Keynote Speakers
Michael Korcuska, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation
Michael Korcuska is the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation and has nearly 20 years of experience in technology-enabled education and training. Prior to joining Sakai, Michael served as Chief Operating Officer for ELT, Inc., a leading compliance training provider. He has also held leadership positions at DigitalThink (now Convergys Learning Solutions) and Cognitive Arts, an award winning custom e-learning developer.
Michael got his start in technology-based learning at Stanford University’s Courseware Authoring Tools Lab and Apple Computer’s Multimedia Lab in the late 1980s. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Northwestern University (where he studied and worked at the Institute for the Learning Sciences) and B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two children.
Ian Boston, Chief Technical Officer, Caret, Cambridge University
Dr Ian Boston from the University of Cambridge, UK, has been involved in Sakai from the early days. He was responsible for early Sakai tools including RWiki and Search. He took responsibility for the Portal and Kernel in Sakai 2.x and latterly is the re-implementation of Sakai 3. Ian has a background in mechanical engineering and parallel computing.
First degree being in Engineering Design and Manufacture. He holds a PhD in parallel computing and engineering stress analysis. Following his PhD he joined Professor Tony Hey’s group at the University of Southampton to lead research projects in High Performance Computing. In the mid 1990’s he became interested in the startup activity in Silicon Fen around Cambridge and became actively involved in startup companies, sitting on a number of Boards as investor representative and technical innovator. One of those board positions became full time and he became CTO of Procession plc a London based Software House supporting enterprise processes in large organizations world wide.
With arrival of a family he joined Caret at the University of Cambridge as CTO, although he still maintains an active involvement in some of the earlier startups. Ian is an overseas member of the Australian Computer Society, a committer and PMC member at the Apache Software Foundation with the Apache Sling and Apache Shindig projects. In his spare time he enjoys offshore sailing, windsurfing and surfing
Clay Fenlason, Director of Educational Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology
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 was elected to the Sakai Board, and in 2007 he joined Georgia Tech as Director of Educational Technology, a role he retains although recently also brought on as Sakai Product Manager. Throughout, his keenest interest has been in the nature and health of the organization and the community source model for higher education.