The third post in my series on D2L’s competency system is going to have to wait a bit, since I am at the Sakai conference for the week. (I’ll try to finish it up after I return home and have had a chance to recover from my trip.) I’m not one for live-blogging, but I’ll try to get in a couple of posts about my experiences about the conference here and there–starting with this one.
First of all, let me wish the warmest of congratulations to returning Sakai Foundation Board member Jutta Treviranus and to new board members Lance Speelmon and Josh Barron. While I would have been privileged to serve, I have no doubt that the community has picked three outstanding representatives who will do them proud.
Today I attended a couple of pre-conference working groups. One of the most exciting conversations of the day was about cross-tool interoperability. What the group actually ended up talking about was an idea very similar to the “LMOS service broker” idea that Patrick Masson, Bernie Durfee and I advocated while we were at SUNY and that I blogged about here (parts I and II). You can read those posts to get a fuller idea of what this is all about but, in brief, the basic concept is that any tool should be able to say to some sort of service registry or bus, “Hey, I have an assignment here; does anybody out there have anything they can do with an assignment?” Other tools might respond by saying, “Yeah, I can grade an assignment,” or “Yeah, I can store an assignment in the person’s ePortfolio”, or any one of a hundred other things. Links to those services are dynamically generated into some sort of in-page component, e.g., a drop-down menu. The user could then apply those services without leaving the page, and this would all be provided essentially without the tool developer having to know in advance what services will be available. (At Oracle, the phrase I keep hearing for these sorts of drop-in services is “contextual actions.”) I’m really high on this potential development for a lot of reasons; maybe when I get home and recharge a little I’ll find time to write a more detailed post.
The other development that I’m most excited about is the continued progress toward and enthusiasm for implementing JSR-170 (the java content repository standard) throughout Sakai. (I’ve blogged about this idea here and there as well.) There are lots of good reasons why the community is excited about this, one of which is that there’s a whole lot of functionality in the standard that is available in multiple implementations (both open source and proprietary) so that the community would no longer have to write and maintain its own code for a lot of this complex functionality. That leaves more resources to focus on education-specific affordances, which is exactly what a community like Sakai ought to be doing. I, of course, am personally most excited by the possibilities of putting all that learning content into a standards-accessible repository, freed from the shackles of course instances and no longer dragged to the bottom of the sea every time a course is archived.
There’s a lot more to blog about, but I have no energy for it tonight. More soon.
