sakai

Blackboard gets a "C-" from open-source leaning education market

Ah, to be proprietary and free from those pesky open-source projects! This is almost certainly the feeling at Blackboard, the "Microsoft of Higher Education" which is coming under increased pressure from Moodle, Sakai, two open-source alternatives for course management, as The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests.

It used to be so easy to throw one's proprietary weight around. Blackboard has launched patent attacks on competitors and has been a tough competitor in a range of different ways. Still, open source is thriving.

Blackboard is heading for a showdown with the free-software movement, according to some observers. Although … Read more

In the trenches with...Janice Smith of rSmart Group

I found this submission for the "In the Trenches" series to be intriguing. If you wanted to find someone with experience analogous to working in an open source community, where would you look?

According to Janice Smith of The rSmart Group, in academia. This may be particularly true for Janice, given rSmart's focus on open source applications in the Higher Education vertical, but I think it's telling that Janice found the same sort of collegiality and community-approach in open source as she had in her previous life in academia.

But let's hear it directly from Janice:

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Janice A. Smith, The rSmart Group, Senior Education Consultant. I conduct on-site client assessments, develop requirements, design customizations, offer virtual and on-site training, and provide functional/technical support for an open source application in higher education and K-12.… Read more

Who will Oracle buy?

Larry Dignan over at ZDNet has an interesting, though speculative (though perhaps interesting because it's speculative? :-) post on Oracle's acquisition strategy. Since Oracle is not planning to slow its frenetic pace of acquisitions any time soon, Peter Goldmacher of Cowen & Co. asks, "Who would Larry buy?"

The list is interesting. I have a few alternative suggestions to Goldmacher's, to help Oracle get more involved in open source:… Read more

In the trenches with...Jonny Brown of rSmart Group

Most people aren't aware of how vibrant the open source community is in the Higher Education vertical market. Sakai, uPortal, and other Higher Education-specific open source projects thrive in the academic environment. Oddly enough, two of the premier open source vendors in this space hail from Arizona, not normally known as the center of open source. Something in that heat must generate school-bound open source....

One of the strongest commercial open source vendors in this market is rSmart, which provides commercial support for the Sakai project, among other things. Jonny Brown hadn't taken Open Source 101 before he joined The rSmart Group, but as you'll read below, he has clearly imbibed the Kool-Aid.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Jonny Brown, Senior Information Architect, rSmart Group. In the very narrowest sense, my job is to find, create, and distribute to our subscribers and the open source community information about using Sakai software. For the most part, this means that I'm a technical writer - a role I played for many years quite some time ago and have never had much desire to revisit. For sure, it wasn't the nature of the meat-and-potatoes work I do (which is very detail-oriented and tends to be boring) that brought me to rSmart. Neither was it the pay check that lured me - I was happily self-employed, reasonably well compensated, very busy, and quite challenged.… Read more