I have just come across a white paper produced by Sakai which compares the Sakai framework with the international ELF work. Many readers will be familiar with Sakai:
The Sakai Project is a $6.8M community source software development project founded by the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project is producing open source Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software with the first release in July 2004. The Sakai Educational Partners’ Program (SEPP) extends this community source project to other academic institutions around the world, and is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and SEPP member contributions.[Sakai Project sakaiproject.org Home Page]
ELF (The eLearning framework is an international initiative which aims to support the emergence of service oriented approaches to learning technology.
My eye was caught by the recommendations of the white paper. It considers a range of ELF-proposed services and makes some notes about them. Interestingly it suffests that some should be “pushed off” to a library effort. These include: ‘resolver’, ‘metadata registry’, ‘harvesting’, ‘catalog’/’archive’.
I am not aware that these areas have been picked up by any library grouping specifically in the context of this discussion.
I reflect on my first year of teaching at the iSchool in the University of Washington. A little about teaching. A little about Canvas, the library, and some software tools. A little about me and my learnings.
The phrase 'workflow is the new content' captures an important insight. In the digital environment we often create, use and share content through workflow applications.
Libraries are not ends in themselves, but serve the interests of the organizations of which they are a part. As university emphasis varies around research, education and career poles, we can expect to see libraries evolve to support those emphases more strongly.
