Sakai 2.3 Integration week went really well. With less than six weeks between Sakai 2.2 ship and Sakai 2.3 freeze a surprisingly large amount of work was done and 2.3 is looking like a nice release.
An number of requirements saw some important progress.
Daily Archives: September 18, 2006
Sakai Status Update
Well it is the end of summer, and then end of Integration week for Sakai 2.3 – probably a good time for a status report.
Focus on User Delight
With the 2.2 and 2.3 releases, Sakai’s framework is pretty stable. There is a lot of innovation in the area of tools going on around the world and we can have some time to take a breath and work on the “user delight” aspects of Sakai. I am working to increasingly put the focus of our thinking on the uses and users of Sakai.
The requirements effort has helped to communicate the “will of the community” to our volunteer development team – in 2.3 (8 weeks of development) there are a number of areas of the requirements that were addressed. As we move toward 2.4, we need to revisit the requirements and make sure that the will of the community is well represented in the requirements so that developers can address many of these requirements over the next four months as we prepare Sakai 2.4. Mark Norton has been retained to lead and facilitate the requirements process.
I truly enjoyed my visit to Lubeck University and the EU Sakai days. they produced video summaries of the meetings:
http://www.oncampus.de/index.php?id=819&L=1
From the discussions at the meetings, it is clear that Europe will bring many new ideas to how we all will use Sakai to teach and learn. The Bologna process:
http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/educ/bologna/bologna_en.html
may have a significant impact on the need to evolve the technology used in teaching and learning across Europe to meet these new EU requirements.
In my hobby as film maker, I am increasingly looking for “end user” Sakai stories to mix in with my Sakai developer stories. My first video in this new series is from Roskilde University.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/media.php?id=65
It focuses on how Sakai is used in and out of the classroom in a database class at Roskilde University taught by Henrik Bulskov.