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.
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Zach – you in touch these days w/CC support in Sakai?
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