JD asked me the other day about my experiences using Sakai, and how I liked it as compared with something like Moodle. This is something I’ve been thinking a fair bit about, not only because Sakai marks my school’s third primary course management system in perhaps four years, but also because I’m speaking at a NITLE symposium on such systems in mid-October.

The reasons my institution has changed CMSs so many times of late make sense, though they don’t ameliorate the difficulty for most faculty in having to learn a whole new system. (Me, on the other hand—I’m always happy to tinker with new software, so changing systems isn’t automatically a bad thing.) We began using one of the large commercial CMSs a couple of years ago when one of our consortial partners got a big grant from a major foundation designed to get the thing set up and help get faculty up and running on it. This school offered all of the faculty in our system training and access to the CMS, hoping that as many folks as possible would get on board. I, frankly, refused, because I find that particular commercial system to be unwieldy and overloaded with features, not to mention generally unattractive and clunky. Instead, I became part of a pilot program through my own IT department, which recruited a small number of faculty (call me “guinea pig”) to test out an installation of Moodle. For a couple of years, I ran most of my courses through Moodle, which I found to be lightweight and flexible. You answer a couple of basic questions— for instance, do you want your course site to be organized by week or by topic?—and Moodle then lays in a basic template that you can fill with various resources. The main Moodle page for each class can thus become a multimediated, hypertextual form of the syllabus, with all of the readings, assignments, quizzes, discussion questions, and so forth laid directly into the schedule. Moodle also comes with a host of modules and plugins and extensions and the like, such that any given instructor can add threaded discussion forums, wikis, synchronous chat, etc., to the class site. Best of all, Moodle is open-source, with an active development community, and I felt strongly about supporting my institution’s impulse to move away from commercial educational software and toward the communally developed and supported open-source model.

So my experience of Moodle was great, and it really began to gain purchase on campus, particularly after our consortial partner informed the faculty that their grant had run out, and that those faculty who were not employed directly by the original grant-getting college would no longer be supported in their use of the commercial CMS. It’s expensive, after all. So the faculty at my school who’d been using that system migrated to Moodle last year. But in the course of the year, the council of deans at our institution finally decided that the consortium should have one common CMS, and that the CMS should integrate with our student information systems, both for populating classes and for LDAP purposes, and so forth. One of the institutions was heavily invested in Sakai, another open-source package, and one that promised better integration with our other systems. So while Moodle is still supported around here this year, there’s a big push on to begin moving people to Sakai.

My experience of Sakai has thus far been much like my experience of Drupal, which I’m using to support the interactive side of both my classes this semester. That is to say, they’re both an interesting combination of lightweight and powerful, which I found utterly perplexing at first. As I described my initial experiences of mucking about in Sakai to our director of instructional technologies here, where Moodle gives you a recognizable framework to begin building from (this weekly structure reminds me of my syllabus!), Sakai basically hands you a big empty box, and a bunch of tools. And then says, make whatever you want! And perhaps it’s just because I’d already put so much effort late this summer into learning Drupal in order to support those class sites, but when I was faced with the big open box of Sakai, I kinda froze, and just wasn’t sure what to put where or how to structure things, or frankly even what the possibilities were. I suggested to our IT folks that they bring someone in who’s been using Sakai for a while, to show some examples of how it’s actually being used, and to demonstrate the more innovative and exciting possibilities that I’m pretty sure are there, but that I just can’t quite imagine yet.

I’ve also got another reaction, though, to the entire CMS question, which is what I’m going to be talking about at that symposium in October. I feel pretty strongly that most CMSs are designed for faculty to be able to manage their courses—and thus the emphasis on things like automated quizzes and gradebooks and the like. What I want the CMS to do is to leverage (sorry) the technologies of the web to get my students involved and invested in active learning—not content delivery, but interaction. Which is why I’m running the Drupal experiments with my classes this semester; I want to argue that the CMS needs to become not a means for faculty to organize their end of courses, but instead a form of social software that gets students interacting, thinking, and writing collaboratively.

But that’s a whole other rant, about which I’ll no doubt be writing more later. Once I’ve finished the BlogTalk talk.

I’ve spent the last three days madly working on the article from which my talk at BlogTalk will be drawn.  And late last night, as I was trying to fall asleep, it hit me:  I’m leaving for Europe on Thursday.

That, needless to say, was about the end of me falling asleep.  There’s much to do, and I’m all in a bit of a panic about it.  I’ll hope, however, to find myself with much to report shortly.

Except looming deadlines, and deadlines already past. I’ll be back with more scintillating thoughts soon, I hope.

Every once in a great while, I get home from the grocery store and discover that they’ve failed to bag something I bought.  It’s always annoying, but never worth returning to the store for whatever it was they left out.

Today, for the first time ever, I got home from the grocery store with stuff in my bags that I did not buy.  Namely, a bottle of organic ketchup and a block of co-jack cheese.

This doesn’t begin to make things even, though it might have, quite honestly, had I not purchased a bottle of ketchup of my very own today.  For the first time in at least eight years.  On any other trip to the grocery store, a free bottle of ketchup would have been a net condiment addition to my kitchen.  Instead, today, it’s free but utterly redundant.

