More thoughts from the Sakai SEPP meeting

I realized that I've been carrying around some more impressions from the Sakai Educational Partners Program meeting last week in Denver without communicating them.

While it's still too early to assume that the Sakai effort to create an open source collaborative learning platform will be ultimately succesful, there is certainly a lot of momentum gathering behind the project. It seems like there is a fairly solid (though still evolving) technical architecture being created, a lot of smart people from major institutions around the country are thinking about how to contribute specific tools to the project, and (perhaps best of all) the community is forming around the project and learning how to express common concerns and work towards common goals.

While I still have some major concerns, most notably the thorny issue of how really good teaching/learning tools that have been created in languages other than Java (like our own Catalyst tools from the UW) can be integrated into this platform, I think that there's enough there there to warrant spending a considerable amount of time and effort with the Sakai folks.