Wow – I finally get a few minutes to blog about Paris. I had two talks which are listed at the end. Initially a few reflections.
This was our second European conference – I think that it worked well – we met many new faces – this is always important for open source. I wish we could have gone sometime other than the middle of summer – there were too many tourists in Paris :).
Probably the most exciting part of this conference was the participation of teachers. Thanks to Josh Baron of Marist – we had a great contest for the best use of Sakai with two wonderful winners who gave wonderful presentations. The coolest thing was the fact that half the room was filled with developers and tech support folks.
Usually we are told what is wrong or what needs fixing or what is hard to use about this software that we work so hard to make better. It was nice to hear from someone who *loved* using Sakai and felt that Sakai enabled them to teach better. I know that I could not teach the way I want to teach on any other learning management system – period. So while we are continuously bombarded about how we can improve (aka criticisim) – we need to remember that what we have here is pretty damn functional as we stand.
The other amazing thing was the amount of innovation *around* Sakai – the SOLO offline system using Google GWT and Gears was amazing, the IMS ePortfolio export from Edia was amazing, seeing folks working on the Open Syllabus in GWT was neat as well. Of course the MyCamTools stuff just gets better and better every time I see it.
I had spent some time working on McGraw-Hill’s Katana before Paris and helped write their install documentation. I like the MHE approach because it gives teachers control over the organization and arrangement of the content and allows them to edit the content other than the learning modules. The large and complex learning modules are served from the MHE servers. The software is free, the content is free for teachers t explore – and only the students pay (like a book) when the teacher decides to use the content. Very cool. The Katana content is not part of a book – it is useful materials that can be used with any book – McGraw-Hill or otherwise. I want to get MHE to use IMS LTI as well so we can quickly get Katana Content into Blackboard and Moodle and other places as well.
The whole Michigan team had some good talks with Michael Feldstein and John Lewis about doing some early work with the IMS Learner Information Services spec. I would really like to see that happen.
The food was great – I went to the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame and not much else tourist wise.
I am really looking forward to the regional conferences for Sakai now that we have moved to an annual conference. I have a feeling that the Virginia Tech teaching with Sakai meeting will be awesome.
Here are my talks:
Teaching in the Open
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/talks/2008/2008-06-30-teaching-open.pdf
Functionality Mashup – IMS Learning Tools Interoperability

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/talks/2008/2008-07-03-lti-sakai.ppt