I wasn’t planning on writing this post, but I’ve become aware of several recent conversations that have led me to the conclusion that it would be useful to get this out.

I meant to get this up a while ago. Moodlerooms has been on a tear lately. First, they submitted a patch to Moodle to enhance integration with external systems for enrollment purposes. This isn’t standards-based integration in itself, but I’m told it aids with integration of things like LDAP and LIS. Next, they integrated Moodle with Google Apps using the SAML 2.0 and Oauth standards, so they can provision users to Google Apps from their Moodle accounts and then have them work with, for example, a Google doc within the Moodle environment without having to log in twice.

Thanks to Sakai Foundation Executive Director Michael Korcuska for providing a nice review (with some thoughtful analysis good suggestions) of my team’s (relatively) new white paper.

Ian Dolphin, the International Director of the e-Framework program, has posted a review [PDF] of the white paper that my colleagues and I recently wrote for Oracle. As usual, Ian brings fresh perspective and insight to the topic from his perch in an international organization promoting standards for education, where he gets views into multiple projects across a number of countries. His analysis about the overlap between eLearning and eResearch needs is particularly interesting. Well worth the read.

The product group I’m in at Oracle (Academic Enterprise Solutions, or AES) has a new white paper out on the company’s vision of the future of the academic enterprise. A lot of this is aspirational, but it does give you a sense of the general direction that the company would like to take in terms of product development. Also, being Oracle’s vision, it focuses on Oracle’s view of academic IT and how Oracle products fit in. If you don’t like enterprise-y approaches or you don’t like Oracle products, then this document probably won’t be of much use to you.

My apologies. I lied to you, Dear Reader. I had told you that I would videotape OpenWorld for you. But as I had feared, it just didn’t seem right. There was too much awkwardness (due to the fact that I’m an Oracle employee) without enough return. Besides, I was crazy busy. So no video.

I’ll be at OpenWorld—a first for me. I’m not presenting anything this time, but I will be at the booth periodically. If you’re going and want to catch up with me, feel free to ping me: michael+at+mfeldstein+dot+com. Also, I’m going to try out my new Flip camera which, I must say, is the coolest toy I’ve owned that was not manufactured by Apple in a long time. In the future, I’ll be doing videos of the conferences I go to, as a substitute for live-blogging (which I hate doing and suck at). My thought right now is that I’ll do one introductory video for context of each conference and then the rest will be interviews with attendees, but we’ll see how it goes.

In my previous??posts??on this topic, I outlined the mundate yet important core use cases that LIS is intended to address. Now I’d like to start looking at some of the sexier possibilities that the spec enables.

In an earlier post, I outlined the motivating pain that brought the working group members to the table. In this post, I’m going to list out the highlights of the solution we came up with to address that pain. Again, this post is focused mainly on the important but unsexy problems of SIS/LMS integration that IMS LIS was intended to address. I’ll get to some of the sexier implications in a future post.
(...)Read the rest of IMS Learning Information Services: What a Solution Looks Like (738 words)