e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: LMS & Learning Platforms

Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.

  • ANGEL's Open Source Move

    ANGEL Learning has announced that they have incorporated TiddlyWiki into their product and that they have released the source code to the enhancements. What the announcement doesn’t mention is that the company also made a financial contribution to TiddlyWiki’s main developer Jeremy Ruston in recognition and support of his work.

    I happen to have had a number of conversations with the ANGEL folks about this move, starting from early in their process, and I must say that they made every effort to do this right. They put a fair amount of thought, for example, into where they should contribute the code and considered donating it back to the TiddlyWiki community before settling on EduForge. It’s sometimes difficult for a smallish company to figure out an affordable way to productively contribute back to open source; I hope that other educational software products, including open source and proprietary LMSs, pick up on ANGEL’s contribution and help to build a larger community around it. TiddlyWiki is a great tool for teaching and I think that ANGEL’s enhancements to it are rather clever.

    Kudos to ANGEL Learning for understanding and respecting the work of an open source community.

  • Four Ideas for the Future of Sakai

    One of the emerging themes from the Sakai Amsterdam conference was a strong desire in the community to develop a coherent vision for Sakai’s developing educational value proposition. Now, because of Sakai’s heritage as a project grown out of an alliance of strong, independent institutions rather than led by a single, charismatic leader (like a Martin Dougiamas or a Linus Torvalds), the process of fostering such a shared vision is a bit complicated. The most likely scenario is that capabilities first developed to meet local concerns of one or more of the members gets recognized by the community at large as addressing a common and reasonably deep need; it could then get picked up as part of Sakai’s identity.

    I’d like to suggest four capabilities existing in at least prototypical form within Sakai today that could lead us to a vision for Sakai as providing unique and valuable benefits to the teachers and students that use it. That word “unique” is important. While it is always tempting for the Sakai community to try to emulate the admirable success of the Moodle community, the fact is that Sakai is not now and never will be Moodle, just as it is not now and never will be Blackboard. The educational potential for Sakai has to come from its own DNA as a technology platform and, even more importantly, as a community. With that in mind, the four ideas I am suggesting today are all about taking advantage of the…um…Sakai-ness of Sakai.

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  • Sakai Amsterdam 2007: The State of the Union

    I have decided to hold off posting about individual presentations at the Sakai Amsterdam conference until the podcasts of those presentations are available. In the meantime, I thought it might be helpful to provide my general impressions of the state of the Sakai community. It’s always difficult to get a sense of the likely evolution of an open source project. Historic performance is not necessarily predictive of future performance. So what I’m going to talk about here is not so much Sakai the software as Sakai the community. How is it evolving? How is that evolution likely to impact the software in the future?

    After spending a rather full week of long days talking to many community members, I can honestly say that I have never been more hopeful about the future of Sakai than I am today.

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  • Sakai Resources Tool Meeting

    I arrived in Amsterdam before the main conference started and had the pleasure of sitting in on a bit of the Resources tool working group. (I didn’t last too long, having flown in that morning on the redeye from Philadelphia.) At any rate, there were a couple of pieces of good discussion that managed to penetrate the haze of sleep deprivation and jet lag.

    First, the group is interested in making it possible to organize the primary navigation within a course from being organized around tools (i.e., in a Blackboard-ish way) to being organized around curricular goals and content (i.e., in a Moodle-ish or Boddington-ish way). To me, this difference tells me more about an LMS and its design philosophy than probably any other single feature. It is the design philosophy litmus test for distinguishing between a developer-centric and a truly teacher-centric vision of an online class. (Like many, I’m not entirely confident that it gets us to a student-centric vision of an online class, but PLEs are another conversation entirely.) The Resources Tool group is not the only Sakai group working on this; I believe that Melete wants to be able to provide the same functionality. I don’t know enough about the different options to have an opinion about the best way to reach this goal; I’m just glad that people are working on it.

    The second bit is confirmation that Sakai is moving in the direction of adopting JSR-170, the Java standard for content repositories. One of the incentives for this move is apparently system performance, but I’m more excited about it because it gives us an opportunity to get student and teacher content out of course instance silos and into a persistent, easily accessible place where people can continue to make use of that content through a variety of enabling tools. I note with pleasure that Moodle also has plans to support a content repositories through JSR-170, including a PHP/Java bridge. So very soon, the two most influential open source LMSs will both connect to content repositories that sit directly under the course tools and support the same technical standards.

  • What Really Happened at SUNY

    I was doing a bit of research on the IMS Tool Interoperability effort and I ran across this post by Chuck Severence. He was enthusing about the need for the developing standard–a sentiment which I wholeheartedly support (although I don’t know enough about TI yet to know how I feel about the way they propose to meet the need).

    At any rate, this bit caught my eye:

    This is like a holy grail – like a quest – and some have tried and come up short – SUNY is a good example where they insisted that hte [sic] “future is now” and ultimately ran out of steam and “lived in the present” and went with Angel (a good choice by the way).

    Chuck probably has no way of knowing this, but his characterization of how things went at SUNY isn’t entirely accurate. While I have generally avoided blogging on this topic to-date, I have decided to break my silence and make just a few comments.

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  • Supreme Court Strikes a Major Blow for Patent Reform

    This is huge. Today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of KSR v. Teleflex, where the central issue was the meaning of “obviousness.” The reason that the word is important in patent law is because an innovation that is deemed “obvious” is not patentable. For example, Teleflex had combined two existing devices for truck gas petals and claimed that the combination was a new idea. KSR claimed that, even though nobody had combined the two devices in production at the time of Teleflex’s patent filing, it was fairly clear to “a practitioner with ordinary skill in the art” (i.e., Joe Truck Designer) that the two could be combined.

    This has direct bearing on Blackboard v. Desire2Learn. Before this ruling, the standard for proving obviousness was very high. As a result, finding, say, one pre-existing LMS that implemented half of the claims in Bb’s patent and another one that implemented the other half probably wouldn’t be enough. Unless you could find one system that implemented every one of the 44 claims, the case for invalidating the patent would be very difficult to make. This ruling should make D2L’s case easier.

    Just how much easier remains to be seen. I haven’t found any details on the ruling yet, so I don’t know what new guidance the court set.

    In related news, the court also ruled in favor of patent reform in Microsoft v. Alcatel-Lucent today. While this ruling is unlikely to have a direct impact on Bb v. D2L or on edupatents in general, we won’t know for sure until we see the written opinions. We should know more about both cases in the next couple of days.

  • IMS Report on Learning Technology Satisfaction and Trends

    The IMS has issued a new report with the somewhat imposing title, “IMS GLC Learning Technology Satisfaction and Trends, North American Higher Education, 05 February 2007 Update.” You can get it here, but first you’ll have to register with the site (if you haven’t done so already). It’s important to read Section 2 of the report (and particularly the “Survey Approach and Disclaimers” subhead) carefully; it is very difficult to get definitive data for this kind of research, and the authors of the report were very careful to spell out the limitations of their methods.

    Nevertheless, there’s lots of interesting stuff here. Here are some of my own observations, in no particular order:
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