Even though the last day of class was April 15 – it has not felt like summer until today. I had travel upon travel and lots of little things that kept me really busy. And we went to Summer Circle on Saturday (Free outdoor theater on the Red Cedar River) – so that means it must be summer. This week – I have no where to go (except a quick day trip on Thursday to DC) and nothing to do. So it is “productivity time” – and I get to work on the stuff that I like to work on.

I am cranking on a new thing called Simple Learning Tool Interoperability. This is derived from draft work in process in IMS right now (and yes I checked with Rob before talking about this). The LMS LTI 2 stuff is really taking off with leadership from Wimba, Blackboard, and Microsoft – they are building some pretty cool stuff that will take a few months to sort out.

In the interim, because I have this Google Summer of Code thing and because I have committed to have two tools integrated into Sakai at University of Michigan this Fall, I cannot wait a “few months”. I need to start now – or I will look bad to Google and to UM – and my Google Students (Katherine and Jordi) will look bad as well – we cannot let that happen.

So I extracted a few tasty bits of the IMS LTI 2.0 spec and have written up my own spec which is not identical to IMS LTI 2.0 – but pays major homage to IMS LTI 2.0. Last week, IMS LTI 2.0 made a bit of a shift in direction – in a very good direction in my opinion – and my Simple LTI was rewritten completely since last Wednesday to reflect the new change in direction – and it is aligned with what I believe (this is Chuck talking and not IMS) will be closely aligned with the final IMS LTI spec.

My spec is finished and I have a bunch of test code in place (it has been a fun week and weekend). I will publish this in a few days – my next step is to take the code in SVN and build a solid Sakai implementation of the newly minted spec.

By implementing the spec and using my own testing environment, I make sure that I catch little stupidness in the spec. Also it makes it so I have more sample code to share with others to make it easier to update the spec.

If you really want to watch what s going on – be like Seth and just watch SVN – I just made a tag to keep the Wimba-inspired version of LTI 2.0 in hand because SiteMaker has programmed to that old draft of the spec.

Make a copy of the final version of the Wimba-inspired version of the
LTI portlet - this is what works with Sitemaker 4.6 for now.
From this point forward, the trunk will be stripped down to only
support the new Simple LTI specification.  I will publish the spec
after the code works as a way to review the spec carefully.
--This line, and those below, will be ignored--
A    https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/sakai-portlets/tags/sitemmaker-002

I will try to bring SiteMaker forward to the new spec – but their release process may have “left the port”. I will switch SAMS (Physics grading, assessment and homework system at UM) to the new spec.

I should be announcing the new document in a few days. Watch this space.