Sakai

Don’t forget to register for the Sakai regional conference at Virginia Tech. The early registration deadline is Monday October 13th. More conference details, including a tentative schedule, can be found on the wiki page.
Remember that the cut-off date for hotel reservations at the guaranteed Sakai rate of $129/night is also Monday, October 13, 2008. To [...]

I’m pleased to announce an important extension and expansion of the Sakai Foundation User Experience Improvement project. As you know, the Sakai Foundation initially contracted with Nathan Pearson to begin working on new user interaction designs for Sakai.  This work has made excellent progress and a variety of schools are assisting with implementation, including UC [...]

I’m extremely pleased to announce the re-launch of the Sakai website. It’s the product of a great deal of hard work over the past several months. There is still a good deal of work to do in terms of adding content and improving what is already there, so don’t hesitate to send us your feedback [...]

Jeff Young has a great piece in The Chronicle??called “Blackboard Customers Consider Alternatives“. As usual, Michael Korcuska has insightful things to say about it. I only have a little bit to add on one quote from Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen:

I have 300 people on my development team working full time on our products and services???I don???t know if there are 300 full-time people currently working on Sakai.

The Chronicle of Higher Education just published an interesting article about Blackboard in which Sakai is mentioned several times (along with Moodle and D2L). Overall, the article is well written and balanced. It’s rare that I read news coverage about something I know well and end up feeling the reporter did a good job of [...]

If you follow the Sakai lists you may know that Megan May, Sakai’s director of Quality Assurance, has been offered a promotion at Indiana University and thus, will be stepping down from her role in the Sakai community. Megan has been working 50% for IU and 50% for Sakai–a situation that was not sustainable in [...]

I’m pleased to announce the newest Sakai Commercial Affiliate, NetSpot in Austrailia. NetSpot is an Australian eLearning technology services company for the Higher Education market in the Asia Pacific region. They offer include managed hosting and managed applications, help desk, technical support, training, migration, integration, software development and implementation consulting. NetSpot has a specialty in [...]

Well, actually, Cambridge.  But if I say “Cambridge” and Sakai in the same sentence, most people will think England.  So, we’ll be in Cambridge, Massachusetts next summer, right across the river from Boston and just next to MIT. The conference dates are Wednesday-Friday, July 8 - 10, with pre-conference sessions on Tuesday the 7th.  Note [...]

It’s been pointed out to me (and I should have remembered anyways) that Solo, the offline Sakai, is a collaboration between NWU and UNISA. I’d left UNISA out of the equation in my recent post on the subject. Sorry about that!