e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Tetra

  • Bodington at the Sakai Conference

    This is the first installment of my promised non-patent (and non-patented) coverage of the Sakai Atlanta conference. I’m going to start with Bodington, in part because I continue to be really impressed with these guys. In my opinion, they are doing some of the most interesting work in the LMS/VLE space today. They are also the furthest along of anyone in terms of realizing the kind of system design that my colleagues and I have been calling an LMOS.

    As you may know, Bodington is going to be using Sakai as the framework for the next generation of their platform. I wrote a few posts about Bodington a while back, shortly after the announcement. The conference gave me several opportunities to hear more from the Bod team about their thinking, their project, and their progress.

    (more…)

  • Bodington Review, Postscript

    Now that there are a number of LMOS/framework-like projects in active development (the Bodington Tetra/Sakai collaboration, Oracle’s AEI, LAMS’ service contract work and, of course, the venerable eFramework and all of its children), I thought it might be interesting to pause for a moment consider how what I’ve learned about Bodington reflects on the challenges of an LMOS-like approach. When we think of frameworks, conversations tend in the direction plugging in tools, as if everything else in the framework itself is fairly straightforward. But the Bodington/Sakai unification project shows that picture to be simplistic. Simply taking Bod’s tooks and plugging them into Sakai’s environment would basically remove everything Bodingtonish about Bodington. Permissions, page layout control (which is related to how tools present themselves in the environment), and UI metaphors all really matter.

    So how do we define the territory that needs to be considered in order to make a framework approach work? How do we figure out what’s important? I don’t know that I have answers to those questions, but I think the solution may well start with use cases. What we need is a library of relatively granular descriptions of what teachers and students do in Bodington (for example) so that we can think about the affordances required to support those activities. The use cases might eventually be built into a pattern language. This approach combined with a catalog of tools, tool capabilities, and tool interoperability contracts, would probably give us enough to have meaningful conversations about building common frameworks.

  • Bodington Review, Part II

    In my last post, I discussed Bodington’s unique access control system and how this affects teaching affordances. I started there deliberately and at the suggestion of my Bodington expert and guide, Oxford University’s Paul Trafford. Today, Stephen Downes comments sarcastically, “Yes, that’s what we all look for first when trying to decide whether an LMS is worth the effort.” And that’s exactly the point. Bodington’s most compelling strengths as a learning environment are precisely not what we tend to look at first when “trying to decide whether an LMS is worth the effort.” (Not that assessing whether Bodington was “worth the effort” was my goal in any case.) As we all know, seemingly subtle implementation details can have disproportionate impact on the quality of the learning environment. Permissions is one of those unfortunately obscure areas that LMS developers often get wrong and, as Paul had suggested would be the case, I immediately saw that Bod’s system opened up pedagogical possibilities that are not practical on other systems. For example, Bodington appears to support very sophisticated multi-role groupwork, including but not limited to simulations, that would be much harder to do in learning environments with less flexible permissions systems. Is this difference important enough to look at first? I guess that depends on what you are looking for.

    Be warned: I’m going to continue my review by looking at other aspects of Bodington that are also not the kinds of things people typically look at first when trying to decide “whether an LMS is worth the effort”. If what you’re looking for is a generic LMS review, then don’t bother reading further and consider starting at the Edutools page for it instead. (more…)

  • Bodington Review, Part I

    Here’s an interesting announcement out of the UK:

    The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Hull, and the UHI Millennium Institute announce the formation of the Tetra Collaboration, the outcome of a series of meetings and a major summit held at the University of Oxford on the 25th-26th September 2006.

    The goal of the Tetra Collaboration is to coordinate activities across the member organisations so as to more efficiently develop and deploy open source enterprise applications of use to UK and European universities and colleges. By working together we can share common solutions to better serve the needs of students and academics, and each of the institutions named is committed to making tangible contributions into the collaboration.

    The Tetra Collaboration will work together on projects that address the needs of education, research, technical infrastructure, service oriented architectures (SOA), federated systems, and application frameworks.

    Tetra will demonstrate the potential of the JISC’s e-Framework, will be built on open standards and IMS specifications, and is committed to developing sustainable community source solutions for education.

    One of the first Tetra projects will be to continue the work of the Bodington (4) open source learning management system to produce Bodington – Next Generation or Bodington NG. This will combine elements of the Sakai open source framework with the pedagogically strong Bodington toolset. A major design goal of Bodington NG is to develop and implement an SOA enterprise e-framework.

    So the Tetra Collaboration will be working to develop a standards-based flexible framework, drawing on service-oriented architecture, that will enable federated virtual learning environments. And it will be using Sakai as one of its components. If you’re a regular reader of e-Literate, then you know that I couldn’t possibly resist finding out more about this effort. So, with the help and support of Oxford University’s Paul Trafford, I set out to learn a little bit more about Bodington. (more…)