Michael-Korcuska

I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while. I promised Michael Korcuska that I would review the new Sakai book that he co-wrote with Alan Berg. This is a particularly important milestone for the Sakai community because it is the first one published about the LMS. When you have only one book on a system, it needs to cover a lot of ground to satisfy the different audiences. In contrast, because there are at least ten books written about Moodle, it is possible to have one written just about using it to teach 7- to 14-year-olds.

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.

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.

Michael Korcuska has a new screencast up showing some of the concepts planned for Sakai 3:
 
I really like what he’s doing here. These multimedia narratives of concepts still in development should greatly increase the amount and quality of feedback the developer community will get—before the release gets out the door.
By the way, as far as I know, this is working (though not necessarily production-ready) code.

Via Michael Korcuska’s blog, there is a new vision document describing the proposed path for the next major version of Sakai. If you find this interesting, then you may also want to look at the documents outlining the current thinking for Sakai 3.0 RC1 in (a little) more detail.

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?? michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2008.