e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Bernie-Durfee

  • Oracle's New Academic Enterprise White Paper

    The product group I’m in at Oracle (Academic Enterprise Solutions, or AES) has a new white paper out on the company’s vision of the future of the academic enterprise. A lot of this is aspirational, but it does give you a sense of the general direction that the company would like to take in terms of product development. Also, being Oracle’s vision, it focuses on Oracle’s view of academic IT and how Oracle products fit in. If you don’t like enterprise-y approaches or you don’t like Oracle products, then this document probably won’t be of much use to you.

    I’d like to acknowledge the influence of a number of outside folks on the thinking behind this paper:

    • My former colleagues at the SUNY Learning Network, especially Patrick Masson and Bernie Durfee, were co-creators of the Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) concept that the white paper specifically invokes.
    • Much of Oracle’s specific vision of the future of learning environments is heavily derivative of the excellent work begin done in the Sakai community around Sakai 3. 
    • Oracle’s thinking about academic analytics has been enlightened by the work of John Campbell’s team at Purdue University.

    I apologize to any others I may be missing; there are a lot of smart people working on these problems, and the AES team has tried to listen closely to as many of them as possible.

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • Stephen Downes Missed the Point

    OK, so Stephen Downes doesn’t like the LMOS:

    I have been sort of sympathetic to the concept of the learningmanagement operating system (LMOS) because, after all, the concept includes things that I favour: distributed resources, user access to the underlying system. But I began to falter when Mark Feldstein said “We don’t just want to offer many different affordances. we want to orchestrate them.” And following his link to Bernie Durfee has sketched out a first use case implementation sent me over the edge. I’ll say it bluntly, and apologize later: this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen. Durfee is describing what the rest of understand as ‘upload a file and base a discussion thread on it’. Something I did right here in about 10 seconds today. But he requires J2EE containers, portlet containers, service integration agents, native Java interfaces, a whole mess of stuff. Ridiculous. Absurd! That’s it – if that is what is meant, toast the whole LMOS concept.

    I’m going to ignore the fact that he got my first name wrong. Frankly, I think language like “ridiculous” and “absurd” is unnecessarily hyperbolic when used in reference to a plan that simply articulates a language-specific implementation of fairly widely established standards for enterprise systems in general and enterprise learning frameworks in particular. It’s also not terribly collegial or respectful. And finally, it doesn’t reflect a grasp of the problems we are trying to solve. (more…)

  • Why Mashups Make the LMOS

    Regular readers know that I’ve been flogging the notion of a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) pretty hard. The other day, LMOS partner-in-crime Patrick Masson and I published an article about the need to make LMS’s mash-up-friendly. Well, today, ZDNet editor David Berlind effectively connects the dots between the article and the LMOS concept. (more…)

  • LMOS Architecture Available on Wiki

    Bernie Durfee has been doing some great architectural design work on the LMOS concept, which is now open to the public. It’s mostly technical and aimed at a developer audience; however, Bernie is a very good writer and has done a great job of making the technical issues fairly decipherable even to non-technologists.

    Comments on the wiki pages are welcome.

  • 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.

  • Introducing the LMOS Open Source Project

    Update: The LMOS Project Vision and Mission Statements are now in HTML format on the project wiki.

    I’m pleased to announce that the LMOS now has a home on Eduforge. This is an idea that really belongs to some of my colleagues at SUNY as much as it does to me, and I’ve been dying to give them the recognition and credit that they deserve. (Some of them are a little shy.) In particular, Patrick Masson and Bernie Durfee have been equal partners in working out the LMOS concept.

    You can find the project’s vision and mission statements here [RTF]. We’re eager to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

    Expect more announcements on this project in the coming days. We’re working on some partnerships that could be truly exciting.