Sakai Colleagues, In lieu of our usual weekly teaching and learning conference call, I would like to share some thoughts the future of these calls and some new ideas that have surface following the 10th International Sakai Conference in Boston this past July. I recognize that this e-mail is very long and detailed but I felt that in order to engage a larger and broad audience that a posting to multiple lists, rather than phone calls, was best. I know that this is a busy time of the year for many of us but if you can dedicate a few minutes to reviewing this and posting comments that would be great. To assist in freeing up some of your time, I'm suggesting below that we not have our regular call for the next several weeks and then reschedule it for a new day/time. As many of you are aware, there were several sessions at the Boston conference focused on the need to find new ways for our community to discuss, identify and document the types of instructional practices that Sakai needs to support now and into the near as well as distant future. Some of this need centers around finding new models for the type of requirements gathering that has been attempted in the past. Beyond this, there also seems to be a strong desire to implement new processes that would produce tool/technology agnostic visions of the types of instructional practices (ranging from traditional to innovative) that future versions of Sakai should facilitate and support. Following the conference there have been a number of discussions taking place in various groups and settings, including several members of the newly formed Product Council, as to how we might engage in this new work. Some of the ideas (but not all) and commentary on this can be found in Confluence at
http://tinyurl.com/nuzsu2. In addition, the folks within the Portfolio group have shared some of the visioning work that they have been engaged in for some time that many feel could represent a good model for the larger community (likely requiring some small modification). Examples of their work can be found at
http://tinyurl.com/mx5uvb. I have participated in some of the weekly Portfolio/OSP calls recently and believe that they are interested in engaging in some broader work in this area. WHERE IS THIS ALL GOING? I, and I believe others, feel that in order to move forward with some practical work in this area that we need to establish a regular (I think weekly but that is open to debate) conference call that is dedicated to such an effort. At the same time, we need to broaden the participation beyond the folks who have been regularly participating in the Teaching and Learning calls as means to increase the resources (i.e. people time) going into this work and to have a more diverse set of institutions represented (particularly more international schools). Because of these issues, I would like to make two proposals: (1) Re-purpose the Sakai T&L call to focus on instructional visioning activities. This would mean shifting our calls away from the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award program and other conference-related discussions. I am currently talking with Michael Korcuska about how the Foundation could assist with the TWSIA work (with continued involved of folks from this group) and also believe that we could move the other conference-related discussions to the Conference Planning Committee calls. (2) Reschedule the call during a time that will allow a more diverse and larger group to participate. This may end up requiring some creative approaches in order to include various time zones. NEXT STEPS I would like to hear from folks on list as to any concerns, thoughts, suggestions, etc. related to these issues and proposed changes. I would like to particularly encourage folks who are new to either the community or these calls to share their thoughts. Having this discussion on list rather than on our calls will allow for greater participation (I hope). I would also like to suggest that we temporarily postpone the regular Wednesday at 11:30 AM EDT Teaching and Learning call with the plan of re-starting these calls in mid- to late-September. This will allow us to some time to find a new day/time as well as free of some time for all of us to think about and start to discuss (on list) the details of how we might proceed with practical work. Unless there is _object_ion to this, I will put out some e-mails over the next couple of weeks in an effort to find a good time(s) for out future calls. Finally, I am going to put some time and effort into updating the Teaching and Learning Confluence page to clean up the older content (I won't remove it obviously, just re-organize it) and try and set up some pages that will hopefully facilitate some of our initial work in this area. I'm looking forward to engaging more on these issues on list with everyone. Thanks, Josh
