Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Update on Sakai 3: Everything is Content

There has been a lot of speculation on what Sakai 3 will be and how it will dramatically change user experience. There is most definitely a paradigm shift between Sakai 2 and 3. Will this new way to interact with an LMS suit the needs of educators worldwide? You be the judge.

I made a short presentation (12 minutes) to the members of our LMS Committee on June 16, 2009. My slides are available on Slideshare. (Disclaimer: I based parts of my material on Michael Korcuska's Sakai 3 presentation)



If you are looking for a more detailed tour, below is a screencast recorded in early June 2009. Michael Korcuska explains the big concepts that are guiding the development process of Sakai 3.



Since Sakai 3 is still in its early development, please consider getting involved with the community! Use cases and feedback are as important as the code itself, so whatever talent or time you have to devote is greatly needed and appreciated. You can try an alpha version at http://3akai.sakaiproject.org

Do you think that everything should be content and workflows? Do you believe this is something educators will embrace?

3 comments:

Ray Davis said...

Since I try to engineer from the outside in, I guess I'd prefer something like "Everything is user action," so as not to prematurely influence design with assumptions about what the vague word "content" means in the online world. How do I know when I've succeeded in making something "content"? "Everything persisted is discoverable," "Everything persisted is linkable or embeddable," "Every change can produce an Atom feed of some sort" -- those seem like clearer guidelines.

In general, though, I have to admit that "Everything is X" reminds me too much of pre-Socratic philosophers: "Everything is water," "Everything is fire," ... As it turns out, Democritus was right and "Everything is atoms," but that doesn't help you much if you're trying to build a skyscraper.

How about "Contentment is everything"? :)

Mathieu Plourde said...

Hi Ray,

I agree that "Everything is content" is a very vague statement, but it's better than what came up earlier in the process (like "entity", and its process called "entityfication", for instance). We're still ironing out our metaphor glitches...

The general idea still refers to the fact that everything is linkable from anywhere a rich text editor (WYSIWYG) is available. No more workaround asking users to "go back to this tool, look for that link, your grade is just three clicks down from there". User will be able to create their content by following a linear pattern similar to what they would experience in a word processor, which is way closer to their expectations.

Thanks for your comment!

Anonymous said...

More information is available on the managed Sakai 3 project to deliver Sakai 3.0 by the end of June 2011. http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SAKDEV/Sakai+3

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