Skip to content

The Wave in Edu

I’ve been at the beach on vacation riding actual waves and trying to take some needed rest. Still I note that Google Wave, last years game changer for e-Learning and the LMS, has come to an end.

A few quick thoughts. First I remain convinced that online collaboration is still far from optimal and that software developers are going to have to continue to innovate and create new ways to foster collaboration online. Portable computing devices connected to networks that capture position, video and other sensory data will create incredible new opportunities for collaboration. Furthermore when one considers the stream of tweets, emails, Facebook posts, RSS and other information streams flowing through your devices at any moment in the always connected universe, I think that the organizational and interface solutions available today are not sufficient. The stream management problem is a big unsolved problem in information management and communications. So I applaud Google for trying to solve this problem, even if their solution failed. Microsoft was in a similar situation when their researchers recognized that the desktop computer GUI was not meeting the needs of a vast group of users in the early 1990s. They sought to go beyond the Mac and Windows User Interfaces, to something better. A group of visionaries did extensive research and developed Bob as the solution. Unfortunately while they’d picked an important problem, they didn’t have the right solution. There was also a lot of thinking that maybe some kind of tablet based interface would be the right solution and we saw another experiment fail. 15 years later Apple found success where others failed with a tablet driven by a new multi-touch UI that solved many of the problems long known to the industry. I highlight this story because it should be noted by everyone that the failure of Wave doesn’t meant that the problem Wave tried to solve in reshaping streams of online communications was not a problem. Instead we should applaud Google being willing to experiment and encourage others to jump in.

A second thought is that this highlights yet again the problem of adapting these technologies for use in dot-edu. Suppose you taught a class using Google wave. What happens after it shuts down? The online transcript of the course sessions will vanish into the ether and will presumably be unrecoverable. This may present a problem down the line if a student challenges a grade, or a program’s accreditation comes up for review. Not to mention that the conversations is lost. Not to mention that the gadgets and activities connected through the Wave may not be able to be replayed.

Lively, Ning, Geocities, and others vanished or radically changed business models in the last few years. We have to take care to remember specific needs for record preservation and continuity in educational institutions.

At the same time I think it is important that you keep playing with these technologies and trying to use them for teaching and learning. A balance must be found between the need to encourage experimentation while at the same time considering the values of integrity and inclusion within institutions. Research and experimentation are just as important and we need to find a way to try these new tools in a way that doesn’t separate us from these other goals. If the tool works, then consider how you may better adapt it to meet the needs of the institution and all students. My biased recommendation is to look at Blackboard Building Blocks&tm; and standards like Basic and Full LTI to look for ways to bridge these many technologies together to align with the values of diversity, inclusion, integrity, research and experimentation.

Posted in Uncategorized.

Tagged with , , , , .

3 comments

By johnfontaine – August 6, 2010

Edufountain II: Mad Scientists for Future of eLearning Seminar

The US Army hosted a conference called The Mad Scientists Future Technology Seminar 2008 . The goal of the conference was to explore how the proliferation and development of speculative technologies could affect the battlefield in the next 10-25 years.

I think we need our own mad scientist series for education. I’ve spent the spring blogging about the future of Web 2.0 and education. I was able to use these notes in a white paper that was distributed at the BbWorld DevCon conference.

This paper was focused on things I see as having a major impact in the next few years and near horizon product cycles. The next set of topics I want to explore are things that are more speculative applications of technologies.

As a parent of the class of 2022 I’m wondering what the high school experience looks like almost a decade out. What are some possible future scenarios for teaching and learning.

There are enormous strides being made in understanding cognitive development, human computer interaction and neurotropics. Quantum computers may allow us to perform multi-vector analysis and searches to solve problems currently beyond computer science and math. Breakthroughs in human health could make us stronger, healther and longer lived. At the same time we could see dark futures with computers controlling and directing our lives; bleak worlds where environmental and system collapse leave us entering a new dark age, etc.

My plan is to look at some far flung ideas and try to think about how they might impact the VLE and education. I’m going to seek out some mad scientists at my upcoming conferences get their take on the future as well.

As an open thread what ideas would you like to explore? Who would you like me to pull aside for Q&A? And what questions do you have? Finally are you a mad scientist out there in a secret volcano labouring to reshape teaching and learning using technology? Drop me a line.

Posted in Edufountain.

Tagged with , , .

