Having a great time here in Lubeck. Here is some cool philosophy.

Rolg Granow who is the Managing Director of OnCampus (or hosting organization for EU-Sakai) madesome really cool points as to why Lubeck was attracted to Sakai:
(1) It is an exteisible framework
(2) It is a reasonable tool in terms of covering the basics
(3) Sakai is not yet complete – so Lubeck (and others) can help define Sakai going forward
He feels that we have only scratched the surface on eLearning and we need to explore some really new things and one of the problems with something like Moodle and commercial alternatives is that they are *too mature*. They have figured out what they are and do a nice job of implementing that. It is harder to affect Blackboard or Moodle because of the maturity of the product.
I agree that Moodle and Blackboard are more polished than Sakai – but this is the first time – that it seems to be a positive for Sakai rather than a negative :)
Another wonderful point that Rolf made is that we need to find ways to diversify the population of our students in classes – Lubeck collaborates around the Baltic sea, and with others around the world.
Instead of using the Internet to get geographically distributed people to receive the courses regardless of location – his philosophy is that learning the future will need to bring together courses with students from multiple countries and cultures *together* (regardless of geography) for a single class.
They have initial results that culturally diverse courses help students learn better. Up to now distance education is simpy a way to let people take classes while working or on some remote location. Rolf’s hypthesis is that these technologies bring a culturally diverse student population *together*.
This fits nicely with some of Joseph Hardin’s ideas that “open courseware” is not about producing something and “exporting” it but instead to create a rich global community that both produces and consumes materials some of which are globally contenxtualized and other elements which are highly localized. Joseph’s notion is that we learn best from contextualized learning.
Combining Joseph and Rolf’ hypothesis – we benefit both from contextualized learning as well as participating in learning that is cross-cultural.