e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Progress Toward an Offline e-Learning Client?

    One of the most beloved aspects of the SUNY Learning Network’s current Lotus Notes-based homegrown LMS is its offline capabilities. Faculty members can download the current course data–including student discussion posts, tests, etc. They can respond to posts, grade papers and tests, add announcements, and so on, all while offline, and automatically synchronize the next time they have a connection. People who haven’t used this capability (especially those who always have a broadband connection handy) don’t understand the value of this affordance, but I do. It’s for the same reason that, much as I love my GMail, there are times when I really need an email client that can work offline. Or an offline RSS feed reader. Sometimes, it’s really handy to not have to be connected. And that’s doubly true for faculty members who are not gadget freaks, live in rural areas, and are unlikely to have ubiquitous broadband (or any broadband at all).

    Anyway, like it or not, we’re on the hook to reproduce that capability in our next-generation system. This is a somewhat daunting challenge. Not that it’s rocket science; synchronization has been done many times in many different ways, and there are any number of existing code bases that we could draw from. Rather, it’s daunting because it’s a lot of work to do at all and a lot more work to do right. Developing and, even worse, QA testing a cross-platform fat client in an environment where you have no control whatsoever over the profile of the client machines is a pretty large task, even if you draw on an existing cross-platform technology base such as Eclipse RCP or Mozilla Firefox.

    A while back, I wrote a bit about some relatively new possibilities for re-implementing the fat client experience with…er…less fat. At the time, though, I was focusing more on the user experience; I didn’t really get into the whole synchronization issue.

    As of yesterday, it looks like there may be a nice, lightweight solution to offline synchronization on the horizon, courtesy of none other than Ray Ozzie–the original inventor of Lotus Notes and now Microsoft’s CTO. (more…)

  • The Edublog Award Nominations Are Open

    Nominations for the (second?) annual Edublog Awards are open. Go nominate all of your favorites.

  • vPodcasting?

    Update: For those of you who tried the link and found it broken, it has been fixed now. Sorry about that.

    My colleagues at FIT are at it again. Not content to merely use podcasting as part of their art history courses, they are trying out screencasting, using Camtasia to provide audiovisual tours of art works. Very cool.

    What I’d like to know, though, is whether one can use RSS enclosures to publish a Quicktime video to a video iPod this way. Will the iPod know what to do with the video? If so, then this would be a great way to broadcast visually intensive learning content.

  • LMOS Services and Service Brokers, Part II

    In a (relatively) recent post, I started to outline how a service broker mechanism could greatly increase the pace of innovation in LMS design. The basic idea was that individual applications in the system could provide services that other applications could automagically pick up on, without requiring developers to wire up integration individually every time. In this post, I’m going to illustrate how such a beast might work, using the example of adding a blog to a Learning Management Operating System.

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  • SUNY Proposes to Build a Learning Management Operating System

    I am pleased and proud to note that SUNY Learning Environments, parent organization to the SUNY Learning Network, is proposing to build an LMOS to support its 100,000+ enrollments. From the announcement:

    In the last eighteen months, LE has mounted a broad, thorough and inclusive investigation into new technologies to support SLN’s programs and services, including the 2005 LE Task Force whose report forms the basis for the attached document, SLN Technology Strategy Report: Request for Public Comment (SLN RFPC). This document identifies a candidate solution that will integrate the open source application Uportal with best in class tools from other open source applications, including Sakai and LAMS. More importantly the SLN RFPC identifies an innovative approach to technology development, a strategy designed to keep SLN agile and responsive to SUNY needs while providing significant efficiencies, cost-savings, and assurances of continuity to our SUNY campuses.

    We are asking for your comments about the Educational Appropriateness, Technological Feasibility, Risks and Opportunities that you see in our plan, as well things we may have missed. The purpose of the SLN RFPC is to gather sufficient refinement and specification for this plan from your feedback to create a Request for Proposals which LE hopes to issue shortly. To this end, we are asking for your comments along with those of other SUNY and external stakeholders, including open source and proprietary providers.

    The proposed SLN2.0 initiative would parallel the Open Source LMOS project, with the ultimate aim of maintaining compatibility with an all-Open Source LMOS stack supported by a broader community. As a result, Learning Environments is very much interested in getting input from the global online teaching and learning community as well as from the SUNY community. The SLN Request for Public Comment [PDF] is being circulated among several relevant Open Source communities; comments from interested non-SUNY parties are welcome and can be submitted to [email protected].

    On a personal note, I would like to acknowledge the hard work of the entire SLN team, but in particular, that of Harry Cargile, Doug Cohen, Bernie Durfee, Paul McLean, and Israel Washington. The report is the culmination of quite a bit of down-in-the-trenches evaluation and analysis of individual products and technology options, and these guys really delivered.

  • LMOS Services and Service Brokers, Part I

    One of the most important concepts in the LMOS Project Vision and Mission Statements is the service broker. In fact, it may very well be the most important concept. But it can be a little abstract, especially for non-technologists (like me). In the next couple of posts, I’m going to do my best to explain what it is and why it could make a very big difference in the evolution of learning management systems.

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  • LMOS Project First Release Goals

    I’ve created a new wiki page for release goals on the project and described the goals for first release. Getting that first release out should hopefully give us enough raw materials to spur significant community discussion.

    I’m sure we’ll set up a project blog on Eduforge in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, I’ll post updates here.