A time of transition

For the past few years I have been managing the technology side of a PT3 grant for the School of Education at Syracuse University. Our research group was called the The Living SchoolBook, where I wrote about the project. The goals of the proposal included multiple initiatives meant to improve the education of future teachers. One of these goals included improvements to the assessment of the teacher preparation programs (which happened to coincide/collide with a simultaneous accreditation effort for the school). Another included the development of a technical system that would allow students to publish and highlight elements of their own learning.

My role was to document the technical requirements of the systems needed and to manage a small team of designers and developers as we built it. We eventually settled on the Sakai/OSP platform as a starting point for a our project. Our development effort consisted of the Goal Management project, which began to incorporate elements of the Sakai courseware tools as components of the OSP portfolio tools. This idea has found some enthusiastic supporters from other Sakai community members, including rSmart, RINET and Indiana University.

In May of 2008, the PT3 grant funding will end. While I had some hopes that I would be kept on to further develop and implement the portfolio tools, I was recently told that the school would probably not be funding the idea. The cost of maintaining an instance of Sakai is difficult to justify for the financially strapped college, which can use the University supplied enterprise BlackBoard instance "for free".

Today I am heading out to Newport Beach to further disseminate the work we have done and to talk with other colleges and vendors to see what the prospects look like for continuing to work in the Sakai community.