Comments Off

By johnfontaine – July 26, 2010

Some Thoughts On Standards and Vendors

mfeldstein has an interesting post up on his site about how to judge a vendor’s support for standards. I’m going to weigh in with my personal views and then provide some comments on his article. The usual disclaimers apply here that these are my personal thoughts and not those of any employer or group I work with /for around etc. Though others are free to chime in agreement or disagree.

Personal Soapbox
I want to start by articulating my personal view as a participant in the standards community. I’m a member of the IMS Technology Advisory Board and a contributor to the IMS Learning Information Systems (LIS) working group. I also represent my company on the Common Cartridge Alliance Program Management Group (CCAPMG). I’ve done quite a bit of work on the bulk data exchange service for LIS. I also work with the SIF association and ADL collab from time to time. I’ve invested my professional and personal time in helping to evangelize for education technology standards. I’ve recently joined the OpenSocial working group and am working with some folks in the community to create a profile of OpenSocial focused on educational data.

It is my personal mission to use standards to create what I call the edutech commons. This would be a set of common code libraries usable by Virtual Learning Environments, Student Information Systems, Learning Tools and Learning Networks which would allow easy integration. In the same way that BSD’s libraries for TCP/IP have become the defacto implementation used by most operating systems, I would like the code that connects up technology in .edu to be easily plugable into many implementations. The whole point of object oriented coding was that we should be able to create consumable objects that wrap business processes and share them across projects.

We’ve actually seem some great progress in this front on the Basic LTI project. Thanks to hard work of folks like Dr Chuck, Stephen Vickers and others we now have a pretty good set of basic LTI libraries out there in the field.

Another great example of this is the Shindig project for OpenSocial. With Shindig any vendor can implement the opensocial framework by creating service provider interfaces (SPI’s) to map their data and classes to the open social API. Because Shindig creates a common service layer, code can be more easily moved between OpenSocial implementations.

The alternative world is one of lots of clean box implementations. We end up in the world of JavaScript, SCORM and other “standards” which have many quirks from implementation to implementation. The lack of a code library in the commons results in multiple interpretations and levels of compliance and this makes interoperability more difficult.

A second concept that is important to me personally is the notion of data transfer. It is my personal view that data should be written to the system once and then be able to move with limited restrictions throughout the network. I want data creators to be able to move easily through the network with lower transfer costs by data consumers. It frustrates me that so much government information is not packaged in a way that it is easily portable. Consider the very necessary work of various companies who compile state education standards and resell the resulting databases. They must parse through different formats, word documents, pdfs and sometimes type written documents without an electronic equivalent other than a TIFF file to compile the information into a computer consumable database. Imagine if instead there was a semantic markup for educational standards. State governments could establish a mechanism for publishing standards in a way that these items could be easily parsed. I love the UK Government Data program’s ambition to make all government documents published with semantic markup and meta-data on a central site.

A Personal Reaction to the article on e-Literate

Knowing my personal biases, let me apply some comments to the proposed rubric for vendors and standards. Michael starts by discussing drivers for standards including the notion that

Standards tend to reduce the total amount of money that customers spend on integration, which generally means that somebody is going to make less money.

I strongly disagree with this. Integration is low value consulting in my view. It is not strategic and does nothing to deepen your relationship with your customer. Customers generally have a limited budget for services with a vendor and if you use it up on integration you aren’t talking about how they can more strategically deploy your product and providing them with customizations that better adapt the software to their business. Furthermore by raising the costs connecting the software to other business operations you pull yourself out of the networks that create the next generation of value. My goal is to create standards that are easily consumable and implement the highest value functionality in a common format maximizing portability. I’m hopeful that LIS won’t launch a new wave of expensive products for customers to buy but will instead add capabilities to existing products and lower maintenance and development costs for customers and creators.

