I didn’t intend to post about this, but people keep asking me what I think, so I guess I need to get something up. For starters, you should read Michael Korcuska’s post on the subject. I agree with everything he says. Beyond that, here’s what I think:
Author: Michael Feldstein
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Sakai Paris 2008: The State of the Union
Let me cut to the chase. If you looked at Sakai in the past and ruled it out, it’s time to look again.
This is a new Sakai.
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At EUNIS and Sakai the Next Two Weeks
I’ll be at the EUNIS conference this coming week (arriving Monday morning on the red eye) and the Sakai conference the next week (arriving in Paris on the night of Friday, 6/27 and leaving on Friday, 7/4). Feel free to track me down if you’re at either event and want to chat.
If you do track me down and we have met before, you should know that I’m really bad at remembering names and faces. There’s a good chance that I will remember our prior conversation once reminded of it. I just may not remember its sensory connections to the physical world. It’s the way my brain works. (Which is why I tend to walk–and drive–into things.) Please don’t be offended if I need a little help making the connection. It doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy our last conversation.
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Secret Society Maybe Not So Secret
Since I complained recently about the IMS needing to open up more, it’s only fair that I should give credit when they actually do it. Chuck Severence, who now works part-time for the IMS, has a public test site up for people who want to test against a subset of the forthcoming Learning Tool Interoperability specification. Now, the full specification drafts are still non-public (to the extent that they even exist–LTI is still under active development) but, to be honest, hardly anybody reads the full spec anyway. What Chuck has done is much more useful because he’s providing sufficient documentation and tools for people to actually start building and testing LTI-compliant tools without a lot of extraneous gobbledygook. All it needs now is a feedback forum, and the IMS will suddenly have a very open and results-oriented (though perhaps not yet comprehensive) process for non-IMS members to provide feedback on specs in development.
Brilliant work. Really, a very big step forward.
On a side note, Chuck mentions the use of REST in the documentation. Thus far, the IMS has been pretty SOAP-heavy in its approach to web services. If the LTI group is indeed making judicious use of REST (which would make particular sense given the nature of what they’re trying to do) then that also is a Very Good Thing.
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Blackboard Inc. Shows Deep Compassion for Desire2Learn Customers
As expected, Blackboard has taken Desire2Learn back to court, claiming that 8.3 still infringes and charging them with contempt. Interestingly, the news of this showed up simultaneously in Inside Higher Education, THE Journal, and The Chronicle. It looks like Blackboard may have something to say that they want to make sure we all hear.
What could it be?
Here’s one candidate, said by Matt Small to Inside Higher Education:
“We have all along said and continue to say, and mean, that we don’t want to do anything that will disrupt D2L’s clients, so if D2L should be held in contempt or sanctioned or if it should go bankrupt … we would hate to see a D2L school inadvertently shut down unexpectedly because D2L does not survive, and we’re committed to working with the schools to help them find a non-infringing alternative that is on their budget and on their time frame and of their choice,” he said. [emphasis added]
How sweet. In a Tony Soprano sort of way, that is.
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Distributed Learning Environment Posts Coming
I am delighted to announce the beginning of a series of guest posts on distributed learning environments by the authors who will be contributing to a forthcoming special double issue on the topic in On the Horizon. Each post will provide an introduction to the article that will appear in the issue when it is published some time in the first half of next year. We have a rather ambitious schedule for the series; I hope to publish three of these guest posts a week over the next month or so. The first, by the OU’s Martin Weller, will be up shortly. I encourage you all to comment on the posts. Your input may well help to shape the final articles.
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I, Too, Am a Twit
For a long time, I vowed never to get sucked into Twitter. The idea of broadcasting my every belch and hiccup to the world in real time just struck me as absurdly narcissistic. Of course, I made exactly the same vow about blogging for largely the same reason back in the day and, well, here we are.
And thus it was that I observed myself with detached amusement as Nate Angell (a.k.a. @xolotl…his gang name, I guess) succeeded in convincing me to give it a try when we sat down to lunch (along with Mike Zackrison) at JA-SIG last month. Nate, in addition to being super-sharp about ed tech issues in general, is also one of the best conceptual salesmen I’ve ever met. Seriously. By the time he was done working me over, I was like, “@Dude, WTF was I thinking? I have to download Twhirl and start tweeting, like, RIGHT NOW!!”
So I did. I gave Twhirl a whirl. Hated it. Then I tried hooking Twitter into GChat. That made me happy for a few hours until I remembered how much I hate GChat. (And don’t get me started on the state of chat clients in the Windows world.) Then I found TwitterFox, which I like and seems to work well. (I’m a Firefox extension addict anyway.) Since then I’ve been tweeting (hate that word) on and off. And now, after diving in and spending some time with Twitter, I can honestly say that…
…uh…
…I still don’t get it.