Some of you mayhave heard about MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) whereby
they are making all of their courseware available online. They have gone
further and have standards so that you can describe courseware. In addition
to this project they have defined the architecture required for a Learning
Management Environment called OPen Knowledge Initiative - (http://web.mit.edu/oki/product/index.html). It is interesting it that it defines what makes up a LME and
then describes what each of the functions do. You will also see a
committment to migrate their existing LME to this new architecture. WEBct
are apparrently looking at the OKI initiative.
Is Moodle going to participate? There is an invitation to software vendors on the OKI website and our university is considering having this as a requirement for and LMS.
Joe
P.S. I couldn't find a forum discussing this so apologies if this is posted in the wrong place.
In reply to Joe Griffin
Re: Learning standards: O.K.I. Service Interface Definitions
از Don Hinkelman در
Hi Joe,
Thanks for bringing up this question (actually, let's move this topic to the Learning Standards forum). I took a look at their site and was pleased to see they are promoting open standards, although I don't know what that means specifically. I could not see detailed module designs like we have in Moodle. Perhaps they are more focused on large scale administrative designs.
Without trying to be facetious, I would like to ask if OKI is interested in participating in Moodle standards? Of course, MIT has lots of money, so I shouldn't be talking absurdly. However, I would invite MIT to look at actual Moodle sites, to see how teachers are actually USING communicative and collaborative tools in practice. A lot can be learned. It is possible to generate a standard TOP DOWN like some big initiatives, but let's also consider generating a standard empirically, that is, BOTTOM UP from actual user best practices.
Thanks for bringing up this question (actually, let's move this topic to the Learning Standards forum). I took a look at their site and was pleased to see they are promoting open standards, although I don't know what that means specifically. I could not see detailed module designs like we have in Moodle. Perhaps they are more focused on large scale administrative designs.
Without trying to be facetious, I would like to ask if OKI is interested in participating in Moodle standards? Of course, MIT has lots of money, so I shouldn't be talking absurdly. However, I would invite MIT to look at actual Moodle sites, to see how teachers are actually USING communicative and collaborative tools in practice. A lot can be learned. It is possible to generate a standard TOP DOWN like some big initiatives, but let's also consider generating a standard empirically, that is, BOTTOM UP from actual user best practices.
In reply to Joe Griffin
Re: Learning standards: O.K.I. Service Interface Definitions
از Martin Dougiamas در
I had conversations with both Vijay Kumar (OKI principal investigator) and Robby Robson (well-known OKI proponent from Eduworks) last year at the ED-MEDIA conference. I can't fault their enthusiasm but I agree with Don that it's a big top-down solution, where the Internet (in my experience) tends to work better with small, bottom-up solutions. They are also (naturally) quite focussed on mega-campuses.
There are heaps of standards already for interconnecting systems such as LDAP, IMAP, HTTP, ODBC, RSS, SCORM, SOAP etc (most of which Moodle already supports and people are using successfully to integrate Moodle with all kinds of databases).
I don't think it will be very hard to later add most of the OKI interfaces to Moodle once there is actually demand for it. Right now there is nothing to connect to!
There are heaps of standards already for interconnecting systems such as LDAP, IMAP, HTTP, ODBC, RSS, SCORM, SOAP etc (most of which Moodle already supports and people are using successfully to integrate Moodle with all kinds of databases).
I don't think it will be very hard to later add most of the OKI interfaces to Moodle once there is actually demand for it. Right now there is nothing to connect to!
In reply to Martin Dougiamas
Re: Learning standards: O.K.I. Service Interface Definitions
از Joe Griffin در
Thanks for the feedback. The reason I asked about OKI is because we at University of Limerick are considering adopting Moodle as our university wide LMS and questions have been raised about how Moodle would fit in with OKI. People here are likely to be impressed by stuff cominmg out of MIT. So any suggestions on how I should respond?
Joe
Joe
In reply to Joe Griffin
Re: Learning standards: O.K.I. Service Interface Definitions
از Martin Dougiamas در
Ask them to explain to you exactly why they think OKI is better than other methods, and what they want to connect Moodle to.
