One of my recent projects has been to look at how the UK Cookie Law may affect universities and software makers such as my employer. Some folks have even started calling me, “the cookie monster”.
I guess I’ve earned that moniker after months of meeting with product owners, customers and lawyers to talk about this new law. I’m not a lawyer, so what you a reading here is just one guys opinion. My employer’s blog will have more official details. My goal here is to try to explain some background into my thinking after chatting with lawyers, clients and attending a few briefings by SIAA and others.

Compliance is fairly straightforward. Here is the model I used:

Get a list of all your organizations web sites and web applications

Depending on how large your organization is this might prove painful. Especially if you have random departments websites

Figure out if the site is likely to be used by people in the UK or EU

The UK law enforces the EU Data Protection Directive. The law protects these users. You’ll want to review this and decide what your risks are. Is the UK ICO going to come after a WordPress blog in the US? I don’t know.
Also sites such as intranets used just within a company by employees probably don’t need to be reviewed because only your employees are using it in a private capacity. On the other has if customers and others use the site then it probably needs to be reviewed.

Next make a list of cookies

There are first party cookies like those set by IIS, Tomcat and PHP. Then there are all the thirds party cookies set by all all those Facebook like buttons, tweet counters and Google Analytics. Finally there are things like flash cookies, HTML local storage, mobile app storage which count as cookies under the regulations. I used the View Cookies extension for Firefox as a starting point.

Figure out what the cookies are doing
What is being connected to that cookie. Since programmers try to use cookies for many things. For example you might have the Google Analytics cookie. Or you might have a session cookie that is tracking users and letting the user set preferences. The law says if the cookie is strictly necessary, you don’t have to get use consent. However since most cookies do double duty and most sites have other cookies, it really is better just to document as many cookies as possible.

Add consent popup or checkbox dialogue to your sites

When the user visits your site, before you set any of these third party or start associating the cookie with personal info, give the user a popup (such as you got when you first visited this site).

I’m using the WordPress Cookie Warning plugin on this site.

Collect the info together and publish

Put a page explaining you cookies. Here is my page.

Review other privacy practices

Take a moment to review the information you are gathering. Make sure this is consistent with your privacy policies and needs. Make sure you store and dispose of private information in ways that match the sensitively of the information gathered. Also review who has access to the information. As information becomes more sensitive you should be locking it down. For example final grades at pretty sensitive, while an email address by itself might less sensitive.

Get ready for more change

Governments around the world are looking at this issue of ePrivacy. As html5 becomes more sophisticated and allows for more sophisticated client applications we will see regulations emerge. The general thrust of these regulations is to rely less on industry standards and place more burdens on website operators.

Big news last week in my software niche. I’m coming up on 13 years writing software at Blackboard. I’m still as passionate as ever about making good software that makes it easy for instructors and learners to share and collaborate. I’m not stopping now and neither are my fellow developers.

I heard a rumor has been spread that I’m giving up on innovation to commoditize. Not just me, but the whole of Blackboard, Angel, Sakai and Moodle. Heck they even say John Baker at D2L gave up. I don’t know maybe D2L did give up, though I doubt it. For the others I know that the rumor is false.

I could point to road maps and recent features, but there are plenty of places like CourseSites where one can see ongoing innovation. The originator of this silly rumor should get the exhaust system on their tank checked. The fumes seem to be making them goofy

A bit of a ramble about why I think the LMS /VLE or whatever you want to call it will continue to thrive in 2012.

There is too much talk about open and openness these days. No one seems to agree on what open is, but everyone agrees it is important. We’ve descended into semantic chaos where people fight to claim they are really “open” and others accuse them of just “openwashing”. I’m taking a break from the terms. Instead I’m just going to describe the technologies I’ve implemented and leave it to you, the reader to decide if you want to call it open, closed, or something else.

To start this new policy off let me describe one of our latest features and then I invite your comments and feedback.

