The following excerpt is from a short article in the Chronicle pulled from Martin Weller's blog.

“...in order to understand web 2.0 you have to act 2.0. I think too many academics are guilty of seeing social networking, or any popular tool, as something to be researched, but not something to be experienced and used. This is both rather a snobbish attitude and also misses the point. Signing up for an account, dropping in for a couple of weeks, doing a survey and then disappearing does not gain you an understanding of how these things are really being used.”

This excerpt got me thinking about what we're doing with Sakai. In some ways, thinking about a new eLearning platform seems to miss the point just as Martin points out. The Sakai community is sure to outpace the innovation capacity of the 1st generation of eLearning tools, and of company's like Blackboard using traditional development models that don't leverage the power of community.

That said, even the amazing pace of innovation in the Sakai community will have a hard time replicating the current state of the art... or the current 2.0 thing that educators should be trying. If the Sakai community were simply developing the next generation eLearning system I think we'd 'miss' just like Martin suggests. We'd miss the opportunity to make it easy for educators to experiment with the latest technologies and to use them effectively with students. But Sakai's goal is much more ambitious and compelling than creating YALMS (Yet Another Learning Management System)...

For me, this is where the view of Sakai as a platform for innovation is really exciting. Sure the CLE is an eLearning application that can be used out of the box as easily as any of the proprietary systems like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Angel, and others. It has a place for a syllabus, a grade book, assignments, and all the standard features you need. But it's also a platform for innovation. It gives the worlds leading institutions a way to make applications like Facebook and Google gadgets easily accessible to educators. Then, because these capabilities are built on an open platform accessible to anyone, the platform may actually make it easier for educators to experience and use these "2.0" technologies.