e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: JSR-170

  • Greetings from the Sakai Conference

    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.

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.