On CourseSites I’m leading ongoing development to make it easy to share the Course experience more broadly via Social Media and Search. This capability is delivered using the emerging Semantic Web infrastructure put forth by the team at the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative and Schema.org.

The first is to create a public component of the course, a web page where anyone can drop by and ask to join, or browse as a guest (if the instructor wants). It links to a public instructor profile with a blog, where the instructor can elect to describe his or herself in a way that connects to the courses they teach. The Course home page also acts as a place to share the educational materials from the class in both IMS Common Cartridge or Blackboard Learn archive format. The materials are shared under the Creative Commons CC-BY license. This allows a permissive reuse of the materials in other educational contexts, while preserving the attribution of the original authors.

These pages contain Semantic web tags to describe the materials they contain. This makes them searchable, share-able and otherwise useful to applications beyond Blackboard. For example look at this example Course Homepage as rendered through the browser:

Now consider how Google sees the same page:

Note how information is encoded in a way that Google can pull key details right form the page. Information such as “version” and file links are consumable by a third party application. The descriptive scheme we use has been developed by a broad set of search engine companies at Schema.org (above). This ensures that from the moment we launched this feature Google and other search engines can consume the information.

We’re also experimenting with ways to make this page more accessible to social discovery as well. We include a standard “share” gadget that lets you publish the link to these materials to hundreds of different social media solutions. Also included on these pages is another Semantic Web technology pushed by Facebook called “OpenGraph“. This allows the link you share to Facebook to contain smart data.  Here is that same course homepage viewed through Facebook.

This integration from Blackboard into Google, Bing, and other search engines along with social media like Facebook and Twitter was done completely through the Blackboard Building Blocks technology.  One of my next projects will be to take the building block and work to make it available to other Blackboard installations.  I hope in participating in the adoption of  a standards driven technology supported by search engines and social media, we will encourage sharing, re-use and re-mixing of educational resources that are linked into the LMS/VLE.

Some random tech things that are bouncing around my brain. Mostly tangental from ed-tech.

Big Data and the Law — an interesting article that explores the legal implications of big data sets. One interesting idea is how laws like HIPPA and FERPA could create headaches for any data-sharing between organizations. The assertion is that in combining a sanitized dataset with other public data can sometimes reverse the privacy safeguards.

Bitcoin — is a new concept in digital currency. The goal of an anonymous, peer to peer currency without a central bank seems interesting. However this month has also seen the near collapse of the largest bank like “bitcoin exchange” after it’s database was compromised.

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace– a must watch 3 part documentary. It is a bit ADHD and doesn’t really have a coherent point, be sure to watch this parody video someone made.

Two years ago Michael Feldstein presented three tests to demonstrate the “new” Blackboard.

These tests were focused on driving Blackboard towards implementing three important industry standards that enable portability and interoperability of systems. I know that many customers want to be able to consider from a broad set of market choices and they recognize that standards enable that choice.

As of today this challenge is answered. Blackboard has integrated these technologies into its core. Blackboard is first to market with IMS Common Cartridge 1.1 (import and export) and demonstrated interoperability via IMS LIS with Oracle and SunGard at the 2011 Learning Impact Conference. BasicLTI has become and industry standard and is integrated deeply into Blackboard Technologies. LTI powers our partnerships with companies like McGraw-Hill and enables Blackboard Collaborate to integrate with a variety of platforms.

As a person who has been working with IMS standards for a long time, I’m really happy to see this progress. It is personally quite rewarding to see talking about interoperability transform into doing interoperability. Let’s make 2011 the year we transformed this challenge into a benchmark. I await updates from the community on the state of standards in other VLEs such as, Sakai and Moodle. Let’s see those benchmarks and meet them together.

Buy your beef from a local rancher and have the cow slaughtered in late spring. Keep it in the deep freeze, do not buy beef out of season.

Buy a young cow that has gotten lean from winter, and now fattened a bit on tender spring grasses and wildflowers. This combines young tender muscle with a sweet fats. Have you ever smelled a feedlot, why would you want to eat anything from there. I go in with neighbors and find a quarter cow lasts us most of the year.

