Fellows

Dr. Ian Boston, University of Cambridge

Ian has been working on aspects of Sakai for the since its inception. He created the Rwiki and Search tools in Sakai 2, going on to rewrite the Sakai Portal in 2.5 , working with Apache Pluto to include JSR-168, the portlet specification. In  2007 he restructured the core of Sakai 2 to form the Kernel 1 code base that forms the bases of the 2.6 and 2.7 releases. He is now working on a new version of the Sakai server, code named Nakamura that adds Collaboration functionality  to  Apache Sling an  Enterprise grade Content Management System. Ian is also a PMC member and committer for both Apache Sling and Apache Shindig, the reference implementation OpenSocial currently serving more that 600M users globally in some of the largest Social Network web sites.

Ian brings extensive experience in the fields of highly distributed web applications. He is CTO at CARET at the University of Cambridge and for two other organisations; CBCL Ltd a Medical Informatics Company delivering drugs information on a global scale, Sybermedica Ltd a Medical Diagnostics company providing telemedicine solutions on an international scale. Prior to joining CARET he was CTO for an early leader in BPM and Activity Based Workflow with customers including Bank of Scotland, New Opportunities Fund, UK Sport, UK Sports Institute, British Olympic Association, Magma Inc, British Telecom, Sema, PwC. Ian has been an active investor in 20 or more start-up companies in the Cambridge area over the past 15 years and sits on a number of advisory boards. He holds a 1st Class Honours in Engineering and PhD in Parallel Computing and has worked on a number of ‘Grand Challenge’ grid problems in the 1990’s.

Jean-François Lévêque, Université Pierre et Marie Curie

Jean-François has been involved in IT for Teaching and Learning at UPMC since 2003 running proprietary software first and then Sakai for 2.5 years to this day. Jean-François is UPMC's only Sakai technical officer working almost full time on Sakai with the help from the non-technical support and training teams. Jean-François is currently involved in diverse Sakai activities such as internationalization and localization, release management, maintenance branch management, quality assurance and Multi-Institutional Survey Initiative.

Nicolaas Matthijs, University of Cambridge

Nicolaas has been involved with learning environments for some time, and first came to CARET at the University of Cambridge as a summer student. During that time he has done some "cool stuff" like a FaceBook application for CamTools – and since then Nicolaas has been at the forefront of CARET’s innovative user interface work, developing new things at a prodigious rate, and sharing what he has built with the wider community. He is now the lead developer at CARET for CamTools and Sakai user interfaces.

Nicolaas co-developed the new user interface for CamTools 2008, and after presenting his work at the Paris Sakai conference in July 2008 has been leading development on the next generation interfaces for CamTools 2009 and Sakai 3. As well as developing himself, Nicolaas has been working on the vision for Sakai 3 and leading 5 developers around the world in front end development for this exciting new system. Working with Sakai is hugely rewarding for Nicolaas, and he enjoys engaging with such a bright community of people, who are open to changes and improvements.

In his spare time, Nicolaas enjoys traveling, playing tennis, badminton and soccer. He's also working on a tool that will allow more test-driven front-end development. He holds a 1st Class Honours in Computer Science from the University of West-Flanders and is currently undertaking a Masters course in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology at the University of Cambridge. He's hoping to be able to come back to the Sakai community next year.

Mathieu Plourde, University of Delaware

Mathieu (Matt) Plourde is the LMS Project Leader within Information Technologies at the University of Delaware. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Graphic Design (2000) and an M.B.A. (2006), both acquired at Université Laval, Quebec City, Canada. Back in 2007, when he moved to the United States to join the IT team at the University of Delaware, one of his first assignments was to explain how wikis could be used in education. His wiki report, first presented at the 2008 Sakai conference in Paris, has been used by multiple educators in the Sakai community worldwide. Mathieu quickly got involved in the Teaching and Learning group of the Sakai community, especially with the Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award. He is also an active member of the annual Sakai conference committee.

Mathieu's multidisciplinary background (graphic, web and instructional design, marketing, e-commerce, management, communications, etc.) gives him a unique view of teaching, learning, and user support. He is also a huge social media junkie. Professional Web Page: http://udel.edu/~mathieu

Janice Smith, Ph. D., Three Canoes Consulting

Janice has served as a functional expert on the portfolio tools in Sakai since their initial development at the University of Minnesota-Duluth in the mid 1990s. For almost three decades at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, she made use of her background in teaching English as a second language and doctorate in linguistics to coordinate language programs, develop a nationally recognized program to prepare future faculty, direct institutional efforts to enhance teaching and learning, and consult for several national organizations. She was a Senior Education Consultant with rSmart for six years, providing OSP services for a broad array of K-12 and higher education institutions. She has consulted with a long list of educational institutions and has presented on teaching and learning, assessment, and the portfolio tools in Sakai at numerous national and international conferences.

In partnership with Sean Keesler at Three Canoes (http://threecanoes.com), she consults on the assessment of learning, conducts site assessments for requirements gathering and project planning, customizes opens source software for specific institutional purposes, develops training materials, and offers train-the-trainer sessions for institutions in the process of implementing portfolios and open source course management systems.

