In an earlier post, I outlined the motivating pain that brought the working group members to the table. In this post, I’m going to list out the highlights of the solution we came up with to address that pain. Again, this post is focused mainly on the important but unsexy problems of SIS/LMS integration that IMS LIS was intended to address. I’ll get to some of the sexier implications in a future post.
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A few weeks back, I got an invitation from Matt Small to get a tour of Blackboard NG. Given all the rumors and speculation around it, I was obviously interested. I particularly wanted to know how much of it exists in code today and how much is vapor. So I took Matt up on his offer, and got a tour from him and John Fontaine. And while I didn’t quite get a full answer to the vaporware question, I did learn a lot of other interesting stuff about the platform and Blackboard’s strategy.
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photo credit: iluvcocacola
e-Literate is back in business and ready to go. Which is good, because I have a backlog of posts I want to get to.
Before I do, though, I want to acknowledge two great additions to my blogging arsenal. First of all, the WordPress theme I’m using is called “Thematic,” and it’s by Ian Stewart of ThemeShaper. I think it’s very easy to read and navigate, which is the top characteristic I was looking for. Ian was also terrific in providing technical support. Second, I have discovered a great plug-in called Photo Dropper that lets me search for Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos and drop them into my post, all right from my WordPress “Write a Post” page. Expect to see more images in my posts in the future.
e-Literate has been upgraded and is about 90% configured. I still have to figure out how to do a few things (e.g., add a navigation tab for the blog page without breaking other things), and I will continue to tweak it for the next few days, but it’s close enough to be basically usable. Please feel free to poke around and provide me feedback, whether good or bad, on how it looks and works for you.
I’m going to be upgrading my blogging software this weekend. This will mean losing some of the customizations to the site that I really like (but that probably nobody else noticed), but it also means that I’ll be able to stay current with WordPress releases in the future. In the process, I’ll be changing the look and feel substantially. Again, I have mixed feelings about this, but on balance I think it is for the best.
At any rate, don’t be surprised if the blog looks mangled or even is down altogether for a while over the weekend. I’ll post again to let you know when it’s done.