Get your cow butchered properly. None of these industrial meat packing plants.

Prepare the steak with a little salt. Chop up some mushrooms and red peppers, and other vegetables such as cucumber, broccoli or asparagus. Whatever is in season. Put olive oil on the vegetables.

Close up the grill and heat it up to about 500 degrees. Get the cast iron hot. Now open then grill and either move the coals away to indirect heat or turn the gas down low. Put the steak on it and let the hot cast iron mark your beef. Put the vegetables on some foil or a basket and close up the grill with the steak and vegetables together.

Close the grill and wait a bit. Your grill should be between 250 and 300 degrees. I find that cooking at a lower temperature allows the fat to melt into the beef instead of getting tough and gristly. Melting the fat is the key to the whole process. That delicious flower and spring grass fed fat will melt into the muscle and create a tender, moist and delicious steak. The aroma of the vegetables and added humidity as they grill alongside the beef will keep your steak from drying out.

Check periodically you will know when to turn the steak when the fat on the streak looks like melting butter. After you turn the steak put the vegetables on top the steak and cook until you have it medium rare to medium.

Now remove the steak. Now wait. You must let the steak cool. If you cut the steak too soon the fat will be pushed out and the steak will lose its flavor. You must let the temperature drop to about 120 degrees F before you serve.

I find that steak prepared thusly is quite flavorful. The meat requires no aging or marinade in my opinion. Eat the vegetables and meat together and drink some hearty red wine or an stout beer.

Cross-posted at my CourseSites blog here

Some have said that the sizzle has gone out of the franchise of the Virtual Learning Environment / Course Management System. They’ve held funerals at conventions and proclaimed the death of the franchise; much like the sci-fi geeks said of Star Trek after Star Trek: Nemesis. Yet these old franchises at their essence were powerful and by reconnecting to their original story and “re-booting” they have risen again. If Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who can do it, why not the VLE and CMS.

A year ago I went out on a mission with a small fanatical team to reimagine the CMS/VLE and take us back to the start of our franchise – and the person who has the biggest impact on teaching and learning – the faculty member. I present to you today the re-imaging of a classic part of the Blackboard story, CourseSites. CourseSites is all about making sure that every single instructor in K-12 and Higher Education can teach on our latest technologies – for free.

From this team’s imagination has come the idea that we can eliminate the barriers to online and hybrid learning using Blackboard Learn 9.1, aspects of Blackboard Collaborate, Managed Hosting and Building Blocks. Using Blackboard Learn 9.1’s inherent open and flexible capabilities, and the support services of our Managed Hosting team, we have been able to create a number of innovative features for teaching and learning. These include:

-Social Media Integration – Open up the so called “walled garden” a bit and share what’s going on in your classes easily over social media. We’ve created not only a means to sign-on using an account from a social media service like Facebook and Twitter, but we are also creating tools to share materials out to these services. Imagine being able to notify colleagues, mentors and others about things inside your course.
-Course Structures– Elevate your use of learning technology by choosing from one of 30 structures to organize the materials and activities in your course. We’ve worked with instructional designers and Blackboard clients to develop structures that highlight key educational practices and make online and hybrid learning easy. If you want to make your course more social, more interactive and use Blackboard tools to their full potential look over these structures and let them help you reorganize your course.
-Course Themes – We’ve created 50 themes that let you give your course some style. This goes way beyond the old button styles and course menu options. You can now select from our growing library of professional themes to give your course some pizzazz and personality.
-Instructor HomePages and Blogs – come visit me at http://jfontaine.coursesites.com/ Here I have my profile, and a few sample classes I’m developing around Building Blocks which I hope to deliver later this year. Get your own CourseSites URL to provide a public gateway to your instruction. From this URL you can link to your current blog, or start a new one using tools we’ve made available.

