I will be putting up notes about how I am teaching with Sakai – I will code them all with the string pedagogy in them to make searching easier in amonsgt all the nerdy posts as well.
So far I am having great fun with Sakai – pre class start I have made my course site and published it – I have very few tools enabled:
Announcements
Polls
E-Mail Archive
I set it up knowing that students are still adding and dropping the course – as soon as they see it – they see the “welcome announcement” and are told to review the E-Mail archive.
I am taking a very valuable (both to me and the students) poll to gauge student experience level and am involving the students in the book selection via the E-Mail archive.
I make it very clear in the welcome announcement that any pre-class start participation is completely *optional*. Being able to later delete announcements is pedagocialy important to me because once class starts – the pre-class announcement is no longer relevant at all and would be distracting if I could not delete it.
This is a good reason to let faculty pre-setup and publsh their classes under their own control – not waiting for tech support to run some script. I will reveal Sylabus, Resources, iTunesU, etc on my schedule – not tech support’s schedule.

Here are my poll results so far:
I know multiple programming languages 7 18.421%
I have taken one intro programming class 11 28.947%
I have had a job as a software developer 4 10.526%
I have never written any software 10 26.316%
I have written a program with more than 1000 lines of code 6 15.789%
These results, while incomplete – really paint a clear picture of where the class needs to go – it must be slow enough for beginners and interesting enough for strong students. I am expecting to try to get the stronger students to help the weaker students.