While in South Africa Adelle Lotter of North-West University (NWU) asked me to give a talk on the Sakai Community at NWU’s Mafikeng campus.  I readily agreed.  Mafikeng is one of three NWU campuses (Mafikeng, Vaal Triangle and Potchestroom) with a student body composed of 6576 undergraduate and postgraduates, the majority of whom are native Setswana speakers. My talk was part of a larger event promoting Mafikeng’s adoption of eFundi, NWU’s enterprise Sakai implementation, the campus’s first online LMS offering.

I was the first speaker and while prepping the hardware before the opening remarks, the moderator glanced at my opening slide and enquired, “What is Sakai?”  I quickly learned that neither she nor the audience was at all familiar with Sakai, the worldwide Sakai Community or that other South African institutions such as the University of Cape Town and the University of South Africa (UNISA) were running their own versions of Sakai in production.  This set the context for what I hope was a useful overview of Sakai and the Sakai Community.

Plugging Mafikeng into the wider Sakai community emerged, to mind at least, as a major theme of the talk.  There is much we in the Sakai community can learn from the Mafikeng experience, and in turn, I hope Mafikeng can leverage the technical and pedagogical expertise resident in our community to further their teaching and learning goals.

I was honored after the presentation to receive from Professor Bernard Mbenga a copy of the New History of South Africa (2007), a collaborative work of history edited by Mbenga and Hermann Giliomee that features the contributions of some twenty-eight historians of South Africa—an approach to history writing that parallels the community source approach that marks Sakai.

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