The Other Side of the Integration Equation

This post is part of a series on the concept of a Learning Management Operating System.

In the previous post, I used Google Maps as an example of an application that is built from the ground up for integration and how that can fuel rapid innovation. But in some respects, Google Maps is a bad example for an LMOS. It’s a tool, and a data provider, but not a framework for pulling tools, the way a Learning Management Operating System would be. We need another example for that. So let’s take a look at Apple’s Dashboard technology.Dashboard is a technology that Apple rolled out with it’s new Tiger operating system. It’s been out in the public for a couple of months and available as a framework for developers for maybe a year and a half. Basically, it’s an interface designed to make it easy for developers to create little tools. Some of them are self-contained, such as the body mass index calculator. Others pull in data from external sources, such as (of course) the Google Maps widget.

So far, developers have produced over a thousand widgets for Dashboard. Here are a few of the cool things you can do with them:

• Find the cheapest gas prices in your area.
• See the radar image from WeatherChannel.com for your town.
• Track your FedEx, UPS, and DHL packages.
• Dial your Vonage phone from your computer.

I’ve deliberately chosen examples that pull information from external sources, but you can also load self-contained applications like calculators, converters, notepads, and so on. What Apple did was add some extensions to HTML (extensions, by the way, that are now supported by Mozilla as well) that make it easy for developers to integrate their applications (including web-based application services like Google Maps or the UPS package tracking system) into OS X. Dashboard is an integration framework.

An LMOS would work something like this. It would provide a (hopefully standards-based) framework for developers to integrate their teaching and learning applications, including web-based application services. Ideally, most of these applications will themselves be designed to integrate easily, the way that Google Maps is.

The LMOS architecture itself would be…well…an empty canvas, the way Dashboard is without any widgets on it. Notice that Apple hasn’t built Dashboard so that their own widgets run better than everybody else’s; that’s not part of the business model. Likewise, an LMOS wouldn’t privilege, say, its native discussion board over alternatives that could be plugged in. It’s hard to imagine a company like Blackboard willingly going to a model like this, which is why expect commercial LMS vendors in general and Blackboard in particular to be the last ones to this party.