And this, my friends, is the most bloggable thing that’s happened to me in the last few days.

Thanks to Liz and Lori, I spent a chunk of last night watching a little, tiny version of the pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

It was worth all the squinting.  Oh, the joys of once again watching Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme in their element:  backstage, rapid-fire, filled with enough submerged detail that it’s always worth watching again.  I’m really hoping that the series holds up well beyond the pilot, because it’s like the glory days of SportsNight, with a higher budget and a full hour to stretch out in…

I want to call attention to this for ever so many reasons, not least among them that it’s perhaps the first effective trailer for a book that I’ve ever seen.

Why do things like this only ever happen when you’re late?

I was on my way to the office today, running late after having dragged my heels all morning. I’m not sure quite what was wrong, but I really didn’t want to get dressed and leave the house. By the time I got myself pulled together and ready to go, it was late enough that I had to drive, rather than making my usual walk. So I hopped in the car and headed out of my complex.

Things you need to know:

1. There is one way out of the complex proper.

2. At the exit to the complex proper, you can either immediately turn left, or go straight for one block and then turn left. Those are your only options.

3. The complex is completely surrounded by construction, and where there isn’t construction, there is a working frozen-food processing warehouse.

So: I drove the block to the exit to the complex, and prepared to turn left. I usually take the first left rather than the second, because I figure that way fewer things can go wrong: one block fewer jammed with construction machinery, and the like. And it was a good thing I intended to turn, because right ahead of me, in the center of the street, was an enormous tractor-trailer, taking up both traffic lanes.

Unfortunately, to the left, there was another big truck, a flatbed, parked next to the frozen-food place. The truck was loaded with huge stacks of pallets, and a guy with a forklift was unloading the pallets and moving them into the warehouse. I got halfway into the turn when I realized that the combination of the truck, the forklift, and the construction machinery on the other side of the street made it impossible for me to get by, so I stopped and waited for the forklift guy to get the load he was just picking up off the truck and around it into the warehouse.

Further unfortunately, I think my presence created some kind of performance anxiety in the forklift guy, because he did something to the controls that caused the forklift to jerk, just a bit, which in turn caused the big stack of pallets he was carrying to teeter and then fall.

Entirely blocking the road.

And remember, the only other way out is filled with an eighteen-wheeler, who is looking to turn right (a.k.a. my left).

I looked up at the truck driver with what must have been raw panic—I teach in fifteen minutes, and I’m trapped. The truck driver, to his credit, was not laughing so hard that he didn’t have the presence of mind, after I backed up, to pull forward so that I could squeeze around him.

I made it to class with minutes to spare, so disaster was averted. But the clearest part of all this for me was the lightning-fast flash of trying to think through how I was going to explain to our departmental administrator that I couldn’t get to class on time because I was hemmed in by a truck and a pile of pallets.

Here’s a bit of irony*:  Chest pain is a primary symptom of a heart attack.  A panic attack can produce chest pain that mimics that of a heart attack.  But other kinds of chest pain can produce the symptoms of a panic attack, as you freak out over what their cause could be.

The situation:  I went to the gym twice this weekend, for the first time in perhaps six weeks; after a several week layoff during all that travel, and then several more weeks of just doing Bikram yoga, I decided it was time to go do a little round of lifting and cardio again.  And it was pretty fabulous.

Of course, I’m sore as all hell today.  And I think I’m having a periodic muscle spasm/twitch somewhere in the muscles on the left side of my chest.  It comes and goes.  Jabbing or pinching, not pressure.  No other symptoms.  So I’m positive I’m not having a cardiac event of any variety.  And I certainly wasn’t having a panic attack, at least not until the stabbing pain inconveniently located Right Over My Heart began.  But the thought of what it could be produces the leading edge of the kind of panic that results in racing pulse, shortness of breath, and other symptoms that I really don’t want to be having right now, thanks much.

Back to work, so I can stop thinking about this already.

—–

* I recognize that this isn’t really irony.  But what is it?  A conundrum?  A paradox?  Colloquially, it’s a catch-22, perhaps, but what it is rhetorically?

Say you’re quoting a passage from a text, and within that passage, the author uses a parenthetical citation to refer to another text.  Do you:

(a) Quote the passage exactly as printed in the text, including the citation?

(b) Quote the passage without the citation, as though it weren’t there, thus protecting the flow of the author’s writing?

or (c) Quote the passage without the citation, but with an ellipsis in its place?

None of these three options seems quite right to me, and I honestly can’t remember how I’ve resolved this issue in the past.  Probably by avoiding it.  And none of the online MLA guides I’ve found have any help to offer, so I’m resorting to blegging.  Also, apparently, posting a lot today, in a mad effort to keep from feeling as though I’m being radically unproductive.

So I really honestly did add them to my blogroll a couple of hours before Liz popped up in the comments, and had made a note-to-self to post an actual bloggy link this afternoon, before getting all distracted by the notion of my disappearing audience, and then wrapped up in a little bit of work.  But all this is neither here nor there.

The thing that is most important:  two of my most fantabulous former students have started a blog, Glowy Box, focused on the most serious matter of watching television.

I like to think that I taught them, if not everything, at least some small subset of what they know.