I am sitting at the Basement 414 space in Lansing, MI. B414 has been going on for about a year and a half. For those of you who know me – I like places that have soul – bars, restaurants, etc that feel like they are organically grown – a place where when you walk in you get a sense, a feeling, and that feeling is defined by the current and past occupants of the space.
http://b414.org/
http://twitter.com/B414/
First off, some factual bits. B414 is alcohol-free, there is no admittance fee (donations accepted), there is no food, you can buy coffee and Faygo pop and sometimes they have popcorn, the bands are very local and they have free WiFi. There are four rooms which make up 4000 square feet of floor space. One room is the quieter room and tends to focus on art, the second room is the concert room – it can hold about 40-50 people and it is a very fun and intimate space including a dance floor, the third room is still storage, and the fourth room is the band staging area. Bands can unload their stuff and stage it in a room connected to the concert room. This allows 4-5 bands per night with a just a little down time – which leads to a lot of fun.

B414 is operated by a passionate group of local arts and IT folks who are committed to creating a friendly, comfortable accepting, tolerant space with as few rules as possible. There are few rules and everyone seems to get along and every one just cooperates with each other. The focus is being together and having a good time.
Fridays and Saturdays are the high energy days with more intense rock. Weeknights are slower – weekend day time s might be more artsy of just a place to hang out and have some coffee.
While this is a misleading description, B414 is kind of like a real-world myspace – an our-space as it were. There is fun, over the top artsy background – some music from time to time – a bunch of friends that support and point to one another – in a sense a real-world social network.
The age group is pretty much all over the map – there is not one pattern – you see kids with their parents (one band had an 8 year old drummer) high school students, college students, and old people like me as well. In a sense the very diverse nature of the crowd is a very stabilizing and calming influence. This space is not about one thing – it is about the occupants at the current moment.
They don’t promote it too much – folks usually find out about it via word-of-mouth – in a sense like MySpace itself.
If at this point, you have absolutely *no* idea what I am talking about – don’t worry – it is pretty much impossible to describe until you get to Basement 414 and experience it for yourself. In a sense, B414 is different for everyone.
For me, it is a place to take Brent’s High School friends so they can do something other than play video games all summer – they meet people, make friends, experience talent, relax, find a place where they belong, and all the while I am sitting here with my Macintosh getting some work done – at least I will get to work after I get this blog post finished.
The B414 team are really cool and relaxed – they just blend into the background – they do a good job of keeping their http://b414.org/ page up-to-date with upcoming events. To find it, go south on Cedar Street and turn into the alley on the right just south of the NutHouse and go to the end of the alley – B414 is the last door in the last building on the right side of the alley – if the door is open – it is open.

I am writing some draft text for a grant having to do with Cyber Infrasturcture. This text will be massively edited before it goes into the final proposal – I am just putting it up here as draft and thoughts – comments welcome.

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Abstract: Building Sakai tools in the Cloud Using Google App Engine (WorkShop)
This workshop will introduce attendees to the Google App Engine and show how to write simple learning tools in Python and host them in Google App Engine. Then students will integrate their tools into Sakai using IMS Learning Tools Interoperability. The workshop will introduce Google App Engine and introduce IMS Learning Tools Interoperability and have a hands-on activity. Students should pre-install the Google App Engine environment on their laptop following instructions at www.appenginelearn.com.
Note To Reviewers: Please do not schedule this at the same time as a Sakai3 developer workshop because I want to go to the Sakai3 workshop myself.
Abstract: Outcome-Based Learning Tools at the U. Michigan Medical School
The University of Michigan is developing outcome-based approaches to Medical Education ranging from clinical experiences in first-year students to lifelong learning portfolios. The underlying principle of the program is outcome-based self-directed learning where the student manages their own plan-learn-assess-adjust cycles with help and guidance from faculty and mentors. The students are tracked against competencies and learning objectives throughout their education. We are developing new learning tools to support this educational model and approach. Instead of looking for a general one-size-fits-all solution, the team has chosen to take a very agile approach to building tools that meet the needs of the faculty, student, and institution. The focus is on quickly making useful and usable tools and getting the tools in the hands of the students and getting feedback. Tools are conceived, designed, developed, deployed, and used in learning activities in a 10-15 week cycle idea to production. Sakai is used to manage the course and launch these new tools using IMS Learning Tools Interoperability. The model is to create a fluid ecosystem of dynamic and innovative tools integrated into and coordinated by Sakai.

