NYU Demo of Sakai Open Academic Environment

We’ve been tracking Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) progress (formerly known as Sakai 3; see project plans here) and thought you’d be interested in a recent announcement.

On November 5,  2010, New York University launched the first pre-release pilot of the Sakai OAE — a revolutionary platform for academic networking and collaboration. The NYU instance will be known as the ATLAS Network (Advanced Teaching, Learning, And Scholarship Network). The pilot will grow to include 5,000 students and faculty from six different NYU schools.

Below is a 13-minute screencast of their implementation.

The NYU pilot focuses on two important areas of need.

1. It provides a single NYU network for many diverse university communities to use.
2. And it provides a flexible set of options for implementing portfolios.

Features include:

• searchable profiles,
• group spaces and uploaded content, and
• two portfolio implementations.

The pilot is being overseen by a cross-school, academic-led committee charged with oversight of the development and implementation of the Sakai OAE environment at NYU. Initial funding for Sakai at NYU was provided by a 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up grant.

It’s exciting to see the work of so many come together! Congrats!

A look back at the UNC Sakai Pilot (2007-2010)

In their book, Implementing Change: Patterns, Principles and Potholes, Gene Hall and Shirley Hord identify ten principles that have been observed repeatedly when organizations and people are engaged in change.

One principle is: Change is a process, not an event.

We thought it might be useful, then, to look back at the earliest beginnings of the Sakai Pilot at UNC starting in February 2007 through to today. Seeing the process from this vantage point highlights the efforts of many who were able to try, to learn, to do, and to change over time. The combination of your efforts helped to create the timeline below. As always, thank you!

The UNC Sakai Pilot: A Retrospective
(3 years in 3 minutes)

Micro-tutorial: Upload multiple files to Resources

We’ve shown how to upload/download multiple resources using WebDAV before (Recall “Map a Drive for Windows & Mac”), but there is another way to quickly upload multiple files to your Sakai site. Here’s how in three easy steps.(Click on an image to enlarge it in a new window.)

Step 1: Go to Resources > Add > “Upload files”

Step 2:  “Add Another File”

Step 3: “Upload Files Now”

Note: You can also opt to notify your site members by email that there are new files in the site.

You can try this for yourself using Resources in your My Workspace area.

That’s all there is to it!