Jeff Longland

Have arrived at BbWorld’08 in Las Vegas. Overwhelmed by everything that is Las Vegas, but for now, the focus is on BbWorld’08 and the DevCon’08. I’m going to make a concerted effort to blog all the sessions I attend, so with that - have to go register and make my way down to the Michael Wesch keynote. But first, a coffee.

I was lucky enough to have a sneak peek of the new MERLOT PowerLink a few weeks ago while it was in-development. Since then I’ve been telling anyone who would listen about the upcoming release.  That said, I wasn’t aware that MERLOT was also on the cusp of releasing a new version of their “referratory”.  I wish I had a smartphone/PDA so I could take a picture of the new MERLOT - looks good.  Back to the PowerLink, it allows any instructor to easily search and link to MERLOT objects like they would any other tool inside the WebCT environment. There were many in the audience who were critical that these are only links and not local copies of the objects - I’m not sure why this is terribly important, is that not the nature of the web?  Kudos to the folks who’ve brought this to fruition - it will be released at the MERLOT conference in Ottawa in a few weeks.

Choosing a session to attend at the WebCT conference is no small task. I have five sessions during this timeslot that I would like to attend - I wish WebCT/Blackboard would provide podcasts of sessions. Anyhoo, as you can see from the title I’m in a technical session. Chris Vento, former CTO of WebCT is comparing eLearning 1.0 vs 2.0.  Of particular interest is his slide Potential Factors for the Next Generation SDK:

• WS/JS interfaces
• Service abstraction and interfaces for meta-level, inter-suite application, and system integration points
• Continued evolution of component oriented frameworks and “connectors” to facilitate flexible integrations

I’m interested in how this will evolve.  My understanding of the current Blackboard Building Blocks is that the SDK is more about accessing modules/internal resources inside Blackboard rather than application bridges as exist currently in the Vista PowerLinks SDK.  If anyone out there can comment more about Building Blocks, please do as my understanding is limited.
Standards are a hot topic as well.  At the end of the session there was some discussion about mixing and matching components from the Next Generation product with other systems like Moodle or Sakai.  For example, integrating a WebCT/Blackboard Learning Outcomes system with Moodle.  Interesting…

Woke up this morning to a handful of automated messages from WebCT about various feature requests that have been included in the Vista 4/CE6 Application Pack 1. I wasn’t aware that WebCT had posted info publically about this pack yet, so I’m pretty jazzed to see an official feature list rather than grapevine mumblings. Some really interesting features coming up:

• Class blogs
• Student journals
• Class roster that allows students to have a profile
• Grading rubrics
• Date rollover for instructors to easily update dates from term-to-term
• Administrator “enroll me option” (LONG OVERDUE!!!)
• Customizable environment/settings

I know a lot of the naysayers will pipe up to say that most of these features can be accomplished using other tools. Yes, I know (d’uh). It’s the integrated nature of these tools that excites me. WebCT listens to their users. WebCT has been paying attention to current trends. WebCT is trying to take the best points of social networks and bring that inside the walled garden that is the average LMS. I see these as positive steps towards a better VLE that puts the student in the driver’s seat.

My happiness is somewhat restrained though. I’ve heard that this pack has been in the works for some time and going through the features I noticed a few that I thought were destined for Vista 5… so I was a little surprised to see them in this application pack. Perhaps this application pack is essentially the culmination of features/plans that were afoot prior to the Blackboard acquisition?

I previously posted (briefly) about my adventures attempting to provide podcasts from WebCT. The larger issue this drives at is generating RSS feeds of WebCT Content. Andrew Gruhn commented today that he’d like to get RSS feeds of WebCT content as well. I drafted a post about this in November and have been kinda sitting on it ever since. So here it is with a whole lotta late night revisions. I’m working on implementing this but it’s currently more of a hobby than anything so don’t expect anything immediately. Hopefully someone finds this useful, let me know if you come up with anything or have suggestions for improvements.
So what type of content could we get out of WebCT? In particular, out of WebCT Vista 3/4 or CE 6. The PowerLinks SDK provides a few webservices that might be useful:

• Mail - new messages, etc
• Calendar - upcoming entries?
• File Manager - RSS w/ enclosures, ie. podcasting
• GradeBook - maybe grades?

I’m a little hokey on the GradeBook idea, but the other three sound decent. There’s also a beta Discussion webservice that’s available through the Vista Developers Network and that would likely be one of the most useful RSS feeds out of WebCT.

1. Instructor creates the RSS tool like they would any other tool. The tool is essentially an authentication module that can integrate with other systems or return a string - ie, HTML.
2. Student clicks on the proxy tool. The tool generates an HTML page with information about using an RSS reader along with a URL for the feed, perhaps a servlet on another server. ex. http://host/VistaRSS/feed?id=30303039 Velocity would be good for generating the HTML.
3. The user adds the RSS feed in their favourite reader. For me, BlogBridge or Thunderbird.
4. The reader makes the request and the servlet handles communication with the WebCT webservices. For example, goto the specified learning context (30303039) and get a list of all files in the /podcasts/ directory. Substitute any of the other content I mentioned earlier.
5. Using the list of all files, generate the XML for the feed. I’ve been using with Rome in my experiment with podcasting. Though Velocity would also make a good candidate.
6. Return the XML to the user.

Ideally in step 4 it would be nice to wrap some authentication around this whole thing. Authentication seems to be supported in a handful of RSS readers and podcast clients, mainly for standard HTTP authentication. Potion Factory walks through the steps of setting up a password protected podcast. Bottom line is that some form of restriction should be available should the instructor wish to restrict access to students only.

Well, time to mosey along. I should be working more on implementing this rather than writing about it, but I felt compelled to post today since I’ve been meaning to do this. So here it is.