Conformance Profiles
Michael writes that is is important to understand how a vendor conforms to the standard. He writes about how conformance profiles are useful in assessing how the features of the standard are implemented by the vendor. I think this whole experience is a sucky one and I loathe it. Most people never read the conformance profiles and fewer still actually understand them. I’ve been on many calls with developers working to understand specific nuances of a conformance profile on top of the already complex standard document. I’ve also worked with consultants in the field trying to parse a 200+ page spec document to figure out if the problem was a bug, conformance issue or just some misunderstanding of the spec. I just want the integrations to work. As a coder I don’t want to spend time analyzing hundreds of different vendors conformance documents to figure out how company “a” implements the person id. As a technology buyer I don’t want to have to know the ins and outs of every standard implemented in the products I use. For enterprise integration I just want to read a list of sections and populate my database and give you back some grades at the end of the semester. I want SOA that works, not some crazy new way to do EDI that requires another peice of expensive middle ware just to make systems exchange data. In my dream world to point system A at System B and generally have them talk to each other with minimal fuss because they both implement a standard. Just like I can call your phone # and have it make its way through the network across hardware from Cisco, Lucent, Alcatel, and Motorola until I hear your voice on the other end of the line. As a phone company customer I didn’t have to review the variances between the CMDA data network vs the WiMax protocols to make the phone call happen. I’m very happy that basicLTI has gotten to this point. It seems like Chuck sends me an email every week saying test out this new thing we integrated with BasicLTI and we enter in our shared secrets and register the tool and it just works.
To walk back my rant a bit, there are lots of reasons standards describe capabilities that are not used or differently implemented by vendors. I’ll also give Oracle some credit for getting a product out there that folks could look at so at least there is some baseline for implementers to look at. I also highlight that there are technologies that can be used to auto-negotiate based on a mutual level of conformance and capability based on a automated profile A good example of this is in OpenSocial where you can query an OpenSocial container for its features. This lets you write code to handle the case where a container doesn’t have a feature. I hope we can see something like this in IMS standards eventually.

Conformance Testing
Good conformance tests make your life easy, but too often conformance tests don’t mirror the real world implementations. Conformance tests can also drive standards implementation and adoption if done correctly. The best example of this is the ACID3 test for HTML. This test has had a profound impact on getting browser vendors to improve their compliance with HTML standards and performance. At the same time many standards come out with very low threshold conformance tests. The result becomes a bunch of people with the certification logo, but no customers successfully going production with the “standard”. IMS has been getting much better at building conformance tests in the last couple of years.

Testing with other vendors
Michael argues that testing against other vendors is key. I will extend this by saying that the standard needs to be judged with multiple providers and consumers connecting. A single vendor can put a lot of energy into lining up a bunch of partners to create proprietary one offs, but this doesn’t mean conformance. A measure of a standard and vendor is can you swap out the component on either side and still have it work. For example in the BasicLTI world we’ve been able to hook up Blackboard, Moodle, D2L, Sakai, Olat and other VLE’s on one side and multiple learning tools like Wimba, Learning Objects, etc on the other side. This shows a highly flexible and solid implementation. I’m excited to see SunGard moving into the LIS world as this will create multiple providers to test against.

Posted in Edufountain, Openness, eLearning.

Tagged with , , , , , , , .

7 comments

By johnfontaine – July 22, 2010

July Garden Update

It’s mid-July. I’m back from Bbworld and ready to do some weeding. Sometimes projects come on and we are forced to let things go by themselves. Still it’s been an amazing harvest so far this year with beets, spinach and broccoli coming in at good intervals giving us a good supply of fresh vegetables.
The tomatoes are not doing as well as I’d like, nor are the peppers, but I’m putting blood meal on them and they perked up a but this week. Finally in the non-container regular garden it looks like we will actually have some real corn for the first time. Our secret this year was to put in a fence as also to do a mounding strategy instead of going for the classic rows. By going with mounds and treating the corn like planting a fountain grass I seem to getting some good results.

Posted in Garden and Landscape Projects.

Tagged with , , , , , , .

Comments Off

By johnfontaine – July 15, 2010

Bb DevCon 2010: Reflections and Open Comment Thread

Mark O’Neil, long time community advocate, Blackboard Administrator, President of OSCELOT and now a Blackboard Learn Product Manager gave the closing key note yesterday and handed out the Blackboard Catalyst awards with me.

We had a great conference with over 330 attendees, program tracks for system administrators, dba’s and developers. We were able to demonstrate our commitment to open standards by having presentations from IMS staff members of Common Cartridge and Basic LTI. Blackboard’s Steve Feldman conducted a day long workshop on high performance environments on Blackboard. I’d also like to thank Anya Kamenetz author of DIY U for sharing her perspective with our community.

I felt surrounded by makers, creators and innovators in eLearning. I’d like to thank everyone for sharing their passion and ideas. I hope you found it inspiring and informative. As I leave Orlando to return to my family, I’m bringing back creative energy and inspiration. I look forward to seeing everyone in Vegas next year. Please feel free to leave any feedback in the comments below.

Posted in Edufountain, eLearning.

Tagged with , .

