During my talk at the Blackboard DevCon, I was explaining why the development of standards seems quite dull – but is essential. I likened it to building a sewer system in a new subdivision long before any homes are built and long before any people live in the subdivision. And once the people live there, all the fine workmanship in building the sewer is deeply underground and never seen again (hopefully).

Here was my quote:

“If the toilet does not flush, no one will live in that house. That is why I am so excited about plumbing.”

Here are the slides for the talk:

http://slidesha.re/qqYy0P

Here is a video of the Demo/HACK of Blackboard as a Basic LTI Provider:

http://www.vimeo.com/26310497

John Fontaine did most of the work of the demo by hacking up a Basic LTI Provider Building block roughly modeled on the ProviderServlet in Sakai that makes Sakai a Provider. I contributed by checking code into his building block that broke it and triggering John to fix it.

Here is that code on www.oscelot.org :

http://projects.oscelot.org/gf/project/oscelotblti/

I must repeat that this is *not* a product direction – it was just a fun five-hour hackathon result.