Several folks on the Sloan-C listserv have raised a strong second line of argument in the Blackboard prior art fight. In addition to identifying specific LMS precursors that had most or all of the functionality outlined in the claims, we should be building the case that LMS’s were directly and consciously copied from and evolved out of more generic groupware. In other words, once you you have a generic groupware system with groups, roles, permissions, and collaborative tools, it was obvious to the educational community that groups could be classes and that tool that education-specific tools such as a test engine, a grade book, and a homework drop box should be added. (more…)
Tag: Lotus-Notes
-
IBM Follows SUNY's Lead on Notes/Domino Migration
Ya know, you can’t make this stuff up.
As regular readers know, the SUNY Learning Network is currently on a home-grown LMS built on top of Lotus Notes/Domino. About eight months back, we proposed [PDF] the notion of migrating to a standards-based Java portal backed by a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Well, this week, IBM announced details of Domino Next, the successor platform to Lotus Domino. And what is that architecture? A standards-based Java portal. Basically, their strategy for migrating their customers to a successor technology is the same one that we came up with. And they’re doing it in a semi-versionless way. Meanwhile, the same day, another article comes out saying that IBM completed 1800 SOA projects for a thousand customers last year—double of what it had been the previous year.
I’m glad to see that IBM is following our example.
-
Progress Toward an Offline e-Learning Client?
One of the most beloved aspects of the SUNY Learning Network’s current Lotus Notes-based homegrown LMS is its offline capabilities. Faculty members can download the current course data–including student discussion posts, tests, etc. They can respond to posts, grade papers and tests, add announcements, and so on, all while offline, and automatically synchronize the next time they have a connection. People who haven’t used this capability (especially those who always have a broadband connection handy) don’t understand the value of this affordance, but I do. It’s for the same reason that, much as I love my GMail, there are times when I really need an email client that can work offline. Or an offline RSS feed reader. Sometimes, it’s really handy to not have to be connected. And that’s doubly true for faculty members who are not gadget freaks, live in rural areas, and are unlikely to have ubiquitous broadband (or any broadband at all).
Anyway, like it or not, we’re on the hook to reproduce that capability in our next-generation system. This is a somewhat daunting challenge. Not that it’s rocket science; synchronization has been done many times in many different ways, and there are any number of existing code bases that we could draw from. Rather, it’s daunting because it’s a lot of work to do at all and a lot more work to do right. Developing and, even worse, QA testing a cross-platform fat client in an environment where you have no control whatsoever over the profile of the client machines is a pretty large task, even if you draw on an existing cross-platform technology base such as Eclipse RCP or Mozilla Firefox.
A while back, I wrote a bit about some relatively new possibilities for re-implementing the fat client experience with…er…less fat. At the time, though, I was focusing more on the user experience; I didn’t really get into the whole synchronization issue.
As of yesterday, it looks like there may be a nice, lightweight solution to offline synchronization on the horizon, courtesy of none other than Ray Ozzie–the original inventor of Lotus Notes and now Microsoft’s CTO. (more…)
-
Lean Clients, Plump Clients, and Chubby Clients for Learning Management Systems
As I mentioned in a previous post the SUNY Learning Network currently uses a home-grown learning management system built on top of Lotus Notes. And while there is a web interface to the system, many of the current users are quite attached to their fat client.
This may sound quaintly outdated at the moment. However, I strongly suspect that we’ll see fat(ter) LMS clients in the near future. There are some wonderful affordances that come with a more robust client-side component to the system. Up until now, those affordances have come with the relatively steep price of having to develop, install and maintain fairly heavy-duty (and often cross-platform) client-side software. But that’s changing. These days, the browser and the operating system themselves are increasingly able to function as client-side platforms for richer functionality. Add to this the blossoming of web services and the small, simple client-side tools that they enable, and we have the potential for what I would call “lean clients,” “plump clients” and “chubby clients.” (more…)