In an earlier post, I outlined the motivating pain that brought the working group members to the table. In this post, I’m going to list out the highlights of the solution we came up with to address that pain. Again, this post is focused mainly on the important but unsexy problems of SIS/LMS integration that IMS LIS was intended to address. I’ll get to some of the sexier implications in a future post.
Author: Michael Feldstein
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Blackboard's NG Strategy
A few weeks back, I got an invitation from Matt Small to get a tour of Blackboard NG. Given all the rumors and speculation around it, I was obviously interested. I particularly wanted to know how much of it exists in code today and how much is vapor. So I took Matt up on his offer, and got a tour from him and John Fontaine. And while I didn’t quite get a full answer to the vaporware question, I did learn a lot of other interesting stuff about the platform and Blackboard’s strategy.
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Back In Business
photo credit: iluvcocacolae-Literate is back in business and ready to go. Which is good, because I have a backlog of posts I want to get to.
Before I do, though, I want to acknowledge two great additions to my blogging arsenal. First of all, the WordPress theme I’m using is called “Thematic,” and it’s by Ian Stewart of ThemeShaper. I think it’s very easy to read and navigate, which is the top characteristic I was looking for. Ian was also terrific in providing technical support. Second, I have discovered a great plug-in called Photo Dropper that lets me search for Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos and drop them into my post, all right from my WordPress “Write a Post” page. Expect to see more images in my posts in the future.
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Getting Close Now
e-Literate has been upgraded and is about 90% configured. I still have to figure out how to do a few things (e.g., add a navigation tab for the blog page without breaking other things), and I will continue to tweak it for the next few days, but it’s close enough to be basically usable. Please feel free to poke around and provide me feedback, whether good or bad, on how it looks and works for you.
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e-Literate to be Down for Scheduled Maintenance
I’m going to be upgrading my blogging software this weekend. This will mean losing some of the customizations to the site that I really like (but that probably nobody else noticed), but it also means that I’ll be able to stay current with WordPress releases in the future. In the process, I’ll be changing the look and feel substantially. Again, I have mixed feelings about this, but on balance I think it is for the best.
At any rate, don’t be surprised if the blog looks mangled or even is down altogether for a while over the weekend. I’ll post again to let you know when it’s done.
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Blackboard, Inc., Loses Battle In EduPatent Venue Fight
According to a blog entry on Desire2Learn’s Patent blog, the US Patent and Trademark Office has denied Blackboard’s request to suspend the re-examination process. Bb and D2L have been fighting over the venue for the next round of the battle, with Blackboard asking the USPTO not to complete the re-examination process (despite having earlier said that a re-exam would only make their patent stronger) and D2L asking the US Court of Appeals not to hear Blackboard’s case until the USPTO issues a final ruling. D2L has won the first of these two battles.
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IMS Learning Information Services: The Motivating Pain
Today Oracle announced the release of the Student Administration Integration Pack, or SAIP. It’s the first product that I have worked on as an Oracle employee, and I’m proud of it for a number of reasons. It’s not a particularly glamorous piece of software, but I think it’s going to be important. This is my first post in a planned series about it.
I’m going to start the series with a few posts about the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification that the SAIP implements. Because, really, the specification is at the heart of the product. Now, let me get one thing out of the way, because some of you are going to complain ask. A draft of the LIS specification has just left the working group and is currently available to IMS members only. It will be made available to non-IMS members by December, after which there will be a better part of a year when it will be open to public comment and further revision from the working group before it is finalized. I know that this schedule makes some of you unhappy. I have complained about it myself. I’m going to tell you as much as I can now and let you know the moment that more information becomes available to the general public.
Anyway….
Today’s post will focus on describing the main pains schools have been experiencing that motivated the creation of the specification in the first place. In later posts, I’ll talk about how the LIS attempts to relieve those pains (again, not glamorous but still important), and then I’ll write a little bit about some of the moderately sexier possibilities that LIS will also enable.
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