I have been thinking a bit about how my new roles on the Sakai Foundation Board and Product Council intersect with my role as a blogger. To be clear, I intend to maintain my independence on e-Literate. I will continue to praise other platforms when I see something praiseworthy, and to speak out when I […]
On "Open" Proprietary Software
There’s been a lot of buzz from various proprietary LMS and SIS vendors lately about how “open” their respective platforms are. I think it’s important that we have a sophisticated notion of openness that is more nuanced than all or nothing. At the same time, I also think it’s important that the word be grounded […]
I've Been Elected to the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors
I am gratified—and slightly surprised—to announce that the members of the Sakai community have elected me to serve on the Sakai Foundation’s Board of Directors. I deeply appreciate their faith in me. I also am grateful to my employer for not only enabling me to make the time commitment but also for actively supporting and […]
Curtiss Barnes on Learning Information Services
Curtiss Barnes is Vice President of Industry Product Strategy for Education and Research at Oracle, and he’s also an all around smart guy. In his latest blog post, he has some more details on recent progress with LIS. It’s well worth your time.
IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union
Regular e-Literate readers know that I am a big booster of the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (For an overview of the basics of the specification, see my posts here, here, and here.) There has been a lot of news recently about adoption, and I thought it would be worthwhile to pull together a unified […]
Pearson Announces Support for IMS Learning Information Services
Pearson just announced that they will be supporting the IMS LIS standard (and with Oracle’s SAIP implementation of it) across a number of their products. First, they’ll support it in MyLabs, which are subject-focused learning environments (e.g., MyChemLab, MyMathLab, etc.)—sort of a fusion between an online textbook and a lightweight LMS. This kind of provisioning […]
Desire2Learn Delivers IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (BLTI) Support
In other IMS news, Desire2Learn has announced that they are the first LMS provider to support BLTI, a specification designed to support plugging third-party tools into an LMS. According to the press release, here’s what’s included: Management interfaces to define integrations to external learning tools (Tool Providers) and to create links New Quicklink type to […]