Comments Off

By johnfontaine – July 14, 2010

DevCon 2010 Some Keynote Notes

A quick report from DevCon 2010 in Orlando Florida. This is our largest ever conference with over 330 attendees including 290+ clients and a number of Blackboard staff. I just finished my keynote where I talked about some of the promises kept in the last year and announced the availability of the openDB. Blackboard has made a major shift in its position with regard to transparence of the underlying database schema for customers. Today’s we’ve made documentation available on Behind the Blackboard that enables customers to analyze and investigate the Blackboard Learn(tm) database schema. We’re also providing tools integrated with BIRT to make developing and sharing reports through Blackboard Building Blocks(tm). This is really going to be a revolution. Working with customers we’ve already seen some incredible results from this effort. Seneca College and GRCC have created a project under a greenhouse grant called “ASTRO” which creates some powerful reports. I also spoke with a representative from Hofstra who was using the open database information to put together a multi-million dollar grant proposal.
The second major piece of news was an update on Blackboard’s Commitment to Standards. I called Ray on stage and had him make some clear commitments about timelines on LIS and LTI two key IMS standards that are showing real traction in the market. He also gave an update on our partnership with SunGard and how we are working with them to create a defined profile that will lead the way for the rest of the community. This raises our level of engagement to move forward on this standard.
Finally I was able to share a White Paper I’ve written on Blackboard’s technology vision for collaborating with customers in the web 2.0 world to enable education innovation. I hope to have this white paper available for download in a few days.

Posted in Edufountain, eLearning.

Tagged with , .

Comments Off

By johnfontaine – July 12, 2010

DevCon 2010 Preview

This Sunday (July 10) we will kick things off with the OSCELOT Open Source Day. This will be a fun day of code jamming and collaborating. I’m bringing my laptop and my IDE.
Monday and Tuesday we will have the official Blackboard sponsored program. Anna Kamenetz will be our keynote speaker, followed by my own annual DevCon keynote in the afternoon. We’re going to be joined by a special guest, Ray Henderson. I think Ray’s willingness to co-present at the DevCon keynote signifies that he personally takes openness of our platform very seriously. I’ve asked him to make some public comments and commitments regarding further opening of the Blackboard Learn(&tm;) platform and standards. As part of this commitment we will have a significant block of time at the conference dedicated to IMS standards. IMS staff will be presenting information with Blackboard customers and partners demonstrating how these standards can be used in Blackboard.

After our comments we will have some tremendous sessions including a performance engineering workshop lead by Steve Feldman, and other tracks focused on System Administration, Getting Started with Building Blocks, Database Reporting and Tools. We’ve also setup collaborative areas in the hallway where we will have Blackboard Experts standing by ready to provide expert advice and insights on building and extending Blackboard.

If you are missing DevCon and Open Source Day this year, then I hope you’ll follow along on twitter and blogs with various information. I will do my best to try to get some blog posts up during the week with my own reflections. If you are covering DevCon via your blog or social media post a comment below and let me know where I can follow your conversation.

Posted in Uncategorized.

Tagged with , , , .

Comments Off

By johnfontaine – July 8, 2010

Fighting for my Library Using Web 2.0

I’m pretty sure that my readers will agree that libraries are worth saving in spite of the technology advances in the past few years. In the interest of brevity I will skip the several page rant about the importance of libraries as cultural institutions and the unique discovery process of browsing the stacks or collections assembled by a curator. Let us presume that if you don’t like libraries, we can hash it out in the comment section or you can just skip this weeks installment.

On June 10th my neighbors and I got a nasty surprise. Our local library branch was being “relocated” outside our walking zone. A single public meeting would be held on June 16th at the old library location to inform us about the relocation, with the county board expected to approve the motion in the following month. This did not leave us much time to act or organize. Perhaps in another era our library would have slipped away from us like the Washington Senators all those years ago.

Yet those who might have sought to slip this through were in for a surprise. The surrounding neighborhoods are vibrant and alive with strong social networks. Neighbors still know each other and with the aid of Yahoo Groups and Facebook and old fashioned fliers the word was quickly spread to come and save the library.

A nearby resident I have yet to meet in person sent out a call for people to send out fliers. I volunteered and was sent a word document to print. I went online and ordered 200 copies and arrived an hour later for in store pickup. I got a few fliers out before I had to leave town for the Sakai 2010 conference, but my wife graciously took up the charge and took the kids door to door. Residents in other surrounding neighborhoods did the same organized on routes by this one activist. I personally started a Facebook Group and quickly saw it grow and neighbors posted update after update. People reported their conversations with officials and staff. The PTA was contacted along with other organizations.