This is my first O’Reilly blog post. Feel free to point out embarrassing typos. Here is the real post:
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/04/the-app-engine-birds-of-a-feat.html
Here is an excerpt:
This was my second Pycon – since the last two have been in Chicago and on a weekend it has been an easy drive for me to attend coming from Michigan. Since last year was my first time at Pycon – I was just finding my way around. This year I was invited to all the “Python educators” parties and running around promoting my upcoming “Using Google App Engine” book – handing out postcards with discount codes and hanging out at the O’Reilly booth.
I was really excited when Guido posted a BOF about Google App Engine. Even though I wrote an introductory book, there were a few nagging questions that the documentation seemed not to answer.
….

I must really like everything else about the iPhone given how frustrating I find the keyboard. For example, last night I sent the following message to George Kroner (a PSU alum):
Go Penn State – NIT Champs
I was walking as I typed it in – and Apple made the following spelling correction:
Go Penn State – NOT Champs
Check it out – I and O are near each other on the keyboard. And given the nature of the NIT – the message as ruined by Apple’s spelling correction / keyboard could be the message I meant to sent – particularly if I was a mean person.
And George might have assumed I *meant* the mean variant of the message – given the Big-Ten school where I work and the Big-Ten school where I got my degrees from. He might have never mentioned it to me so I could apologize for the message I never meant to send. He might have though I was a mean person forever!
I was great to be at State College last night watching PSU win the NIT – go Big-Ten!
I turned off spelling correction this morning. At least Apple gives me that option so the mistakes are all mine and/or the keyboard.

Today was a kind of neat day.
It started at 3:30 AM in Boston when I got up to go to the airport to make a 5:56AM flight to Detroit – I was still geeked because I thought my keynote at Apple Academix at MIT went pretty well.
The flight arrived in Detroit at 8:10 AM – so I drove home arriving about 9:30AM.
I spent a few hours cleaning up some code I owed Alan Berg and cleaning up a Melete patch for Mallika Thoppay fixing a bug McGraw-Hill found in their testing.
By about noon I had sent the two code bis off and went to Office Max to print 100 30% off coupons for my App Engine book to take to Pycon.
I left for Pycon in Chicago at about 1:30. After I got on the road I called Bryan H. for a quick chat -but we starrted just catching up and we ended up talking for over an hour. By that time I was past Kalamazoo.
At that point Christina Sherman of the extensible catalog(XC) project called and we talked for about 2.5 hours – all the way until I reached PyCon at O’Hare Airport – it was a lovely chat and made the drive seem almost instantaneous.
I walked in, got registered, and sat down to use the WiFi and Steve Githens walks by and we catch up. Then I go to the lightning talk.
After the lightening I stop by the O’Reilly booth to talk to Laurel Ackerman and introduced myself and promised to bring in the coupons tomorrow morning.
Then I wandered back to meet the Edu-Sig crew for dinner at a Mexican restaraunt. I ended up sitting with Andrew Harrington from Loyola, the guy who write the Crunchy package, and Jeff Elkner who is a High School teacher from Virginia who loved the idea of teaching App Engine to his students.
After dinner, we went to the BOF where I reconnected with Anna Ravencroft, Kirby Urner, and the whole gang. As usual the topics were pretty broad and big – but it was a good group and I got the strong sense that the cause of teaching with and about Python had really advanced in a year. There were small and large successes to talk about and it felt to me that we were moving away from the notion of “if” and toward the notion of “when”.
We talked about the Punch/Enbody talk – which I did not see but was well received.
And now at 12:39 AM I am finally in the hotel ready to go to sleep. What a cool day.

