IMS Learning Impact
Last week I was at IMS Learning Impact 2008 just up the road in Austin. The Sakai Foundation generously sponsored me to go, since I have been involved with Sakai’s support for IMS Common Cartridge for a couple of years. Michael Korcuska’s blog post about the event is here.
I have been guilty of moving exclusively in Sakai circles, and it was great to break out into a broader cross-section of stakeholders in education technology. The IMS crowd is small but high-output; These folks know what is going on and are responsible for getting things done in their respective organizations. IMS has a large vendor representation, but this wasn’t a trade show at all. These are decision-makers coming together to promote standards for their mutual benefit. It’s funny to be an open-source guy at an event like this. “Oh, it’s a profit deal!”
IMS has put together a suite of documentation and testing tools to help developers produce and consume valid Common Cartridges, which should be a great help for smoothing and speeding adoption. Kevin Riley of IMS said that when they started testing Common Cartridges, the greatest source of errors was actually in misinterpretations of IMS Content Packages, which have been around for quite some time but have never had a similar validation system to ensure conformance to the spec.
When I started working on importing cartridges for Sakai, it was for Blackboard 5.5, and as there was no public specification, I only got it working by reverse-engineering whatever course cartridges I had on hand. It worked, but I have spent the subsequent four years responding to and patching for edge cases. I can only know about special cases as they pop up, and that has been one long headache. The great thing about having the Common Cartridge specification is that it will be possible to build an importer that will handle every allowable permutation of Common Cartridge from the get-go. And when we eventually (soon?) add Common Cartridge export capability to Sakai, the various validations will guarantee that our cartridges are proven correct before they ever go out the door.
The various publishers are eager to have one format to publish their content digitally. Pearson Education can already offer any of their cartridges in Common Cartridge format by request. Open University and Elsevier are also producing a ton of content this way.
The Common Cartridge mascot is a chicken. It took me until just this minute to get the joke: systems won’t support the format unless there are plenty of cartridges, and no one wants to produce cartridges if the systems don’t support it. Chicken and egg, duh! Well, the chicken has hatched, and the eggs are coming. It’s time to start making some omelets!
There was some talk that the Common Cartridge spec is too little too late, because the pace of change in technology has left it in the dust. I admit to being frustrated that it seems like it’s been “almost ready” for at least two years. It’s true that there have been plenty of exciting developments in technology that CC does not take into account (wikis, blogs, mashups, social networks), but the content it does support is not exactly obsolete: documents, images, videos, recordings, hyperlinks, discussion topics, assessments. After all, we still use books don’t we? There is still plenty of steam left in these “old-fashioned” media.
IMS has plans to incorporate tools as a content type for a future version of the spec. Hopefully that will allow Common Cartridges to tap into the cutting edge for many years to come.
The Winding Journey of Java DB
Java SE 6 has finally arrived on the Mac with a recent update, so I was over on Sun’s website reading about all the new stuff and Java DB caught my eye. This is a small, all-Java database that can be embedded in applications on a desktop, a server, or a mobile device. The reason I find this interesting is Java DB and I go back a few (technology) lifetimes.
Java DB is based on Apache Derby, which is an open source project that IBM spun out from a product called Cloudscape, which they acquired as part of the purchase of Informix, which itself had acquired Cloudscape as a two-year-old startup with around 50 employees in the go-go year of 1999.
Way back then, I was in the process of looking for my very first developer job (with no qualifications, I might add). A few projects later, and my team had selected Cloudscape as our best bet for a cross platform client-server system to teach struggling kids how to read. This was back when you had to shell out $50k to use the software. In an act of surprising optimism, they put me on the project as the database lead! The first thing I did was buy a shelf-load of books about databases. I was so green I wrote my own connection pool! Java development on Mac OS classic was hell, but Cloudscape blew my mind because you could use objects as a column type, and invoke methods on them from inside a SQL statement. A glance at the docs suggests it doesn’t work this way anymore, though they do have an XML column type.
It’s good to know that some good software can survive the corporate churn-and-burn. Who knows, maybe I’ll use Java DB née Derby née Cloudscape again in the near future.
image courtesy of the Wayback Machine
The Business Value of SOA
Having heard about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) for a long time without having any idea what it is, I was happy to discover this talk by Anne Thomas Manes which finally sheds light on the subject for me.
