You may have heard by now that alongside my full-time teaching at the University of Michigan School of Information I will be working with the IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. My task is to improve and grow the IMS Developer Network and to focus on increasing the adoption of IMS standards in real, released and widely deployed applications.
http://www.imsglobal.org/severance.html
This IMS work is very complimentary to my work in the School of Information. My research area and focus since 1996 has always been very web 2.0 and very much about technology enhancing teaching and learning – so this fits very well with my research agenda in the School of Information. Even before this position, I was already talking with some of my students about summer projects in teaching and learning and internships with IMS members. My management at the School of Information (Judy Olson) is very supportive of my activities in IMS.
The University of Michigan CIO office (John King) is also very supportive of my increased level of involvement in IMS in a consulting role – Michigan was one of the founding institutions which formed IMS over ten years ago and Michigan continues to be a strong supporter of IMS. I will no longer be the University of Michigan’s formal technical representative to IMS so David Haines will take over that role and Noah Botimer may also become involved in IMS from Michigan. I am excited to see how Michigan is increasing its commitment to IMS at this point in time. Their enthusiastic support for me in this new effort is part of that increased commitment – I appreciate that very much. Michigan is hosting the next IMS Quarterly Meeting in Ann Arbor June 9-12 – I hope to see you there – Ann Arbor is wonderful in June. We are planning an awesome summit meeting with speakers from around the world.
http://www.imsglobal.org/june2008meeting.html
Looking forward, as I take on this new role, a couple of things won’t change much:
(a) I will continue to be interested in interoperability between tools and data between different learning management systems. I will continue to be interested in building bridges between commercial and various open source learning management systems.
(b) I will continue to be involved in Sakai as a volunteer developer in my spare time. My interests in the past year have centered around Sakai’s portal and IMS Learning Tool Interoperability 2.0. I expect this will continue – I hope that over the summer I can go after some of my assigned Sakai JIRA items and get my list down to a manageable level for the 2.6 release.
(c) I will continue to attend Sakai, JA-Sig and other meetings to the extent that I have funds to support my travel. At these meetings I can represent both Michigan and IMS.
(d) I will continue to come to IMS meetings and participate in working groups – I will be giving a few formal IMS talks about the developer network at the meetings in addition to participating in working groups.
(e) I will continue to take my Sakaiger (www.sakaiger.com) with me as I travel and take pictures of the Sakaiger with wonderful people in teaching and learning in wonderful locations.
I like many things about my new IMS position:
(a) I can work on developing relationships with the developers and decision makers in various open source and commercial companies – and try to use personal interaction and connections to build “critical mass” for standards adoption in a way that “sticks” – I love this kind of community building work. I love talking to folks and learning their needs, goals, and issues and trying to find a path forward where everybody wins.
(b) IMS has a very large community which is easily accessed through webinars using Wimba’s Classroom product. IMS webinars draw a wide ranging audience and are a great way to generate interest in IMS initiatives. This lets me do another thing I like very much – prepare PowerPoint and give talks :)
(c) Rob has given me some resources (time and money) to invest in advancing the adoption of IMS standards – it is not a lot – but it means that I can push on a few really important things. I can also raise additional funds through IMS to further speed up the process of adoption and dispersion.
So the basic idea is to get a lively development community around the IMS standards. I would like get IMS to have an open source repository, contribution agreements, and have IMS become an open source development organization where we focus on building reusable code that makes IMS standards adoption as easy as possible in as many languages as possible. For example, I would like to see us collectively build and maintain some utility elements and test harnesses that allow developing applications for IMS standards easier.
As an example, this week I am working at Wimba on IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0. Wimba has developed some simple PHP code that can be used to emulate a IMS LTI Consumer tool – it is not a Learning Management System – it is just 300 lines of PHP – it is very useful to exercise an LTI Producer. I doubt that Wimba would want to release, support, and maintain this code as Wimba – but the code would be extremely useful to others interested in learning about LTI and in particular, implementing LTI in PHP. So it would be nice to have a repository where code like this could be contributed and made available under an Apache 2.0 license from IMS. The code may or may not be perfect – but at least we don’t lose the material that is produced as we do the engineering that goes on as part of standards development. We will be very careful to separate and label “contributed” materials form those materials which are actual IMS products.
I would like to get to a point where we have a team of developers from the IMS member organizations where those developers are released to spend a bit of their time on the problems of the commons. I hope to help guide that activity and produce a roadmap for where we would go with these shared resources.
It is a key point that my role does not have enough resources from IMS to actually *do* much of anything – I may do (or support) some focused development here and there to make a demo better or do a proof of concept to help people to see possibilities or to take some code that is contributed and improve the documentation or things like that. The bulk of the work will still need to be done by the member organizations. It is my hope that with some central coordination and communication we all can do it together much more efficiently.
My Google Summer of Code is a good example of how I hope to leverage resources to advance IMS standards adoption – focusing on adding coordination and leadership value to help guide resources in the right direction for the common good.
http://www.sakaiproject.org/soc2008/
I will initially focus on IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 and try to get it to the point where it can serve to help define the right way to build and accumulate technology in the IMS Developer’s Network as we work towards developing and finalizing a standard. I will move into Common Cartridge and Learner Information Services (formerly Enterprise). After those standards, my interest is in IMS Learning Design and Portfolio standards and seeing how these standards can have increased impact in the marketplace.
I will be giving a talk next week at JA-Sig in Minneapolis, MN on functionality mash up and IMS Learning Tools Interoperability. If you are going to JA-Sig stop by and say “hi”.
You can contact me at my IMS E-Mail at cseverance at imsglobal.org – of course csev at umich.edu will continue to work as well. Please let me know if you have any ideas as t how to improve the IMS Developer Network please let me know. I hope to see you at future IMS meetings such as IMS Learning Impact in Austin May 12-16 and at the IMS Quarterly Meeting in Ann Arbor, IM USA June 9-12.
http://www.imsglobal.org/learningimpact2008/agenda.html
http://www.imsglobal.org/june2008meeting.html
P.S. If you know of any good places to do Karaoke in Austin – let me know. We should have a good Karaoke BOF at Learning Impact.