The evening of the 16th arrived. I tried to get home from Denver to boost the crowd size since this was our only chance. My wife got a sitter and walked over to the library. To her dismay the parking lot was nearly empty. She walked into the library disheartened that all this work had not resulted in turnout. However when she opened the doors, she saw it was standing room only. Just like her the neighbors had walked to the library. Of the 400+ people in attendance 80% or more had chosen to walk to the library rather than drive.

The County Manager and Director of the Library were also in for a suprise as attempted to sell us on their new vision of a library. Neighbor after neighbor stood up and spoke out against the concept. Arguments developed on forums, facebook and listservs were articulated. The 5th grade president of the local elementary school student body spoke eloquently how he used the library after school with his friends every day.

The meeting ended with the manager choosing to delay the final decision. So we continued to organize. Word of the meeting turnout spread through the community and pictures were posted online. Research was done using the library and online to determine legal and other options. Maps of the impact to the neighborhood were shared to demonstrate how we’d be affected by the change. More talking points were developed and detailed community impact statement was put together by many contributors in the community. We constructed knowledge from local history projects and old timers reflections to show the community’s long support for the library. Old timers told us how the library had moved to its current location in 1973, after being located only 2 blocks away before that and had originally been built with neighborhood, not county funds in the 1930s. The elaboration of community history and construction of knowledge using various “DIY U” style tools was impressive. The ability of the community to educate itself and eachother about the value of libraries and impacts of removal was equally astounding.

A few things I learned: Libraries contribute to a walk score. The more walkable your neighborhood the higher your property values. Typically one point on the walk score can be worth 2-4K dollars in my area. In losing the library it seemed we might drop 5-10 points which would be significant to property values already depressed by the housing collapse. The LEED scoring system for commercial offices includes 20 items, one of which is a library within .5 miles of your office space. This would have meant affected the ability of two nearby office complexes to get a high LEED score (something which they were touting in their rental materials). These are just a few facts and if you are trying to save your local library feel free to reuse them.

The result was today Friday the 18th, 8 days after it began the county manager was forced to announce that the library was staying right where it was. The ability of local residents to connect and communicate online worked in combination with our walkable streets and community spirit to create the perfect storm. I’m told that usually community activism takes months and had expectations that our campaign to save the library would draw out for a long time based on the comments from others who’d worked on other community zoning and services issues. In a way the community center project did what it set out to do in a most unexpected way, it built community. By the way the community center (sans library) is still being built for residents down the road. Since they already have 2 walkable libraries and were just as surprised about this move as we were; everybody wins.

Posted in Edufountain, Personal Items.

Tagged with , , , .

2 comments

By johnfontaine – June 19, 2010

Some Myths About the Mobile Web and Native Apps

I think the current conversation about mobile and native apps for learning has gotten a bit into the realm of mythology and wishful thinking about the state of HTML5 and its ability to deliver on the promise for using mobile devices in education. I do like HTML5 and I’m working to implement many things using the awesome frameworks like sproutcore, prototype, jquery and dojo that are really providing great capabilities in client development. I start as a product manager and occasional developer though thinking about creating software this quarter and I think there are a few myths out there worth challenging on the state of the technology worth discussing. As always these are personal opinions, not necessarily those of my employers, etc.

