Hi Janet,

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 4:11 PM, Hurn, Janet E. Ms. <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> My issue with this is that certain courses that have already had major investments of time and resources to develop, depend on certain features of the wiki and blog tools that are just not available in Niihka.

We should definitely itemize those limitations somewhere and see if we
can find different options to address them in the short and long run.
Do you have that information somewhere?

In any case, the question is what we do with that information.

> I am all for an open source solution but a solution must be available for these courses in August and if Campus Pack is the one that is available at that time, then it should be utilized until a suitable open source solution is found. (perhaps this is the exceptional type of circumstance you are referring to.) I don't believe it is fair to expect faculty and students to find an alternative outside of Niihka to use until an open source solution is found.

Clearly there has to be some wiggle room in the language (the
"exceptional" clause).

But on the details of this case:

First, my experience with Campus Pack was not at all that positive.

I found the blog tool to be so poor a couple of years ago when I used
it in a course that I stopped using it altogether.

I consider Sakai's to be equally poor.

If I considered it important to use blogging in my courses, I would
use a free outboard service like posterous, which you can setup to
allow people to blog by simply sending an email. I would think it
would yield better results for students and faculty alike.

Wikis are much more important to me, and I use them extensively in my courses.

I found the wiki tool from Campus Pack not much more than adequate
when I used it extensively in two courses last term. I think it has
some features that are better than Sakai's tool (and some of its own
bugs and limitations).

But two things:

1) as I've mentioned elsewhere, there is an effort to add a much
better wiki support to Sakai using xwiki:

<http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/>

I could easily see this ready to go for Fall, particularly if we
dedicated some effort to helping out. I am certain this wiki is a
large step up from Campus Pack's, and it is open source, with all the
benefits that attend to that.

2) all of our student's have access to Google Docs, which offers
superior collaborative document authoring that can be integrated into
Sakai, and which can provide an alternative for some courses that
might otherwise use a wiki tool. Again, this could be ready for use in
the Fall without much work.

But we haven't considered either of these options.

These decisions impact me directly as well, since I depend on this
technology every day.

I'm very much focused on the long-view; on establishing a strategic
vision and a set of policies that will hopefully achieve the best
outcomes over the next 3-5 years. This time-frame will also include a
transition to a new, next-generation, version of Sakai; something
which I hope to see us contribute resources to so that we can directly
shape it to serve our needs.
-- 
Bruce D'Arcus
Associate Professor, Graduate Director
Department of Geography
Miami University
234 Shideler Hall
Oxford, Ohio 45056