Nate Angellraised by wolves, accidental open-source evangelist

Sakai working session participants will gather to report back to the full community about work undertaken at the conference: What was attempted? What was achieved? What worked and what didn't? Participants will also discuss how to extend their work beyond the conference and inspire continued workgroup activity at other Sakai gatherings and throughout the community. How can we increase participation in Sakai development processes? How can we inform and educate the community about how development takes place?

With Nate Angell (rSmart), Noah Botimer (University of Michigan), Eli Cochran (University of California, Berkeley), Michael Feldstein (Oracle), Clay Fenlason (Georgia Institute of Technology, Sakai Foundation), David Goodrum (Indiana University), John Lewis (Unicon), Stephen Marquard (University of Cape Town), John Norman (University of Cambridge), Max Whitney (New York University).

The Sakai Product Council acts on behalf of the broad Sakai community to ensure the exceptional quality and cohesiveness of Sakai product releases in their support of varied teaching, research and collaboration needs. It does this formally by determining those projects which will go into a release, and informally by advising projects as they progress from R&D to production-ready maturity. The Product Council will undertake its work: by employing the expertise of its members, through direct consultation with experts in the community, with reference to best practices for technology, pedagogy and standards, by establishing and communicating clear and objective criteria. You can read an interim report of Product Council activity in 2009 and goals for 2010 on the Sakai wiki. Join us at the Sakai conference to meet representatives from the Council, hear a current update of our activity and goals, and give us your input on our work to date and going forward.

I was deeply honored to be named a 2010 Sakai Fellow—mostly because fellowship bestows a coveted black "ninja" sakaiger (pictured)—but also because I read my fellowship as evidence that the Sakai community recognizes and values all forms of contribution to our collaborative work.

Three out of 2010's six Sakai fellows have made their substantial contributions primarily in areas of actual technology development: Oxford's Matthew Buckett, Cape Town's David Horwitz, and Michigan's Gonzalo Silverio. I can't stress enough the high value and significance of these three fellows' work.

The other three 2010 Sakai fellows—Indiana's David Goodrum, Michigan's Steve Lonn, and myself—have made our primary contributions in what might seem "softer" areas of Sakai: coordination, communication, thought-work, and research. The very tangible outcomes of David's leadership in the formulation of the Sakai Learning Capabilities and Steve's continued focus on the invaluable research of Sakai's Multi-Institutional Survey Initiative are far better evidence than any of my own contributions of the value of work outside the Sakai codebase.

Unlike others who suggest a strong difference between what might be called the "write" and "read" communities within Sakai, I see this year's Sakai fellowships as testimony to my view that such a dichotomy is not so useful. Instead I see read/write activities in open communities as a continuum that generates a virtuous circle of outcomes: new reading generating new writing and vice versa, until the distinction between reading and writing becomes robustly fuzzy.

All of us in the Sakai community are readers and writers at different times, of different texts, inspiring and supporting our whole collaborative endeavor.

Thank you Sakai!

After the announcement of Google's CloudCourse being open-sourced, I decided to give it a try and see exactly what's under the hood...at the very least, it would give me a chance to try out a Django app via Google App Engine, which alone is worth the time.

Long story short: I got CloudCourse up and running in a matter of minutes.

Any hullabaloo that CloudCourse as it stands now is a serious contender to existing full-featured online learning systems like Sakai, Moodle, Blackboard, or Desire2Learn is premature. CloudCourse is at its root a scheduling and rostering application, clearly designed for the internal training needs it was apparently developed to serve. No educational institution will be migrating from their current LMS to CloudCourse any time soon.