I think vendors and purchasers will be using native apps for the near future, though I’m hopeful that over the long term standards will allow us to run on more platforms at a lower costs. I’ve come to this conclusion and advised my peers based on the following 3 points: current content delivery packages, the advent of multi-touch as the dominant user interface, and the relative costs of platform specific native vs HTML with native HTML.
Consider the state of web delivered today. A large amount of high value, highly produced materials are in PDF, Flash®, PowerPoints® and such. Even the after almost 20 years of HTML we still have enormous quantities of stuff being produced beyond the limits of HTML. We’re slowly getting materials and capabilities into more open and flexible formats, but this is still many years out. At the IMS Learning Impact Conference I spoke with employees from Cengage, Pearson and other traditional education powerhouses. The people I spoke with are passionate about standards, but also working to sell content. On the one hand they are aware that more and more is possible in ordinary HTML, on the other hand DRM concerns, existing development practices and risk management forces them to take a more conservative approach. They have all made very large investments in Flash, and spent billions producing great interactive content using this technology. It will take significant time for them to revamp their production processes and develop materials in pure HTML5 formats. This may create an opening for more nimble providers. At the same time with native apps like the iPad Elements app generating significant revenues, we may see a rapid move by publishers to develop these titles. The fact that Apple apps come with a built in business model for content vs the more loosely defined web model will draw lots of interest. The reality is that a publisher today can build an app for the iPhone and model a return based on marketing, sales and adoption patterns. In the pure HTML5 DIY approach publishers are left with a much smaller set of data to build their model. When one is making multi-billion dollar decisions about platforms, there is a current advantage to the native app model because of the existence of a single user experience built around the App store.
My perception of the content space (a push from existing proprietary development based on HTML’s perceived limitations, and a pull from known business model of Apps and Ebooks); leads me to conclude that native apps have a current advantage that will take many years to overcome.
The second myth around native vs. pure mobile web is view that the transition from pure HTML for a desktop web browser to a multi-touch user interface (also driven by HTML) can be done at no, or limited costs. In fact each mobile device has a different browser version and different set of capabilities. With mobile web we’ve gone from testing a few operating systems and a few web browsers to trying to understand the user experience across a large set of devices and device makers. Andriod’s touch capabilities vary across different phones and screen sizes and pixel densities are different. If we couldn’t make one form of HTML across every web browser and OS, how are we expecting this to be different on the phone interface. I’d be super happy if the dream of write once run anywhere libraries was a reality, but my experience has been that they never live up to the hype, or one ends up with a terrible user experience. Consumers choose their mobile devices because they love the user experience and the “look” of the device. As a small example consider the Blackberry Curve vs. the iPhone. The curve has a trackball and a keyboard. The iPhone has a touch screen UI and virtual keyboard. It is more efficient on the Curve to point and click, but on the iPhone you sweep and drag. A mobile web app designed for curve should be totally different from the one designed for iPhone. Just scaling down your site so it renders well on both smaller screens is simply not acceptable. A native app can overcome much of this.
Now you might say, well why not just render your app in different ways and use HTML as your underlying technology. This leads to my third myth; that the costs of native apps is higher than mobile web. If I have to build two mobile web views; or (n) depending on the platforms I support; then how am I saving any real costs. Many applications are built on a Model, View Controller design pattern. As a developer I can use HTTP transport and XML or JSON as a my data transport behind the scenes and port views and some controls to support various native apps. This results in a higher quality user experience at about the same costs. I hope that as form factors, user input controls and HTML5 features converge we can reduce the number of distinct interfaces we have to support. However in the short term I think that Native Apps will play a dominant role in mobile development for the near future 5-7 years.

Posted in Edufountain.

Tagged with , , .

Comments Off

By johnfontaine – June 2, 2010

Reflecting on Learning Impact 20Ten

I just got home from the 20Ten Learning Impact Conference in Long Beach California. This was a great conference and I had a great time talking with so many leaders in the industry.

A few quick notes:

-Open Educational Repositories — Dr. Charles Reed, Chancellor of the CSU system gave an amusing keynote on Open Educational Repositories. Members of the CSU digital marketplace team were present in force. Dr Reed described the success of the Merlot Project, and challenged publishers with the statement, “Algebra II hasn’t changed enough to justify $120 / text book.”

-IMS GLC is becoming a cornerstone of the educational standards world. The presence of for profit educational institutions, military (a stronghold of SCORM), K-12 (including some large virtual schools like Florida Virtual Schools), international (IMS Korea and JISC in the UK), government policy makers from the US department of Ed, publishers and vendors from around the world gives credibility to the IMS as the broadest organization in the currently overly fragmented world of education technology standards.

-A trend to lighter more implementable standards. I spoke with many TAB (technical advisory members) and IMS staff, and I believe there is now consensus towards simplified specification development focused on implementations over use case volume. The Basic LTI/Common Cartridge approach has gained acceptance as superior to past approached. This model of lightweight standards focused on primary use cases that can be rapidly adopted by industry is winning over the past model of elaborating every possible use case and writing 400 page spec documents. One of my frustrations in many years in educational technology standards has been to see a number of “standards” emerge which become so complicated that every vendor creates a unique profile. The result of so many profiles is that customers lose interoperability, which was the goal of standards in the first place. This new approach is winning over the membership. At the LTAC meeting on Thursday we saw demonstrations of BasicLTI and Common Cartridge from most major vendors, I’m happy that Blackboard was one of them.

Posted in Edufountain.

Tagged with , , , , , .

1 comment

By johnfontaine – May 23, 2010