In which Open is the new Black(board)
Posted By Kevin Gaugler on October 19, 2008
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Whereas once it was thought that secrecy gave you an edge over your rivals, openness now brings competitive advantage. Web companies are now opening up their networks and sharing precious code in order to become more relevant to their user base. In order to compete with Google’s move to a more open platform, Facebook began allowing third party developers to create applications that would run on their site, generating an influx of innovative functionality for their users. In order to compete with Google’s move to create a free and open operating system for mobile phones, Verizon announced that it would open it’s network so that any device could run on their platform. No longer do you need to buy a Verizon phone to be on a Verizon plan. And if you have the technical know-how and the desire, you can even have your Smartboard make phone calls to your students’ cell phones.
In December of 2008 I had the privilege of presenting at the 8th Sakai Conference in Newport Beach, California. The conference had a level of energy unlike any other I have attended. The enthusiasm of the participants is certainly understandable since the Sakai community primarily meets in order to build a free, open-source on-line learning environment that will rival that of Blackboard. They have reason to be so bold in that the community has a large number of colleges and universities around the globe dedicating programmers to writing code for Sakai. It also has assembled strong commercial affiliates like IBM, Sun MicroSystems, Oracle and Cengage Learning. (I should remind you here that this blog is underwritten by Cengage.) If you’d like an overview of the Sakai product, I recommend you watch the following 8 minute video. It summarizes well my impressions of what Sakai means for higher education.
For programmers at colleges and universities, Sakai offers great opportunities to build customized tools for one’s institution. The code programmers use to build the Sakai product is open source and released under an Educational Community License. This means that anyone can use and modify the code as long as they give what they’ve built back to the community. For language teaching and learning this could mean the development of highly customized tools that easily integrate within a larger course management system. Even though The Yale University Center for Language Study (CLS) has been developing a set of online authoring templates that foreign language instructors can use to create web-based learning modules, it took one simple fact to sell me on Sakai. The Universidad Politécnica de Valencia has developed a mirror site to Sakai in Spanish. As a professor of Spanish, I frankly find the potential for true international collaboration boundless. For starters, I hope to soon be offering to my students the same Spanish-language interface for their on-line course materials as any of the 38,000 students in Valencia. What are your thoughts on Sakai and other open initiatives? What will such tools bring to the teaching and learning of all things international? If you use Blackboard or WebCT, what do you think are the futures of those products at your institution? How do these more “closed” systems work for teaching in languages other than English? We invite you to leave a text or video comment with your experiences using course management systems to teach or learn languages.
About the author
Kevin Gaugler
Kevin Gaugler is Associate Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. Technology has always been part of the DNA of his teaching. As a graduate student, Dr. Gaugler began working in The University of Connecticut's state-of-the-art multimedia language center to research relationships between the 5Cs and instructional technology. While at Marist, he has developed a a FIPSE-funded course entitled Spanish and Technology and has helped to create Identity Quest, a course that rethinks technology and study abroad. He has presented his pedagogical innovations at numerous conferences and colleges in the United States and is the author of several monographs.Comments
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Great posting on Sakai…as you know, I strongly agree that “open education” in all of its forms (open-source, open courseware, open learning, etc.) is one of the most powerful emerging models for the future of education.
Folks may be interested in hearing more about Sakai directly from instructors who are using it to innovate their teaching practices and the learning experiences their student receive. You can do so by taking a look at the presentations of last year’s winners for the Teaching with Sakai Innovation award which are available at: http://www.cpm.jussieu.fr/CPM/activites/visioconf/sakai_conf.htm#2AD (this is from last year’s international Sakai Conference that took place in Paris, France).
Keep up the blog posts, their much needed on this subject!
Josh
[...] 21, 2008 by Michael Korcuska Marist College faculty member and blogger Kevin Gaugler just added a nice post about Sakai to his blog (called The World A.T. Ways). Kevin is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Chair of [...]
Woo this is a nice blog, i would love to read more.
Thanks
gibs
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