LMS

From Cole Camplese, Should it all be Miscellaneous?:

The idea that we can follow a book filled with instructions on how to do information architecture, web design, usability, and so forth may be crazy.

Some great conversations going on about structuring dialogue within organizations, and the inherent tension between freely flowing conversation and institutional control over the messages contained within that conversation, and the need for quality control over content affiliated with an institution.

In addition to Cole's post (linked above), D'Arcy Norman has a couple of good posts that provide some context.

The Summer of Code application process is underway. Along with some good folks at The Oregon State Open Source Labs, we have put together a proposal to share content between Moodle and Drupal.

In combination with the recently developed functionality to author and export content from Drupal in IMS LOM format, you could author courses in Drupal or Moodle, and use those courses interchangeably in Drupal, Moodle, or any other LMS that imported IMS LOM.

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I've been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php

From Michael Feldstein, via the OLDaily.

It looks like Blackboard paid for Google adwords to have ads for Blackboard appear when people searched for "Open Source LMS" --

Image via Michael Feldstein

Unfortunately, the Blackboard ads appeared under the heading "Open Source LMS" creating the appearance that Blackboard is an open source product.

A mildly edited version of my response to Jim Groom's post over on the bava --

D'Arcy mentioned the need for this to scale, and he's right. With that said, I don't think we need to have scalability to 100K students as a first goal. The beauty of the small pieces loosely joined is that it's easier, and that it's a step away from the monolithic LMS's so beloved by so many --

Toward that end, it's good to consider what we'd need to carry from the blog to the aggregator in order to connect a student work with an institutional SIS/LMS. To start, I see two factors as essential: first, mapping a feed to a student, and second, mapping individual posts from within a feed to a course.