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…)
Tag: interoperability
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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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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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All Hail the Mighty B-Rex
Yes, yes, we’ve all heard the news by now. BlackCT Wednesday has hit. Will it be remembered as The Day the Music Died? I don’t think so. Unfortunately, it could be remembered as The Day the Music Was So Badly Wounded That It Became Barely Listenable for a Really Long Time.
You know. Kinda like the ’80’s. Except with software. (more…)
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Does Education Inflected Architecture = Web 2.0?
In my last post, I suggested that we need an architecture that is designed with a low barrier of entry for educators to actively influence and change themselves. Today, I ran into a related post by Dana Boyd, which I actually found through Hypergene Media Blog which, in turn, found it via Ben Hammersly. (Whew.)
Here’s the relevant quote:
My argument is that we stop thinking of remix as production, but as active consumption. Remix happens as a bi-product of consumption. What we’re remixing is culture and the active consumption of culture is part of identity development and living as a social creature in society.
Think about clothing consumption. Few people buy all of the items on the mannequin. You buy different pieces and mix and mash them. You might even decide to alter them by adding patches, by dying them, by cutting them up. You make the clothing yours. And then you share your consumption with the world by parading on the streets. In this way, you make the clothing tell your story.
Boyd is talking about remixing content by way of analogy to personal effects, but why couldn’t his point apply equally to software services and applications?
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Time, Ownership, and the VLE
This is the first of several posts I’ll be making about stuff I learned at yesterday’s conference at FIT–which was excellent. It’s not often that I go to a conference where I find every single speaker to be interesting, but this was certainly the case here. (Raymond Yee apparently live-blogged…er…live-wiki’ed the first part of the day.)
Anyway, keynote speaker Rachel Smith pointed out a great little project called Dracula Blogged. Basically, the author, noting that Dracula is written as a series of dated journal entries, decided it might be cool to republish the novel as a weblog, posting each entry on the same calendar day (e.g, October 6th) as the dated entry in the novel. I think the success of this experiment underlines a couple of attributes that we need to think about for next-generation VLE’s. (more…)
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LMOS Integration and Specialization
This post is part of a series on the concept of a Learning Management Operating System.
In my last few posts, I argued that a next-generation learning management platform should have the following characteristics:
- It should provide a framework that makes it as easy as possible for programmers with different skill levels in different programming languages to build and integrate learning tools that will serve specialized teaching and learning needs.
- Whenever possible, the technology standards implemented by the framework should be general rather than education-specific in order to encourage the re-use of relevant groupware applications that weren’t originally designed for e-learning purposes.
- Part of what the framework should provide is a set of user interface primitives, thus reducing the usability challenge of mixing together applications that were designed by different groups of people. But those primitives should be inheritable by applications with as little specific programmer effort as possible, i.e., they should mostly come along automatically when the developer chooses to use the framework.
- Another part of what the framework should provide is strong and flexible groups, roles, and permissions structures to be used by the various learning applications.
- The roles, groups, and permissions framework should also provide the capability of a user-centric view in which users can get roll-up views of data in applications that they use across several different groups (e.g., the combined calendar dates in several courses plus club and campus events).
I have claimed that all of these goals can be met by using a modern, JSR-168-compliant portal as an architectural basis.
But two questions naturally arise. First, don’t we need any inter-application integration? Second, to the degree that we do need that integration, does it need to be done using specialized, e-learning-specific APIs? Depending on how the goals defined, I think the answer to both questions is “less so than you might expect.” (more…)