Charles Severance, Joseph Hardin, Ted Hanss
With well over a decade of development, deployment, and experience, enterprise learning management systems are deeply integrated into most institutions of higher education. There are very few remaining schools that rely solely on paper, face-to-face conversations, lectures with overhead projectors and chalkboards. Much like the shape and structure of classrooms is nearly universal around the world, so too is the shape and design of the enterprise teaching and learning management systems around the world.
Much like the physical shape of the classroom is a forced perspective that affects how we teach and learn, so too the layout and shape of these LMS systems forces perspective that strongly shapes how we think and teach using technology. In a sense given that these learning management systems are provided by the central campus authority and often faculty are forced by the administration to use these systems, it is no wonder that our approach to teaching and learning is affected by the capabilities and structure of these systems.
Given that higher education faculty are often independent thinkers, there is a natural tendency to reject the convention that comes from the administration and strike out on one’s own direction and quest (like teaching at a coffee shop or outside on a nice day). This has led to a movement for “Personal Learning Environments” that advocates that learning software should be similar to Peer-To-Peer software like Napster or BitTorrent. While some of these experiments have been interesting in particular contexts, the idea that we can replace the central Learning Management Systems with software that runs on each student’s laptops has not enjoyed adoption.
Another approach faculty use to break out of the enterprise LMS has been to simply teach using public Web 2.0 features like Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, Google Docs, etc. Often each teacher invents their own approach and ultimately takes the responsibility for teaching the students to use their chosen suite of teaching technologies. This takes essential time away from teaching the subject of the course.
The

Last week I spent two fun days at Blackboard hacking with John Fontaine and George Kroner. My goal was to advance my understanding of the Blackboard Proxy tool and get a better sense of how to fit the upcoming IMS Learning Tools Interoperability specification into Blackboard’s product. Part of my job as the IMS Developer Network Coordinator is to “network” with developers and this was a perfect example of a situation where I could advance the cause of interoperability amongst learning management systems and learn something new.

None of the statements or pictures in this post represent any product commitment by anyone. They are just hacks to show proof of concept.

I arrived with a plan to write a SimpleLTI (simplelti.appspot.com) Building Block – but quickly decided to spend our time playing with BB9 proxy to see how it lined up with SimpleLTI, BasicLTI, and LTI 2.0.

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Dr. Charles Severance, University of Michigan School of Information

Today’s learning management systems, such as Sakai, Blackboard, Angel, Moodle, and others, represent a very mature and smoothly functioning ecosystem. These systems are all mature enough that the majority of faculty and student users are generally satisfied – regardless of which system their university has chosen. Increasingly, these products adopt each other’s features and are slowly beginning to look like clones of one another. This behavior is quite natural in a well diffused market, where the only way to get a new customer is to take that customer away from a competitor. The right marketing approach in a saturated market is to claim “we have everything they have – and more!”. Products compare themselves with the others in the market and adopt features to either gain an edge over a competitor or take away a competitor’s edge in some area.

One might see this seeming stability and maturity in the ecosystem as the “golden age” of Learning Management Systems. However, when things start to appear to be “too stable” – perhaps it really means that we are waiting for a disruptive change to move us in a new direction and evolve and grow. When we look back a few years from now, we may realize that this was just the late Jurassic period and the current crop of LMSs are the Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Apatosaurus – unknowingly waiting for the meteor to strike.

There is a significant unsolved problem when moving course information between Learning Management Systems and Open Educational Resources such as the MIT Open Courseware initiative. There is a similar tension moving course content between commercial publishers and LMSs. Currently, the LMS holds the ‘high ground’ in the conflict with content producers because we force students to use an LMS. Content producers must convince the teachers to adopt their content and then bring the content into the LMS. So, in order to reach their market, content producers are forced to adjust to the technical demands of the LMS vendors – even if those technical demands change each time the vendor produces a new release of the LMS. There is a lucrative sub-industry in the publishing business to take a copy of publisher content and produce up to 5-10 versions of the same content for the each LMS.

The problem is no better when we are taking content out of an LMS. To produce an Open Educational Resource from LMS-based materials, there is often a completely custom, high touch/high cost process to extract, convert and clean up the materials so they can be published into the OER Repository. Of course, once in the OER Repository, other teachers want to use the materials and so they need to pull the learning resources *back into* their local LMS. The need to go through two painful conversions to get “open” learning content out of one LMS and then back into another makes the cross-flow and remixing of learning content between different LMS systems via OER repositories virtually impossible and sadly rather rare.

