Daily Archives: January 10, 2009

Sakai Advocacy: Note back to Clay

On Jan 9, 2009, at 10:02 AM, Clay Fenlason wrote:
You’ve recoiled a bit from the negative formulation of my post, and
I’m afraid this has led you to react against a position in which I
can’t recognize a view I actually hold. You may be making a good
argument against someone; I just don’t know who that person is. Some
of that I’ll blame on my own proclivities: a critical frame of mind,
and a tendency to find bracing clarity in starker terms.
——-
I think that you hit the nail on the head. I agree that we can and should talk about a lot of things and always be looking for ways to improve. However – the length of your note, the fact that you were tying a lot of threads together, and seeming to move toward a pretty significant conclusion – it started to sound like a “plan” rather than a discussion. So I reacted and said “no” to the plan that your note kind of laid out.
The part of your note I like the best is the notion that the future in 5-6 years in the use of technology for teaching and learning might be quite different than today – and the development environment might be very different – and indeed by that time – things like the Sakai Kernel might emerge and be broadly available in such a way to make building tools light and fun – and it will work *really* well – and we will have a zillion new ways to teach.
Frankly I have been pushing this and writing about this for years – so I like the notion of thinking about what Sakai 4 might look like – and enjoyed reading that bit of your note.
If Sakai 4 ends up being built on some glorious framework that we don’t have to build – that framework will not likely come from Kuali or Spring – or frankly any of the patterns we are used to seeing and using. The Google AppEnine is the closest thing to such a nirvana – it is a framework – it is a kernel – software and hardware magically scale somewhere in the cloud – we write little widgets and mash them up.
Part of my comments on Sakai 3 suggest that we are not thinking about a few issues of hyper scalability needed to go 4akai. I got these ideas as AppEngine sinks into my conciousness:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/000578.html
Perhaps my ideas of sharding and read-only replication are before their time for 3akai – I accept that in time a wise crowd will see and do the right thing – and do it at the right time.
Google AppEngine is likely to see competitors in the next 2-3 years from Microsoft and Yahoo – and perhaps while AE may not be the be-all and end-all – as the market for cloud services matures – I bet things will turn out pretty nicely and support the model you propose. And as you suggest – at that point “Sakai” will be a “different thing” – the cool thing is that we will likely still be a bunch of great people working together around teaching and learning.
And by then, we might be the #1 vendor across both the commercial and non-commercial sector. Not by our clever project management – but instead because we simply out-innovate everyone else by experimenting with everything at the same time.
Just as some experiments, I wrote a book on Google AppEngine that will be published by O’Reilly (www.appenginelearn.com) and have an independent study course with seven graduate students experimenting with building learning tools using IMS Tools Interoperability and Google AppEngine and seeing how these things mash up. Of course since Sakai already has superb support for IMS Learning Tools Interoperability and it is in production at UM, these tools can be dropped into a course in the middle of the semester or even the middle of a weekend.
The first tool I will be writing in this new environment will be a “Wisdom of Crowds” tool so I can do live experiments in my classes to demonstrate that wise crowds are smarter than wise individuals. I need it to be written and in production and deployed into CTools by Wednesday morning.
/Chuck