Sakai

Integrating Library Reserves and Course Management Systems: Aleph, RSS, and Sakai

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/
666?ID=MWR0566

Hey, I’m as excited about the potential of service-oriented architectures and the ‘loosely coupled’ appproach as the next guy, but on a regular basis I find myself lamenting the seeming lack of real world working examples one can currently point to.

Yet every time I feel this way, along comes another presentation like this one, in this case describing the use of RSS to display library resource holdings within the Sakai CMTools application, that help me believe the grand vision of diversity and choice with stability and integration may actually come true. So don’t dispair; ‘network economy’ effects to the contrary, slowly cracks are forming in the vendor lockdown and silos we all lament … really … I think. – SWL

Sakai Release Candidate 1 released today (anyone got a demo running yet?)

http://www.sakaiproject.org/press/sakai-rc1.html

You’ve probably seen this news announced already in a number of places; as promised Sakai Release Candidate 1 was released today. This post is more a query if anyone has got a build up and running that I can have a look at. Pressed for time right now myself, but maybe I’ll get one going in the next few weeks if no one else steps forward. It looks slightly involved, though not too bad. – SWL

Webcast by University of California of discussion on SAKAI

http://ets.berkeley.edu/etstandards/sakai/

Similar to the last webcast they provided back in December concerning Lionshare, the University of California system (and specifically UC Berkeley, who seem to be hosting the event) are providing a webcast stream of a presentation by Joseph Hardin, the Director of the Collaborative Technologies Lab Media Union at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor concerning the SAKAI project. I only caught the morning of the Lionshare talk, so don’t know if the question and answer sessions in the afternoon are typically broadcast. But hopefully they will be for this one, as the ‘Questions on Chef and Sakai’ put together by the UC Berkeley Educational Technology Services – Learning Systems Group are of great interest and extremely pertinent to anyone embarking on the development or deployment of an open source CMS or other elearning component in an post-secondary enterprise environment. The talk is on Monday, January 12th, 2004 from 9 am – 12 noon PST, so I guess there is some small solace in not being able to get to the CANARIE sponsored sessions in Vancouver that day. – SWL

CETIS on SAKAI

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20031124150257

Wilbert Kraan at CETIS has a lot more information on the proposed SAKAI project that I posted on last week. As reported, it’s a collaboration by a number of the former OKI participants in conjunction with folks from uPortal and introducing work around the JSR 168 Portlet specification. As Wilbert writes, “SAKAI is meant to come up with production level application almost within a year.” – SWL

http://staff.washington.edu/oren/
weblog/archives/000085.html

Also announced in Educause (the above was the only link I could find offhand, not an official release) came news of this collaboration from some of the original OKI players, but now with the addition of uPortal to the mix. It seems the goal is to build around the recent JSR168 specification, which will “define the portlet API and the portlet-container responsibilities as the runtime environment for portlets” in Java-based portal environments. – SWL