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Platform or Product?
Is Sakai an open platform for developers or an integrated product for instructors and students? For me that is the big unanswered question from last week's Sakai conference.
It seems like the optimal answer would be "both." Downloading Sakai should mean you get a place to upload files, a calendar, discussion board, gradebook, membership list, etc., and that those tools work well together (e.g. an assignment's due dates from the gradebook also show up in the calendar, or that an new file posted can be publicized with an announcement).
Sakai should also have the APIs in place so that skilled individuals or small teams can build innovative tools on top of Sakai - and be able to take advantage of the infrastructure provided by the core tools. A new lab notebook tool could take advantage of the class membership list, for example.
The conference ended with a Q&A session with the Sakai board members. I asked how decisions about what's included as the 'core tools' will be made. The response I got from one board member was "I'd like to see Sakai include six discussion boards. The user can try them all and decide which they like best." No other board member disagreed.
That's been bugging me ever since. Even assuming that each school's IT department will pick a default set of tools (a possibility mentioned by the board member), does it make sense to have Sakai include every tool built? Can there be no standards for inclusion? If I'm developing a new attendance-taking tool that I want to be able to post grades, what do I do if there are 6 gradebooks?
The keynote speaker at the conference was Brian Behlendorf talking about how they run the Apache project. Apache was frequently touted during the conference as a governance model that could be used by Sakai. But Apache is a very different product than Sakai - the user interface for Apache is a plain text configuration file. It's users are the same people as it's developers. I think the people looking to Apache as a model for Sakai see Sakai as a platform, not as a product.
The same logic goes behind the idea of shipping Sakai with 6 discussion boards. Don't like any of them? Build your own! The assumption is that the user is a software developer.
I think a shared software development platform for educational technology would be a great thing - I'm not knocking that. But it will be a shame if Sakai becomes another first rate open source software project with a second rate user interface.
Tags: Sakai opensource