Sakai Conference in Austin

Last week, I went to Austin to go to the fourth Sakai Conference. Sakai is a community source learning management system (LMS) created by a joint project between IU, UM, MIT, and Stanford. It handles all the nitty gritty parts of teaching a course like grades, homework assignements, annoucements, etc.

My main goal while at the conference was to tell people about Connexions and how we plan to integrate with Sakai in the future. I also went to see if there were any new tools for Sakai that might help us out.

I advertised Connexions to people mostly by doing a "Technical Demo" Thursday night. I was given a table and a projector and used my laptop to show off the Connexions website and all our editing features. I also showed off Rich's current 301 course in Rice's Sakai instance. It uses an IFrame to display his Connexions course. I was a little late getting set up because my bus driver got lost between 4th street and 23rd street and couldn't find the UT Alumni Center. We eventually got there, after about an hour. I set up and started fielding questions while still booting up my laptop. Some people were eager to hear about Connexions and very enthusiastic about it. Others were not too enthusiastic once they learned that we currently are not a part of Sakai.

I put a lot of emphasis on the sharing and collaborating aspects of the Connexions system. People were eager to hear that they did not have to create their own repository for their institution. One already exists that they can make use of. They also liked to hear that Connexions has tools to make it easy for people to edit and correct each other's work (Patching) but the original author still retains the copyright, unlike Wikipedia. They also liked the fact that Connexions is not just for Rice's benefit, it is for everyone's.

I sat in on several interesting presentations while at the conference, as well. One was from people at eduCommons people and the Melete people. They announced that they have just recieved a grant from Hewlett to fund a collaboration between eduCommons and Melete. It seems that they are going to export content as an IMS package from Melete and then import that package into eduCommons to make it freely available to everyone. This sounds like a decent idea on the surface, but there are still two copies of the content. They should be able to have a single repository for the content and pull the information to the other system. Also, their IMS import/export functionality seems to be good for creating new content, but does not seem to currently handle updating content. Our proposed system of keeping content in Connexions and letting professors pull it in for use in Sakai should be much easier to maintain.

Another presentation that could be of use for us was one for TwinPeaks. It is a tool designed to pull in content from OKI repositories into Sakai. I'm not sure if their interface is anything that we could use, but it could bear further investigation when we get closer to integration.

All in all, the conference was a good experience. This was really my first time working with Sakai much and I am not incredibly impressed by it. I think the entire system has a horrible user interface. Maybe it is an interface that is more intuitive to one who doesn't work with Plone all day, but it still confuses me how some things are done. The fact that when you click on the same link, it will take you different places. The only way to get back to the front page of a tool is a tiny, unlabeled up arrow button. Each tool organizes functionality differently. For example, some tools uses links on a top bar to go to different views of the product... other tools use them for copy/paste functions. They need to strive for more consistency and better UI design, in my opinion. Also, I tried to install a Sakai instance on my laptop to play around with. I used the simple demo version that is supposed to work out of the box, but it still took me several hours to get it working. I spent another several hours trying to set up Melete to test it, but could not get it working. In contrast, when I set up Plone on my laptop for the Plone conference, it took about 5 minutes to get Zope and Plone running after the download had finished.

Also, another piece of information that I learned was that Austinites have no clue how to drive on black ice. I went out for dinner one night and drove along slowly, watching two cars in front of me pound and pound on the gas til their wheels are going about 50 or 60 miles an hour, with the car sliding along at about 1 mile an hour. Plus, I probably passed about 20 or 30 vehicles that had been abandoned in the median where they crashed. So, be careful if you go to Austin during a freak freezing rain storm.