Key points for me:
- SOA aims to tackle the problem of too much cost and redundancy in enterprise IT
- If you develop a capability, it should be reusable across your applications
- You want to avoid building monolithic applications
- SOA is something you do not something you buy
- Having an Enterprise Service Bus does not mean you have SOA
- SOA requires an organizational lifestyle change; You have to apply the principles across all the projects in the organization
- SOA is a long-term proposition, on the order of 10 or 20 years
Those last two sort-of make my eyes bug out. Do you know anyone in technology that makes 20-year plans? My feeling is that our organizational hierarchies simply prohibit cross-cutting changes like this in the enterprise. Either the CEO is demanding this from every division, or it won’t go forward.
I do think the principles are interesting. IT is such a young industry that we are learning for the first time what it looks like to have 40 years of cruft in your infrastructure. Certainly anything that begins to scrape away the barnacles should be good for the organization.
Bollywood Blackboard!
Oh, this just makes my day.
Here’s a small series of humorous episodes related to recent Blackboard and Open Source Learning Management Systems. The mashups are made with snippets of classic Hindi Bollywood films, overlaid with user created subtitles, from a fun online tool called BombayTV from Grapheine. The role of Blackboardwala is played by none other than Amitabh Bacchan, of course.
http://metamedia.typepad.com/metamedia/2008/04/the-adventures.html
WordPress 2.5 coming soon
Matt Mullenweg gives us a preview of the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5.
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-rc2/
They’ve been working with the web geniuses at Happy Cog and the results look awesome.
WordPress is seriously firing on all cylinders. It’s a Good Thing.
New Screencast: the Sakai App Builder Plugin for Eclipse
My new eleven-minute screencast is about how to use Aaron Zeckoski’s App Builder plugin for Eclipse to jumpstart your new Sakai tool projects.
It’s also a great learning tool, since you have a working tool in less than two minutes and you can start playing around with modifications.
As before, new videos are posted here: http://aeroplanesoftware.com/sakai-training-videos
Getting Started with Sakai: Setting Up Eclipse
I have just posted part two of my series of screencasts on how to get started developing for Sakai. This one is all about setting up the Eclipse IDE. Tasty!
Interface21 now SpringSource
I guess this happened late last year, but it escaped my notice: Interface21, the company behind the Spring Framework, has changed its name to SpringSource and has a spiffy new website to go with it.
The Spring Framework has come to be synonymous with enterprise Java. It’s a great example of the cream rising to the top in an open source “free market.” I think I’ll attend Wednesday’s webinar on Spring 2.5.
IMS Common Cartridge Alliance
I just signed up as a dues-paying member of the IMS Common Cartridge Alliance. IMS CC is a standard that has been evolving for several years, with the ultimate aim of creating a single format for publishers to create course materials that can be loaded into any learning management system.
I wrote the underpinnings of IMS CC support for Sakai over a year ago while the spec was still a fledgling. I have hope that I can complete the work that I started, and make Sakai a first-class Common Cartridge citizen.
With my new membership, I have access to:
- Demonstrations of common cartridge use
- Sample cartridges to open up and study
- Implementer tools and sample code for testing our implementation
- Conformance tests
- Webinars
- The latest versions of the spec
I’m excited, but allow me a ten-second rant: if the success of information standards hinges upon their dissemination and use (as I am convinced it does), the IMS Global Learning Consortium is clearly brain damaged for locking their specifications up behind a pay wall and a “do not disclose” directive.
Sakai As It Could Be
I just saw this, via Chris Coppola at rSmart.
For me, this is where the view of Sakai as a platform for innovation is really exciting. Sure the CLE is an eLearning application that can be used out of the box as easily as any of the proprietary systems like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Angel, and others. It has a place for a syllabus, a grade book, assignments, and all the standard features you need. But it’s also a platform for innovation. It gives the world’s leading institutions a way to make applications like Facebook and Google gadgets easily accessible to educators. Then, because these capabilities are built on an open platform accessible to anyone, the platform may actually make it easier for educators to experience and use these ‘2.0’ technologies.
I hope I’m not harping, but again I see a rift between what we perceive as technologists and what our students and educators perceive. Namely, we get excited by what could be, and they get excited by what is. In other words, if we want Sakai to break out of the mold of the monolithic course management system and embrace the profusion of innovation in web tools, we had better produce something to show — and fast — because our constituents will get tired of waiting, and they’ll vote with their feet.