMS will be replaced are being made by people who have already replaced their LMS.

Now that I’ve had a little while to think about it, I’m ready to distill my initial enthusiastic reaction to Google Wave down to a manageably short (and hopefully non-fanboi) post. Let me say at the outset that I have no idea whether Wave will succeed. I am convinced, however, that something like Wave will succeed, in part because much about it is not new. My initial thought was was, “Hey, somebody finally got Apple’s OpenDoc to work.” Scott Wilson twittered that Google had reinvented ActiveX. In some ways, Wave is, like many great inventions, an old idea with some new twists.

A while back, I noted with some interest Michael Korcuska’s screencast showing off a prototype of some functionality planned for Sakai 3. Some recent related conversation has come up on the Sakai listservs regarding the possibility of including wiki-like capabilities as core functionality of Sakai 3 and how this might overlap with and complement the capabilities in the screencast. I will argue here that, if combined carefully and enhanced with one more idea that has been floating around for Sakai 3, we end up with something quite new and interesting in the world of learning environments. I proposing calling this new and interesting something a “Wiki’ed Learning Environment”, or WeLE.

Thanks to Sakai Foundation Executive Director Michael Korcuska for providing a nice review (with some thoughtful analysis good suggestions) of my team’s (relatively) new white paper.