Thoughts on the IMS Open Technical Forum

(Isaac also wrote about the forum.)

On Thursday, a group of us (Barbara, David, Chris, Isaac and I) attend the IMS Open Technical Forum held at Stanford.  IMS is in the business of "developing and promoting open specifications for facilitating online distributed learning activities such as locating and using educational content, tracking learner progress, reporting learner performance, and exchanging student records between administrative systems"    Here I will write down some things that struck me about the day.  (Theses notes are not an "objective" reporting or minutes of the proceedings.)

The morning sessions were the best ones since there was some effort to communicate to people who don't normally attend IMS meetings.  For the first panel (Panel Discussion 1: Architectural Frameworks for Learning Interactions), I remember best the excellent slides of Daniel Rehak, Technical Director of the Learning Systems Architecture Lab (LSAL) of Carnegie Mellon University.  Of particular note is the detailed architecture stack and comparison to the MIT-OKI architecture.  When he flashed up the slide for an LSAL Services Demo (which he and his team are currently working on), I turned to Chris and said, "this is what we're trying to do...."

Rehak was followed by Jeff Merriman, Project Leader of the MIT-OKI project (whose purpose and personnel are detailed in a new project blurb).   (We were hoping that Vijay Kumar, the PI of MIT-OKI, would be in attendance.)  It seemed that OKI and IMS are trying to work closely together.  OKI, however, is attempting to produce working software in addition to a specification.  Merriman spoke about having to figure out long-term sustainability for OKI (since the Mellon funding is about $2.5 million over two years (I think)).   It will be interesting to follow the progress of OKI and see what they will have to play with early next year.  Maybe Fred Beshears, who is UC Berkeley's point-person for OKI and attendee at the OKI workshops, can enlighten me.  (I've told Fred that I'd be very interested in any local campus group interested in following OKI together.)   (Other interesting tidbits:  Scott Thorne of MIT, the technical lead for MIT-OKI, was also on the panel.  There was some quick talk about the Educational Activities and Learning Practices working group (EALP) of OKI, headed by Charles Kerns , who is involved with CourseWork ("a new, Web-based teaching toolset under development in Academic Computing[Stanford]".  It would good to learn more about EALP.

(A report on the Ottawa IMS meeting discussing talks by Mark Norton, Scott Thorne, and Dan Rehak might be a worthwhile read.)

The second morning panel was on "Learning Object Repositories and Digital Libaries".  The panel was moderated by Kevin Riley (IMS),  Neil McLean (DETYA, IMS Australia),  Martin Koning Bastiaan (MERLOT, Center for Distributed Learning, CSU), Ralph LeVan (Research, OCLC) and Dipto Chakravarty (on the phone of Artesia). 

As I wrote yesterday, LeVan was my favorite speaker of the day.  He spoke about the potential pitfalls of having only a functional architectural view, which tends to be obscure work that often many depend on others to do (and which no one ends up doing because no one really has the business case to do).  He cautioned that the IMS is heading into an area (distributed database searching) that has been well-studied and been found difficult by librarians (particulary the Z39.50 community).  LeVan argued that the way forward is pragmatism informed (but not ruled) by theory.  Sobering reminder for those of us who think that XML will solve everything and who tend to forget  massive legacy systems.  I'm looking forward to following up on LeVan's work in greater depth.

I also enjoyed Martin Koning Bastiaan's talk and agreed with what he said about metadata.  It was encouraging to hear him talk about how MERLOT is working with the IMS standards in digital repositories.  McLean's work would be helpful to follow up on if we want to understand how a consortium of Australian universities are already doing distributed learning.  (At first glance, they seem to be ahead of us.)

We sat through the working group reports (which, alas, were not terribly accessible to outsiders like us) and left before the keynote to beat the aweful Bay area commute traffic.  Perhaps Fred or Isaac can tell us about Madeleine Rothberg  (NCAM) who spoke about accessibility.