Fresh on the heels of working with Marc Ritter of Wimba, I spent this week in Vancouver working with the developers of SiteMaker (www.gvcsitemaker.com) to do an initial integration of SiteMaker into Sakai using a prototype version of IMS LTI 2.0. Jonathan presented this approach in his SiteMaker talk at the the Newport Beach.
Chuck Hill of GVC did a great job on the SiteMaker side. We produced a really simple user interface that mimics YouTube’s approach – “cut and paste this bit” to make this as simple as possible. The user never has to touch any XML. Jonathan Maybaum of UM deserves the credit for the clever UI design – he always tries to think about things from the user perspective and he wanted it as simple as possible.
We also implemented the shared secret security with message signing with SHA hashing. We spent some time thinking about how to improve the security further.
The code modifications to SiteMaker really support all of the UI including needed persistence and the code is complete and checked into the trunk of SiteMaker.
Here are some screenshots of the SIteMaker Configuration Screens
SiteMaker Access Configuration
SiteMaker Configuring Remote Participant Access
I ended up building a new Sakai JSR-168 portlet that is unique to LTI-2.0 to make it much cleaner and simpler than LTI 1.0 – this new portlet is now in SVN here:
https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/sakai-portlets/trunk/
Here are some Sakai screenshots:
Sakai Configuration Screen
Sakai Launching SiteMaker using LTI in the frame set portal
There is more work to be done and the LTI specification is still being developed so this code will need to evolve over time – but this much progress is a testimate as to how much simpler Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 is when compared to IMS Tools Interoperability 1.0.

At the last IMS meeting, a lot of progress was made on IMS LTI 2.0 – I am now very excited about this spec and have pretty much switched my efforts from IMS TI 1.0 to IMS LTI 2.0.
The key is the amazing work and investment on the part of Wimba (www.wimba.com). Marc Ritter of Wimba has done some super work – he did a great demo of an BlackBoard building block working with Wimba to pull Wimba into Blackboard – they are also working on a Moodle Module as well.
Not wanting to be left out when cool code is starting to work – I worked with Marc to connect Wimba into Sakai using his early version of LTI 2.0. Here are screenshots:
Wimba Running in Sakai using LTI 2.0
Wimba running in BlackBoard using LTI 2.0
This is very exciting – more soon on making Sakai and SiteMaker working together using LTI 2.0.

The Mac Air is the first time in recent memory where I went to a computer with less. Less disk – less screen real estate, less plugs, and nicely – less weight.
Here are my notes.

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The OSP group was discussion options for workflow and Mark Breuker opened up the topic of using IMS Learning Design to solve workflow problems. While I have not discussed this much except with a few pals – using IMS LD as workflow a pet idea of mine.
So I wrote up this response.

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I just came up with that one and wanted to write it down. I am about to end my hippie phase of growing my hair long and go back to the short hair cut. So now I will once again match my pictures on the web. It is easier to get a haircut than to update all of my profile pictures around the web.

The MIT Open Courseware project is a success at producing reusable learning materials for public consumption. As the impact of Open Courseware is broadened and more institutions provide open courseware materials, we will need to find ways to organize dynamic learning around those materials involving participants inside classrooms, outside of classrooms, and a mixture of both. Specifically, we will need to create global learning communities and support the ability of their members to work through materials collaboratively. As part of an effort to explore possible next steps beyond Open Content, we are taking a novel approach to teaching university courses where all of the course materials and participant interactions are done in the open. In these courses, anyone can join and participate in the learning community utilizing Sakai. Course materials are produced and published immediately – each participant is presented with one of three views determined on the basis of their relationship to the university course. (1) A public view available to anyone with an Internet connection and a browser. These participants see all the course material, but do not see or participate in the discussion or email interactions. (2) A learning community member view is available to anyone (including the general public) using a University of Michigan Friend account to join the course site. These participants engage in the course materials and the interactive tools. (3) A student view is available to students formally enrolled in the class. The only difference between the student view and the learning community view is that the students have access to an assignments tool which allows the submission and grading of assignments and exams. This poster will describe our experience using this approach in a masters-level class and an undergraduate class, and discuss the implications of our experience for teaching future classes.
Charles Severance and Stephanie D. Teasley, University of Michigan

I got the following question:
I think I’m most interested in what “stretching Sakai” to be a portal
would look like, a clearer picture of what the challenges and
solutions would be. Do you know someone in the community who is
trying to take this tack?
Here is my answer.

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I am preparing to merge SAK-11544 into the trunk – I invite folks to take a look at the code and give a shout out if they see any “gotchas”.

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Open Source Learning Management systems like Moodle and Sakai are becoming an increasingly significant segment of the LMS market. Open Source systems are adopted at all levels from young children to higher education and life long learning. While it is nice to get software for free – the ultimate impact of these systems will be how they change our thinking about teaching with technology. Most of the commercial LMS systems are based on a very structured model of teaching and learning with technology from the late 1990’s. However products like Sakai and Moodle are increasingly pushed to function in a Web 2.0 / Facebook oriented world – where the learning is brought naturally into a student’s multi-tasking and very busy life at the right point in that student’s life. By allowing those that teach and use these systems to have greater influence over the capabilities of these systems – the open source systems naturally evolve toward the real needs of teaching and learning. Having two or more strong entries in the Open Source LMS space insures that both products continue to innovate over time. And in particular there is increasing cross-pollination of ideas in one community that naturally move into another community. Perhaps the Sakai community will think of an innovation first and then Moodle community will improve on it or vice versa. With open source philosophy at the core of the communities developing and maintaining these systems sharing of ideas and innovations in pedagogy is as natural as sharing source code. While each community is very proud of their particular value, these communities tend not to feel that any one community “owns” any one innovative idea.

I used Oracle for the first time in my life today – thanks to help from David Haines – it was not nearly as scary as I had imagined. David told me about henplus – which is the “vi” of database debugging tools – fits my style perfectly.
He walked me through my properties and getting connected to the database. Once connected – it felt a lot like any other database. Hey – put semicolons at the end.
The MailArchive paging code came together in three compiles. Here are some cool queries.
select * from ( select a.*, rownum rnum from ( select XML from MAILARCHIVE_MESSAGE where (CHANNEL_ID = ? ) order by MESSAGE_DATE desc ) a where rownum <= 20 ) where rnum >= 11
Note that the rows start from 1 – unlike the LIMIT in HSQL or MySql – where the rows start from zero. But all in all pretty straightforward.