1) It is developed by research universities–and mostly by the top profs and their grad students at these universities.

And naturally they use their own desires and dreams (in code!) for an online system as the primary use cases. But the majority of students in the US are not taught in small, highly independent groups. Maybe they should be, but that model does not scale.

So for years now Sakai has been an application with great potential, and likely always will be, as it’s funders really have little understanding or interest in facilitating the day to day activity of a common teacher teaching hundreds to thousands of students.

As such, Sakai largely replicates the functionality of Postnuke, Drupal, Xoops, etc. and as they do, fails when matched with Blackboard for meeting the needs of usual teachers.

Of course the white elephant in the room has a name with two os, and must not be taken seriously as it is not java and all the profs at all the R1s _know_ that serious applications are written in java–the big grantors don’t give real money to PHP projects, period.

And this is not about providing better teaching tools, improving student learning, or about making teachers lives easier, ok–it is about the ‘best’ faculty at the ‘best’ institutions getting funded to do work that interests them, people who are looking for a usable tool for common users at non-premier institutions to come from this process are going down the Huron with a theoretical paddle that has great potential to one day move water…

But hey, “Together we stand, divided we fall…Goodbye Chenga” and all that.

LinkTool was originally created by folks at Rutgers University who designed it to address the need to hook “legacy applications” into Sakai. It is still not part of the core tools of Sakai, but is available for those who want to turn it on. In order for your application to be hooked in, it has to be able to consume web services supplied by Sakai. We work with ColdFusion and PHP and both scripting languages have built-in web service capabilities. What we had to do is retro-fit our applications’ login pages to process the web service information from Sakai (user, role, etc.). LinkTool creates secure connections between Sakai and the application, so once the connection is made, we can trust the authenticated information about the user. Once your’ve got it to work, there is a lot more you can do to communicate other information between your application and Sakai.

LinkTool works, but is not a finished product — I’m not sure it’s value is fully appreciated even by Sakai developers yet. But in my opinion, that’s what makes me forgive a lot of the surface weaknesses of the tool and see the possibilities. Your last comment is right on target: “I wonder if Sakai promises more robust possibilities for collaboration than a handful of smaller, more agile tools that might be shaped into a larger, more heterogeneous learning network through which we can reflect and archive the mind of a university in a host of more flexible and portable formats.”

Thanks for the clarification about LinkTool, I was hoping the iframed integration was not the extent of it. How exactly is Sakai going to integrate these external tools using this tool? It was not clear to me and I would love some more information on this. I imagine this would be a key component of joining a number of the “smaller” best of breed tools. Is the integration of these tools through LinkTool something a Java programmer would have to create? –or is it out-of-the-box? –or are these extensions/modules already available?

I guess I have a lot more to learn about the inner-working of Sakai, and I’m glad you responded here because I’m sure my impression of Sakai was far from entirely accurate. At the same time, I wonder if Sakai promises more robust possibilities for collaboration than a handful of smaller, more agile tools that might be shaped into a larger, more heterogeneous learning network through which we can reflect and archive the mind of a university in a host of more flexible and portable formats.

Two things I would add to this conversation: While I’m not sure about how easy it will be to integrate Sakai in teaching, Sakai has already proved to be a terrific tool for collaboration in a wide variety of ways (including research across institutions). In that capacity, my experience is that folks here have been very enthusiastic about the tool. Second, the description in the above review of Sakai’s LinkTool is not correct. LinkTool, which in my opinion is a critical feature of Sakai, is not a tool for simply embeding web content (there is another tool for that appropriately named Web Content). LinkTool is a webservices-based approach to hooking up with external applications. I dabble in ColdFusion and have found no problem integrating my tools for authentication, grade submissions, etc. with Sakai. In fact, we have also already tested using LinkTool to hook in, not only to Moodle course sites, but even to specific tools in Moodle (which, I admit, are in some cases much better than their counterparts in Sakai). We are hoping to do the same with WordPress, MediaWiki, .net tools, etc.

How all this will turn out, I don’t know. But I know it will be exciting, and we will be hearing from many new voices.

After a brief test period, I pushed very hard not to retire that clunky in-house solution. Sakai was slow, confusing, and was a step down from other popular open-source elements out there. Not to mention, it had (has) one of the worst discussion forums I have ever used. Since then, the build at Indiana has added a lot of new, exciting features. Unfortunately, nearly all are sub-par.

Being open-source, we imagined that it would be easy to do a little of our own development, but this is where university bureaucracies make open-source nearly meaningless. At that time, the process ran through a chain of requests, committees, and finally a masked developer somewhere in Michigan who might, if it fit in with the grand vision, look into finding an existing module or developing a new one to fit our needs.

I’ve gone back to Sakai each year for the last 3 to test it out as an instructor. Each time I turn right back around and use Moodle on my own server. I might be one of the few who don’t want to use their own. Though it’s easy to use and provides a lot of freedom, it’s just another thing I’ve got to manage. I just want to simplify my life.

I still hope that one day they’ll get it right. I’m hoping that one day, they’ll offer workshops on how to teach better instead of how to configure your class workspace.

Dan

But feel free to visit. It will feel much like visiting Second Life: quirky-interesting, but …eerily lonely as no one really visits there http://cyberlife.blog.asu.edu/