Keep in mind that what we’ve done with CourseSites is just an example of what’s possible with Blackboard Learn technology. Every customer has access to the open SDK and power of Building Blocks. In less than a year we’ve been able to build these new innovative capabilities for our users with a very small group. As you think about what’s possible on your campus, look at what we’ve done with CourseSites. Imagine how you use these sample principles to create our own unique vision to re-brand and re-imagine your Course Management System / VLE.

Exciting news in the world of education this week as Department of Education announced a $2 billion dollar grant program over the next 4 years to fund the development of online educational formats. Except there is just one catch. Materials would have to be made available in the horribly outdated and flakey SCORM package format. This is like mandating that materials be published in 8-track tape format. More on the industry reaction including Rob Abel from IMS here. Personally I’m annoyed that the government is mandating a packaging format to this level of detail. I’d be much happier if they said materials must comply with HTML5 and support the needs of accessible learners. If we must have some packaging format to wrap these resources up in beyond HTML5 we could use Common Cartridge which does a great job at staying out of the way of the materials, while handling the most common use cases for education materials (quizes can be imported to a native quiz engine, discussion board topics can be seeded, remote links can be provisioned by LTI, etc).

To follow up on Ray Henderson’s blog post earlier today

I’ve been at the IMS Quarterly Meeting in Lone Star College in the Woodlands, Texas this week. My Blackboard colleagues and I have been showing off our progress on IMS Standards. We are finishing testing of two technologies in our Blackboard Learn product: IMS Common Cartridge and Basic LTI. We’ve taken our integration of Common Cartridge and Basic LTI into the Bb Learn core and included support for BLTI links inside a Common Cartridge Package. I’m also pleased that we will include both Import and Export of Common Cartridge within the core platform. This will do a lot for learning object repositories and sharing.

The Blackboard approach to Basic LTI actually extends Building Blocks technology in a powerful new way. We’ve made it possible to define a BLTI link within the bb-manifest.xml file which means that Basic LTI links can be used within a number of workflows in the application. As far as I know we are the only vendor to allow these more complex link placement options. We also make it possible for administrators to define trusted tool providers and enable course builders to create links to these providers as easily as one would put in a URL. Finally since we’ve integrated Common Cartridge and Basic LTI a CC package that included BasicLTI links can be used to define placement of tools within the flow of course materials. For example one could build a module which ended with a link to a simulation after providing some local training activities.

Blackboard is also making progress on Shibboleth. We’ve joined the InCommon Federation and hope to setup Blackboard as an identity provider. We are working with a handful of customers to work through a few key use cases involving SAML user provisioning and synchronization and sharing courses between institutions.

I’m not going to go into too much detail on our new SCORM partnership, but I think we’ll see that our player improves dramatically as we move to the RUSTICI player.

Finally I know that system admins and managers want to see better integration between the Blackboard Learn and other campus systems. The administrative systems need to work better. I’ve been on the LIS working group now for several years within IMS and so I’m happy to report a couple of items. First the working group has finally finished key elements of the core profile. We’ve worked to refine and simplify the API so that it will meet the needs of integrating administrative and vle systems in both real time and batch scenarios. This newly simplified profile was the last hurdle preventing us from completing our implementation. We’ve been working closely with SunGard in the last few months and I’m optimistic we will have something to show at the next IMS meeting in January. Now we’re still a bit of a way from shipping LIS. The workgroup still has some issues to work out in the Outcomes (grade exchange) profile and with authentication. The timeline for the LIS workgroup is that the workgroup will be doing testing of all profiles but outcomes by the end of January, and then plan to publish and finalize the grade exchange and hopefully be done with the specification by Learning Impact. I’m cautiously optimistic that we will meet these timelines. There is a lot of work left though within the workgroup. In addition to authentication and grade exchange there is a set of fairly complex certification tests which we(the workgroup and IMS) will need to complete, test and review. Still it seems like as an industry 2011 will be the year that IMS LIS is finally ready.