This page is for End-User Support community members to post notes and/or share their highlights of the 2008 Sakai Conference in Paris.
Please be sure to post your name & contact information along with your notes.
Highlights from Sakai, Paris
One thing noted by everyone was that this conference included more faculty than ever before, and these faculty were excited about using Sakai to enhance their teaching. This seems to be a step in the right direction. I couldn't tell how much the faculty interacted with developers, but at least we got them within several feet of each other.
McGraw-Hill is providing "cartridges" that will pop directly into Melete (also called "Modules" in many implementations). They claim that they have truly designed these modules to be used in online classes - rewriting the online content rather than just cutting up the textbook. The modules have intros, videos, activities (flashcards, crosswords, matching, etc.), links to the e-book, and all the stuff you expect from a textbook company. What's nice about the Sakai implementation is that once you have dropped in the cartridge, you can edit it in Melete to change the order of the modules, remove modules, add anything you want to the modules. The product is called Katana, and you can download it here: http://MHLearningSolutions.com/katana
Note: McGraw-Hill developed this in conjunction with ETUDES (obviously). I couldn't help but smile to myself as they talked about how you could use Katana in the Sakai environment you are familiar with. If you've ever used Melete, you know that it doesn't look or act much like any other Sakai tool. But it does load all of their course stuff right into Melete where you can do whatever you want with it.
Actually, to clarify, it doesn't load "all" of the course stuff into your site. All the navigation kind of stuff is loaded so that you can manipulate it, but the actual course material resides on the McGraw-Hill server. This arrangement makes the course cartridge quite small. You would have to consider bandwidth issues for students who think they are going to take a course like this from home.
I didn't get to see all of the presentations from the teaching award winners. Someone else should give the details.
Interestingly, our pseudo-presentation on our progress in end-user support generated the most discussion around the help tool. People are very interested in easy, automated ways to do things like substitute tool names and change skins. Jonathan Bolte's brain is cranking away on possible ways to do this.
Here's something that I found interesting. I went to a presentation on the podcasting project at Indiana University where the presenters said that very few instructors used podcasts as a way to record and disseminate lectures. Then I went to the OpenCast presentation by some folks from Berkeley. They have a very elaborate system embedded in Sakai which schedules and automates the recording of audio and/or video for lectures. The system automatically uploads the lecture and records all the date/time/subject stuff about it, so that it is available a couple of hours after the lecture is given. Curiously, they don't really know much about how the lectures are used.
Doesn't it seem like we ought to try to discover which of our great ideas are actually useful to people? (Just a little rhetorical question) I should note that podcasting at Indiana University is really in its infancy, so it is difficult to say where it will go. On the other hand, the recording and posting of lectures at Berkeley has been going on for several years. Doesn't anyone ask them if people are using these things?
Maggie Ricci
Indiana University
mricci@indiana.edu