Answers like "I read about OKI in a trade journal" or "it comes from MIT" should not be taken seriously.
If they have a good down-to-earth case for it at Limerick I'm willing to listen, and if they are reaching for their wallets at the same time then moodle.com will certainly be in on it!
Answers like "I read about OKI in a trade journal" or "it comes from MIT" should not be taken seriously.
If they have a good down-to-earth case for it at Limerick I'm willing to listen, and if they are reaching for their wallets at the same time then moodle.com will certainly be in on it!
In reply to Joe Griffin
Re: Learning standards: O.K.I. Service Interface Definitions
از Bryan Williams در
Joe,
You should probably be aware of the fact that several Universities here in the US over the past few years have (again) made grandiose technology platform anouncements, with a certain amount of funding behind them. Typically, they are tied into either a grad students dissertation, or a department heads slush fund (Mellon in this case). Since 1982 I've seen a number of these projects get going, and suddenly fade away when the money runs out or the student (now Dr. So and So) goes to work for PeopleSoft, SAG or another proprietary vendor. Incidentally, there is practically no mention of OKI within the most visable American pedagogical organizations (ASTD and ASCD).
Here are a few question you might ask your peers at Limerick. Why is this project taking so long to get off the ground? And why isn't there more buzz within recognized learning groups? Phase One of OKI was suppose to be ready almost a year ago. Is it ready now? Here is there 5 year timeline.
Ask your peers to call someone at MIT and find out what is really going on, and who is actually supporting this. The last update event they posted on their site was in October of 2002.
In reply to Martin Dougiamas
Re: Learning standards: O.K.I. Service Interface Definitions
از Hannes Gassert در
SOAP is not among the supported standards, is it?
Where and how (would it be | is it) integrated?
Thanks a lot,
Hannes
(Oh, and yes we've got systems to connect to)
Where and how (would it be | is it) integrated?
Thanks a lot,
Hannes
(Oh, and yes we've got systems to connect to
In reply to Joe Griffin
Re: Learning standards: O.K.I. Service Interface Definitions
از Adam Franco در
As an update to using the O.K.I. OSIDs in PHP, we have put up a site for O.K.I. in PHP at http://www.phpoki.org.
We have been working closely with the O.K.I. group at MIT and though the OSIDs were initially released in Java, they were designed to be language independent. Version 2 of the OSIDs (not yet converted to PHP) will remove several Java-centric aspects such as method-overloading (which we got around in PHP by using optional arguments) to make the interfaces even more language independent.
I'd just like to make a quick note in top-down/bottom-up argument that is flowing in this thread:
The situation that we keep running into is that every system out there has its own 'standard' that perfectly fits its own functional/usage/data model. When we, as application devlopers, try to make our application inter-operate with another application with different functional/usage/data models, we need to write some serious glue for each inter-operation that we wish to provide. Where the 'top down' standards developers come in handy is providing a well-thought-out framework of common services that are useful to share. Yes, you lose some design/operational flexibility when you make calls across that interface layer, thought not necessarily more than your custom glue would. The up-side is that each application can code their own calls to a standard such as O.K.I.'s and not have to write special glue for other apps that do the same, saving everyone a lot of hassle.
We have been working closely with the O.K.I. group at MIT and though the OSIDs were initially released in Java, they were designed to be language independent. Version 2 of the OSIDs (not yet converted to PHP) will remove several Java-centric aspects such as method-overloading (which we got around in PHP by using optional arguments) to make the interfaces even more language independent.
I'd just like to make a quick note in top-down/bottom-up argument that is flowing in this thread:
The situation that we keep running into is that every system out there has its own 'standard' that perfectly fits its own functional/usage/data model. When we, as application devlopers, try to make our application inter-operate with another application with different functional/usage/data models, we need to write some serious glue for each inter-operation that we wish to provide. Where the 'top down' standards developers come in handy is providing a well-thought-out framework of common services that are useful to share. Yes, you lose some design/operational flexibility when you make calls across that interface layer, thought not necessarily more than your custom glue would. The up-side is that each application can code their own calls to a standard such as O.K.I.'s and not have to write special glue for other apps that do the same, saving everyone a lot of hassle.