Collaborative Learning Environments
My new work includes managing and supporting the distributed learning environments used at the New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We use Sakai, an open source courseware system, to link mentors with mentee teachers and administrators so they can share work, distribute assignments, and analyze practice.
For me, with my experience with Blackboard and Moodle, I am easily transferring my experience to this new platform. It does work differently, and has presented some unusual and unexpected problems, which is where I am mostly focusing my time at first.
Part of my learning is becoming acquainted with the vast resources, discussions and resource materials available for Sakai. It seems that while K-12 has become more enamoured with Moodle, and while Blackboard is becoming the one commercial system of note, Sakai is being adopted at the University level more and more. The support, design and best practice materials are vast! The majority of my email through my new UCSC account is mostly filled with conversations regarding Sakai, and I only joined three groups.
I have a lot to learn, and I hope to be able to contribute to the community when the time comes.
