Michael Korcuska's blog

It seems ideal, in this my last blog entry as Sakai Executive Director, that I get to write about the European Sakai Conference that took place last week in Valencia. This is the third time I've visited Valencia and, as many of you know, it has become a city that I heartily recommend for a family vacation. I've gotten to know the good people at Universidad Politécnica de Valencia fairly well and it was fantastic for me that I was able to say some of "goodbyes" in person and in a place that increasingly feels familiar to me.

As you may have read by now, I've accepted a position at LinkedIn and will be stepping down as Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation as of March 15.

I was pleased to see Michael Feldstein's blog post about Sakai at smaller organizations (he also alluded to the strength of Sakai's teacing and learning leadership). Coincidentally, that's exactly what I was planning to blog about.

I’ve recently been in a number of conversations about the education system in the United States and the role of technology in improving things.  So I thought I’d take a minute to write down some of my thoughts on the subject. While I don’t think technology is a silver bullet by any means (as evidenced by the fact that I’m still having this conversations 20 years after I entered the field!), I do think technology has a role to play in improving learning outcomes.

Michael Feldstein just posted some great information on tracking the Sakai Foundation activities on his blog. I also wanted to point out that I've started a "Sakai Foundation Goals and Activities" wiki page that (hopefully!) provides a framework for putting a lot of the particulars into context. It certainly needs more work and I will invest the time to make it easier to understand -- if people find it useful, that is.

Several members of the Sakai community, including Ian Boston, Brad Wheeler and Chuck Severence have made excellent comments on the Chronicle of Higher Ed article regarding Melllon's folding of the RIT program into the Scholarly Communication program.  If you're interested in the story I encourage you to check them out.

As you may have read by now, the Mellon Foundation is merging its Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) with it's Scholarly Communications program.  David Wiley published an excerpt from the email Mellon send to current grant recipients on his blog:

I just returned from Educause 2009 in Denver where my "Blackboard, Moodle and Sakai" session was one of the most popular events of the week. I wrote about it here and you can watch the session here (MS Silverlight needed). My Sakai 3 poster session was also very well attended and I've uploaded the slides I used for that session to Slideshare.

Yesterday at Educause I was one of three panelists in a "Point/Counterpoint" session entitled "Blackboard, Moodle and Sakai." The session was completely overcrowded. There were probably 400 people in the room 20 minutes before the scheduled start time, many others who were trying to watch on a TV screen outside the room and many others that gave up and did something else. Luckily it was recorded so you can watch the session online.

Unicon has been invited to organize a Market Research session at this year's Educause conference. This is an interesting and innovative program that the conference organizers are piloting this year. As I understand it Unicon is one of three companies invited to participate, the other two being SunGard and Google, so this is a big honor and a big deal for both Unicon and the entire open source community. I encourage you to attend this session and then head over to the Open Source reception....read on for more information