Over at Michael Feldstein's E-Literate site he has a couple of articles which are worth a look. The first, What's Wrong with the Sakai User Interface is a polemic less about Sakai than the discussion component offered in the first public release. Michael makes some excellent points about the limitations of 'threaded' discussion particularly: “Conversation branches in threaded interfaces usually do not intertwine; they fragment. They become separate conversations … the discussion board interface forces fragmentation of conversation …”
Michael picks out the 'reply to' button as particularly problematic since this encourages replies to a tangent and not the main conversation. He contends that the default for a reply button should be to the conversation and then perhaps an optional 'reply to a branch'. What's important is a whole conversation view rather than the fragmented tree view so beloved of current systems. He's got a point.
His second article Sakai's Okay? contains a response from a correspondent who points out that the discussion facility he criticizes in his first article should really be criticism of a legacy service (the University of Michigan's Chef) which is being delivered via Sakai (an architecture project) and not Sakai itself.
So Michael's primary article raises an important issue of relevance to us all and a reader's response improves our understanding of the Sakai Project … the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
I'm on holiday for the next couple of weeks but I'm sure my colleagues will attempt to keep the articles ticking over:)
