So, it is out of the box and running...
I must say it is getting better. For one thing: below is an item on how I managed to squeeze an RSS into Blackboard.... In SAKAI there is a button to do this job. Easy as pie.

What I am still missing, just a few odd things that sprung to mind, not in any particular order:

RSS feed of announcements in the course (but I may be a little shortsighted ;-)

What about the option of dedicating a directory in the resources section to being a podcast. Especially interesting because you can let students add content too. Makes it dead easy to get students to create audio or video recordings in turn and offer these to the whole class :-).

The WIKI is, how shall I put this politely? Not quite grown up yet. Extremely techy, not attractive or even suitable for students used to wysiwyg editors and easy interfaces.
Have a look at the Moodle WIKI tool: that has obviously been developed for a while.

Enough moaning ... more

With a sick kid on the sofa, I thought I would give the SAKAI demo a try....

Uhm arrg...
Ah, it's actually working :-)
I have managed to install the demo SAKAI on my laptop...

If you are interested in giving it a try a number of tips:

The five or so readme's are a bit confusing:
The one is directed at the demo version, the other directed at the real Src code version.... Please SAKAI: only leave us simple non-system-admins with one Readme file. This is what I ended up doing:

First install JDK 1.4.2
you can find it at: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html.

Then set the two JAVA_HOME and Path environment variables. This is a lot less complicated than it looks. In Windows XP, you go to
Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables
(read the page on the SAKAI ... more

Wow it works:
A teacher today asked me (she doesn't realise yet) to get an rss feed on the homepage of her course.

Well thanks to a little Googling, the experiments in Brabant and Leiden and the tip I got from Ross in the eLISU team at the Caledonian University I experimented using the Feed2JS script. It is simple but excellent. It works a treat. Just paste the code in html box in an announcement and make it permanent: and hey presto... There is new relevant news available on your course homepage every day!

Today I visited a meeting on SAKAI in higher Dutch education. It was a very interesting session.

It reminded me again of the fact that SAKAI is definitely moving on. More and more tools are being added. It has picked up past the talking phase and is now being built and growing rapidly. The thing I like about SAKAI is that it is more than just a VLE. It is also more than just a Collaborative tool. It is both, but it is also growing to be a great deal more. It is a place to connect to other tools and offers integration. I was especially interested in the plans to offer video and audio streams integrated in SAKAI. So not separate systems for video conferencing, but a system which can be integrated seamlessly.

However it is difficult to judge how easy these integrations will work out in practice. As usual standards will be very important and I hope SAKAI had adhere to these.

And now for a trial installation...

I just tested the Moodle Wiki. Wow, I am sorry but I simply must share this with the whole world. It is Excellent...
OK, there might be bugs, I am not issueing any guarantees ;-)

It is an easy to use tool in which groups of students can build there own hyperlinked set of knowledge. And it is not restricted to text either. Other students can watch it develop and you can review the popularity of your own weblog as it grows.
So let them [grow] using a Wiki. Now all I need is an enthousiastic teacher.

With the help of my friendly student assistant I have created a number of video instructionals. In fact it was surprisingly easy. Once you know what you want to say you can almost create instructionals faster than regular manuals.

The great advantage is that the user can immediately see where they have taken a wrong turning and you can never forget that one small insignificant step you left out before you had it printed in thousands ;-)



We have created the screen captures using Camtasia. Its a shame its such an expensive programme, because it worked a treat :-)

So for all those Dutchies out there who are wondering how they can tweak their portfolio....

Follow this link.

There we are: it is finally available: My very own podcast. In fact I have decided to skip the audio phase and switch directly to the video.... So it really is my Vodcast.

The address is:

http://www.keithrussell.nl/podcast




Please do not expect too much content. For me it was simply a trial in finding out how hard it is to get a podcast going. If you want to know about the techniques I have used: subscribe because my first installments will be covering those matters.



If you don't have the faintest idea what a podcast is: chuck it into google or follow this link.

Here we all are, cold and wet but quite proud. Behind us is the entrance to the Trou d'Haquin (yes its that small dark hole that's swallowing up all that water....
There are no clear photographs of the kids in the cave I'm afraid. Cave photography is a skill on its own.

Last weekend I took the kids on their first ever caving weekend. We stayed in the Chateau de Floreffe, a lovely, small, quaint castle near Namur. The kids had great fun playing in the grounds and running about in the woods. I just managed to capture two of them wizzing past on my Lomo...

» Visit the site on the castle



I hope to have some photographs of the caving trips themself soon. On saturday we did the Trou d'Haquin (see some photographs by others). A quite sporting and exciting cave for two of these youngsters. On Sunday we took it easy and did the Grotte de Floreffe (just walking around and enjoying the sights) and we went into the Grotte St. Anne ( view the map) for a reasonable distance. I am pleased to say they really enjoyed the caving :-)

A while ago we had an interesting visit from Apple. We already had been looking at the iTunes U initiative in the USA. We hope that this initiative will also become available in the Netherlands in an integrated form combined with other university systems...



It does seem to be a technology driven innovation, not to mention product driven ;-) On the other hand it may well be a relatively easy innovation in education. The lecturer can simply continue teaching as she/he already did before. Video lectures can be offered online and students can get used to this new facility. I am sure new wil get used to it an awful sight faster than most lecturers will ;-)

A more interesting question is what consequences this shall have in a number of years time? Perhaps F2F lectures will still exist but will be turned into a much more interactive affair...