This week I took a trip to Blacksburg, VA for the Sakai regional conference. It was a low budget trip now that I am pulling from my own funds to come. The Red Carpet Inn is $54/night including tax and I spent about $100 in gas to drive the 18 hours from Syracuse, NY and back. My late registration cost $200.

The session by Virginia Tech on outcomes was really good and tied in directly with the Assessment Institute that I attended a couple weeks back. I think the experience I had at Syracuse with NCATE accreditation and the use of Sakai portfolios and Goal Management is hitting lots of other schools now. Schools like Virginia Tech and Indiana University that are exploring variations on the theme of Goal Management are building a free (not as in beer) system that integrates the student centered ideas of portfolios with the institutional perspective needed for long term sustainability and aggregation needed for program assessment over the long haul. Although Syracuse University is not actively involved in the development of those tools, I believe that the return on the investment that was made when the School of Education developed and disseminated the proof of concept GM tools has not come full circle yet. In a year or so, I bet that the community will improve upon this theme and a much more refined approach will be available for use by SU and other schools.

The presentation by TX State entitled "Bye, Bye Blackboard" was interesting as I felt it represented an interesting dichotomy that has popped up on the list a few times and will be highlighted by present financial strains that college IT departments will be feeling for a while. Texas State had been running an early version of Blackboard that was written in perl and had customized it for their local needs a great deal. The costs of licensing Bb for an upgrade in 2005 were going to increase from $5K to $55K per year. The rationale for investigating an open source solution was to allow them to continue to make their customizations (to innovate) and to simultaneously avoid the high license costs. However, the number of FTE needed to maintain Sakai and the weight of moving from perl to enterprise java development seems to have negated cost savings. I asked the presenters (the project director and some IT staff) if they could comment on the discrepancy between their implied goal of reserving the right to innovation versus what seemed to be an implementation that looked like a commodity service replacement. The IT staff member who had done the perl customizations admitted that they were not customizing their software as rapidly as they could in perl and that the staff were not able to turn on a dime and react to faculty requests in the way that they once could. Much of the talk revolved around training faculty to do the same sorts of things that they did in Bb in Sakai and maintaining the more complicated infrastructure to support Sakai. The development work they have done seems to be more targeted towards administrative work (migrating Bb courses to Sakai) and enterprise integration projects than towards the faculty and student end users at this point. I think that is natural and probably necessary, but the perception that Sakai is a great platform for rapid innovation and response to feature requests is a tough sell unless you throw a ton of resources at the problems. I really appreciated their attention to the different needs of their faculty as they encouraged their faculty to make the choice to move to Sakai. This is undoubtedly one of the nest Sakai success stories in the community, but it is filled with lessons we could all learn from.

This underlying message resonated with what some Sakai implementors have been saying on the list. It struck me that Luke Fernandez's comments about discussing Sakai design in terms of Bb and Moodle were telling in the sort of Bb service replacement that many schools are expecting from Sakai. At this point Sakai may be behind the curve on meeting these expectations for those schools, but will quickly be moving forward to change the paradigm. Michael Korcuska's demo of the ideas that are coming out of the Sakai 3.0 UX work are evidence to that.

There was an OSP BOF at the end of the first day. Since the BOF was my bright idea, I ended up doing some demonstrations of the OSP tools and reviewing the documentation that was available on the wiki. In general I think it was well received. For the most part, I think that the schools that are interested in OSP are not interested in large vendor contracts to set up and run their portfolio implementations. I think that the model for giving schools a "leg up" and then letting them do their own work is more in keeping with many of the committed Sakai schools. I also received positive feedback on building community documentation into a consulting job. I made sure that I credited Weber State for funding the development of the community documentation that is on the wiki and encouraged others to talk to Janice Smith and I if they would like help with their own implementation and/or would like to fund further documentation efforts.