Comments on: Now, That’s What I’m Talkin’ ’bout!

by: Nils Hjelmervik

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 14:14:25 +0000

I’ts now been two years since this post first was published.
Has ther been any developmet?
Is there any tools publicly available except for the ConseptTutor?
Can I now buy an xml config file witch give me access to a tool in a LMS that supports the IMS tools interoperability guidelines?

by: e-Literate: Now, That's What I'm Talkin' 'bout! [demonstration of the IMS To

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 21:30:48 +0000

Opinion from the e-Literate edublog on the recent demonstration of IMS Tools interoperability between FOSS and proprietary systems.

by: Ernie Ghiglione

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 11:59:07 +0000

It’s a pitty that IMS TI left aside a lot of aspects that would be great to have include in it.

For instance, the integration doesn’t include any aspect of authoring. So you would have to have created the assessment before hand in Samigo -rather than potentially created on the fly or from your LMS if needed.

In addition, it looks to me from my conversations with the Sakai fellows at Alt-i-lab that there’s little you can do to monitor the state of the integrated tool that you have called from your LMS. There’s really a way for the user to click on the “Finish” button on the assessment and go back to your LMS.

So, for certain tool that require not to have any tracking of state, then IMS TI might be useful. However, for some others (LAMS included) this doesn’t quite help.

It would have been great if we could have used IMS TI to basically have tools that can be run in any LMS, since once you do your tool proxy one, you are ready to go. But I guess for a bunch of tools, we would have to still work on specialized integration if we want richer ways of integrations.

Ernie

by: Ray Davis

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 21:35:24 +0000

The Sakai 2.0 Gradebook has also been designed to be loosely coupled to the framework. (And to support the Back button, although it’s definitely odd application out at this point.)

by: Michael Feldstein

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 06:33:49 +0000

That’s only true to a degree, Dave. In the short-run, the platforms don’t all have to be supported by the same people. If they are web services, they don’t even have to live on the same server. (I don’t know if this applies to TI specifically, since I haven’t seen the spec, but it’s language-independent nature would lead me to suspect that it does.)

In the long-run, at least some of these tools will break free from their platforms (as Samigo has from Sakai). You won’t have to support the platform; just the individual tool.

by: Dave Bauer

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 04:41:15 +0000

Michael,

I love the idea of picking the best tools from each system and hooking them together. Overall it sounds like an amazing goal.

I think a realistic limitation of all this, at this time, is that you’d need to support 2, or 3 or more “platforms” and that is going to cost a lot. Now is the cost worth it? That’s a good question. It might be if the alternative is a greatly dimished capability, for example, if the message board in one system is way behind, or just doesn’t support the methods of learning that you need.

I don’t want to diminish the potential, I think yo u are on the right track, I guess the road will just be bumpy.