Steve Swinsburg, Australian National University

Steve is a Senior Software Engineer at the Australian National University. He holds a Masters Degree in Information Technology, majoring in Web and Internet Technologies (2008) and a Bachelor of Science Degree (2003), both from the University of New England, Australia. He also has several years of tertiary teaching experience. Steve is a committer on several of the core Sakai services and tools, is a branch manager for the 2.5.x maintenance branch, and is part of the Sakai maintenance team.

Steve developed Profile2, the social networking tool for Sakai 2, as well as a URL shortening service, a remote administration utility, has enhanced the Sakai App Builder for new developers and has committed over two dozen new web services to the Sakai suite. Steve also actively contributes to the various mailing lists and assists other developers within the community.

Steve has written over a dozen articles on Sakai best practices and how-to's, and regularly blogs about Sakai related developments. In 2008 he had an article on Sakai in distance education published in the Australian ascilite journal.

More recently, Steve has been involved in a project to connect Sakai to uPortal via the IMS Basic LTI specification, so that Sakai applications can be rendered in different environments, as well as continuing developments on Profile2.

From 2008-2009, Steve was based in the UK as a Portal Systems Developer at Lancaster University, specialising in Sakai integration and development. He supported the National Centre for e-Social Science's Sakai portal, and helped further Sakai as a research and business tool in the United Kingdom.

Prior to his post in the UK, Steve was a Web Developer in the Teaching and Learning Centre at the University of New England, Australia. He was involved in many development projects at UNE related to online learning from 2004-2008. His main responsibilities included the analysis, design and implementation of web based applications and the integration of Learning Management Systems (WebCT CE 4.1, Blackboard and Sakai) with core enterprise systems as well as providing technical end-user support.

In his spare time Steve plays competitive water polo, performs with his local post-hardcore band, and enjoys spending time with his new addition to the family, Dexter.

Alan Berg, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Alan Berg Bsc. MSc. PGCE, has been a lead developer at the Central Computer Services at the Universiteit van Amsterdam for the last ten years. In his famously scarce spare time, he writes computer articles (http://home.uva.nl/a.m.berg). Alan has a degree, two masters, and a teaching qualification. In previous incarnations, he was a technical writer, an Internet/Linux course writer ok a product line development officer, and a teacher. He likes to get his hands dirty with the building and gluing of systems. He remains agile by playing computer games with his kids who sadly consistently beat him physically, mentally and morally. Did I mention the physical beatings; those eight and twelve year olds are so tough.

With his newfound super hero powers, Alan intends to help stimulate changes to QA practices and infrastructure via automation and supporting the building of consensus over best practices. He considers good coverage of the code base with unit tests as a prerequisite to a stable evolving Sakai. Further, time allowing he would like to explore the possibility of creating an officially endorsed Sakai book.

Nuno Fernandes, Universidade Fernando Pessoa

Nuno Fernandes is a Software Developer with seven years of Java experience at the Universidade Fernando Pessoa (UFP). He has been involved with Sakai development and its local implementation (branded as UFPUV) since December 2005. His current responsibilities include UFPUV deployment, local QA, maintenance, support, localization, internal services integration, bugfixes and implementation of new features and tools. Recent work with Sakai involves Java, Spring, Hibernate, JSF, Apache Velocity and Wicket technologies.

He was previously a co-founder of BlueSpan, a software/hardware R&D company, and Software Developer at Multiwave Networks, a fiber-optic R&D company, developing Eclipse RCP desktop applications for telecommunication device management and interoperability.

During the next year, Nuno will remain strongly committed to Sakai development, focusing on content authoring and sequencing development. He will continue his active participation in the community providing bug fixes, new features and localization.

David Horwitz, University of Cape Town

David Horwitz has over ten years of experience in developing educational technology solutions for residential university courses. From his previous existence as a maritime archaeologist, David has cultivated an interest in integrating appropriate educational technology technology both within the curriculum and with other university systems. In his spare time he restores his Victorian house and studies traditional Okinawa karate.

One of the challenges Sakai faces in southern Africa is building on the existing base of people skilled in the technical aspects of Sakai. A South African programmers café was held in 2007 and David would like to build on this in 2008/09. His other areas of interest include quality assurance and developing email templating for Sakai.

Beth Kirschner, University of Michigan

Beth Kirschner has over twenty years of experience in software development of online collaboration systems, grid computing, digital libraries, automation. For the past few years, she has been involved with the Sakai project's localization, ePortfolio, and research-oriented collaboration efforts.

As a Fellow Beth plan's on continuing her involvement with Sakai ePortfolio, Research Collaboration, and Localization, starting with a Translation Boot-Camp at the 9th Sakai Conference in Paris.

Dr. Maggie McVay Lynch, Oregon Health and Science University

Dr. Maggie McVay Lynch has worked developing online instruction for the past two decades. She has developed over 100 online courses for colleges, universities and private industry. Her university teaching includes both traditional and online courses in Counseling, Education, Business Administration, and Management Information Systems. She has also published widely including four textbooks on e-learning. Lynch is currently the Director of Statewide Teaching and Learning Services for the Oregon Health and Sciences University (OHSU) School of Nursing where she provides strategic direction and support for administrators, faculty and students engaged in both classroom-based instruction and e-learning. She also teaches in the Master's in Nursing Education program.