The meteor strike will happen when the owners and holders of content tire of the current situation and decide to take the initiative and simply change the rules of the game. Content holders will realize that the current crop of Learning Management Systems are mostly a set of “learning gadgets” arranged around a simple content management system. It will quickly become clear that it is easier for the learner to bring the Learning Management System “gadgets” to the content than laboriously convert and copy the content into the LMS. We should not redundantly embed learning resources in hundreds or thousands of Learning Management Systems just so the content can be “close” to the learning gadgets.

Bringing the learning software to the content has many benefits. There is a single carefully curated and maintained copy of the materials. The providers of information can more easily track use metrics and report on impact. Commercial content providers can build scalable business models that do not include tailored conversion and duplicative content handling. Dramatically reducing the production and logistics costs of published materials may lead to new attractive business models for publisher-provided content as well as greatly increase the reuse of open materials.

What is needed is a way for the LMS to “tag along” as the user moves between various sources of content. In essence, the LMS should be a small unobtrusive menu layered on top of the content. This “embedded” LMS has all of the features of the current LMS offerings. It does not have to be any one LMS system – it can even make use of best-of-breed existing tools and capabilities in Moodle, Angel, Sakai, Blackboard or others as long as the current LMS providers invest the time to make their tools and capabilities available as widgets.

The content must be able to retrieve a list of LMS tools to use and identify the appropriate learning context for the current student viewing the material. With this approach, literally thousands of students in hundreds of learning contexts could be simultaneously using the same freshman calculus materials at an OER repository such as open.umich.edu. Each student is given a personal set of tools appropriate for an individualized learning context.

At a high level, the approach is quite simple – we borrow a well-understood pattern from service-oriented architecture called “inversion of control”. The content does not know in advance which LMS will be used — instead, at the moment the student visits the content page, the content contacts a central server and asks “what tools are configured for the current viewer of my content”. The tools are then displayed in a menu bar that hovers unobtrusively over the content. The learner experience consists of traveling from one content page/site to another and this little LMS toolbar just follows them around. The toolbar can even have a “Content Map” tool that leads the student from site to site.

This is accomplished in a similar manner to Google Analytics, Google Maps, or Google Friend Connect. A bit of JavaScript from a trusted source is embedded in the content and handles all of the management of determining which tools are appropriate for the current user viewing the page and displays the appropriate menu above the page. When a menu item is chosen the learning gadget pops up on top of the content. The gadgets can run back on the servers at the students’ campus – the content does not even know the identities of the students visiting the content. All of the logging and identity is stored back at the system that is running the widgets. All of the orchestration of identity, menus, and tool launching can be handled by an emerging FaceBook-like standard for learning – IMS Learning Tools Interoperability.

When the content providers decide to enable the use of learning management system widgets on top of their content, the transformation from LMS-centered learning to student and content-centered learning will likely happen very rapidly.

If this approach is widely adopted it will dramatically change the role of the LMS in education. The move away from LMS-centered thinking to content-centered (and web-centered) thinking in teaching technology could be the meteor-like transformative event that may make the current LMS walled-garden approach extinct in a few years. Of course, this new approach is open and standards based so it allows any LMS to produce an “embedded” version of itself for use in this new content-centered learning environment.

Perhaps the dinosaurs will evolve instead of going completely extinct after the content meteor hits. The more adaptable LMS platforms will survive by evolving to grow wings and feathers and learning to fly.

If all goes well, perhaps a few years from now when learners, mentors and teachers are flying around the web, learning as they go, clever embedded versions of Moodle, Angel, Sakai, and Blackboard will be their ever-present “co-pilots” along with a new and diverse set of learning tools to meet the needs of portfolios, lifelong learning, user-centered learning, and ideas that we have not even imagined.

This is an E-Mail I sent a while responding to a query that triggered me to think about “how I would do research collaboration” if I ever once again got the chance.
First off, I would love to help in your effort – I have a long history of trying to get researchers to collaborate – sadly many of my efforts were less than successes.