OHSU is undertaking an extensive integration process with Sakai, including webconferencing, a federated digital repository, portfolios, and outside electronic resources such as iTunes U, Google Docs, and others as yet not identified. During the next year, Dr. Lynch will document the implementation of these systems and share lessons learned from that process; identify and report on the user experience in order to recommend where the Sakai community might desire to put additional efforts toward software integration and/or enhancement; and propose one or more pedagogical models for selecting teaching and learning resources and delivery mechanisms based on the documented dependencies discovered during the year's study.

Dr. Ian Boston, University of Cambridge

Ian has been working on aspects of Sakai for the since its inception. He created the Rwiki and Search tools in Sakai 2, going on to rewrite the Sakai Portal in 2.5 , working with Apache Pluto to include JSR-168, the portlet specification. In  2007 he restructured the core of Sakai 2 to form the Kernel 1 code base that forms the bases of the 2.6 and 2.7 releases. He is now working on a new version of the Sakai server, code named Nakamura that adds Collaboration functionality  to  Apache Sling an  Enterprise grade Content Management System. Ian is also a PMC member and committer for both Apache Sling and Apache Shindig, the reference implementation OpenSocial currently serving more that 600M users globally in some of the largest Social Network web sites.

Ian brings extensive experience in the fields of highly distributed web applications. He is CTO at CARET at the University of Cambridge and for two other organisations; CBCL Ltd a Medical Informatics Company delivering drugs information on a global scale, Sybermedica Ltd a Medical Diagnostics company providing telemedicine solutions on an international scale. Prior to joining CARET he was CTO for an early leader in BPM and Activity Based Workflow with customers including Bank of Scotland, New Opportunities Fund, UK Sport, UK Sports Institute, British Olympic Association, Magma Inc, British Telecom, Sema, PwC. Ian has been an active investor in 20 or more start-up companies in the Cambridge area over the past 15 years and sits on a number of advisory boards. He holds a 1st Class Honours in Engineering and PhD in Parallel Computing and has worked on a number of ‘Grand Challenge’ grid problems in the 1990’s.

John Ellis, rSmart

Clay Fenlason, Boston University

Clay Fenlason first became captivated by the role of technology in both communities and education while working as a volunteer in educational development in rural South Africa. There amidst schools without libraries and communities historically walled off from the world he discovered the power of the Web for leapfrogging a generation of infrastructure and lack of informational resources.

Upon returning to the States in 1999 he moved to Boston to enter a master's program in philosophy at Boston University, and he parlayed his experience doing computer modeling in gamma ray astronomy (he holds an M.S. in Astrophysics from I.S.U.) to acquire a job in the IT department - initially just for the tuition remission while he pursued his own studies. But a professional philosophical interest was once again eclipsed by a fascination with the computer as both a social tool and a medium for learning and collaboration. Late in 2003 he became the Associate Director for Academic Computing for Boston University's School of Management, and then spearheaded BU's entry into the Sakai partnership in early 2004. Since then he has been a vocal and active member of the community at a number of levels, and was named one of the inaugural Sakai fellows in May of 2006. In late 2006 Clay joined Georgia Tech as Director of Educational Technology. Throughout, his keenest interest has been in the nature and health of the organization and the community source model for higher education.

Steven Githens, Northwestern University

Seth Theriault, Columbia University

Zach Thomas, Texas State

Johan van der Berg, University of South Africa

Johan is currently employed as a senior web architect at the University of South Africa. He has been involved with online learning since his employment in 2001 as the webmaster for the university. His knowledge of both development and system support gave him the unique ability to lead the implementation of Sakai at the university. With Unisa having no skills in JSF, he implemented Apache Struts as an alternative for Sakai tool development, which allowed Unisa to deploy within a very short timeframe. He has been actively involved in the community, and his involvement in what was the largest production implementation of Sakai on mySQL has opened the door for many others to follow.

Aaron Zeckoski, Virginia Tech

Aaron Zeckoski is a software engineering and open source software developer. He is internationally recognized for his expertise in the Sakai open source collaborative learning environment. His nine years of experience include work both as part of a university team and as an independent consultant. He is in demand as a workshop instructor on a multitude of topics related to Sakai development and deployment. An experienced systems architect, Aaron has demonstrated his programming expertise in all aspects of web application development; he is a major contributor to projects such as the Sakai Evaluation System, Opencast Matterhorn, DSpace 2 repository, and EntityBroker framework. He is also experienced and interested in technical documentation, development of tools for programmers, and developer training. He is an active member of the Sakai, Opencast, and DSpace developer communities. In his spare time, he dabbles in PHP and Python and is an advocate of ReST and open source. He seeks challenging work involving web applications and service oriented architectures.

Aaron Zeckoski is currently a Senior Research Engineer in CARET (Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies) at Cambridge University. He was previously the Manager of Application Development and Lead Developer in the Learning Technologies unit at Virginia Tech for five years.