Alex Little

Had almost an all day meeting with Ernie from LAMS today which was very productive, and I now have a much clearer idea as to what we are doing within the scope of this project, especially for the coding that we need to do, the architecture, the APIs etc. I need to get the notes from this meeting written up into a proper document and include the whiteboard diagrams (scrawls?!) we came up with. Once I’ve got this written I’ll post a link up so everyone can have a look.

These are some of the areas we should be able to get started on next week:

• Sorting out which IMS Enterprise Service to use – need to contact Sam Easterby-Smith about this
• Set up a project on Sourceforge to store our code for the Moodle Group Module
• Find out more about how to create modules with Moodle
• Install the LAMS module for Moodle so we can have a play with this
• Define more use cases
• Start thinking about how the user interface for setting up the groups would look
• Contact the MINTED group (another JISC funded project under the demonstrator strand) at Sussex Uni, as they are looking at doing very similar work, and we don’t want to duplicate effort.

Spent most of this week working on our internal project planning database, which is all going well – it’s moving forward much quicker than I thought it would take – so that’s always good!!

Had really good meeting today with Ernie from the LAMS team about our JoinIn project, and I’ll post up more information about that on the JoinIn blog/webpage

Been quite busy the last week, mainly away doing "things" – at the end of last week I was invited to a LADiE project workshop in Edinburgh, to discuss the technical aspects of the first draft of their reference model. I learnt quite a lot, especially regarding the use of document style web services over remote procedure call style services. Also got a better idea of how BPEL could be used, from the example that Warwick Bailey gave that they used duing their project to combine Simple Sequencing and QTI.

Then for the first couple of days this week I was at the JISC toolkits kick off meeting, finding out about JISC’s open source maturity model and the peer review sessions which will take place throughout our JoinIn project. Also found that another group at Sussex Uni are doing a similar project to our JoinIn one, where they are using IMS Enterprise to link up Moodle to their student record system – I’ll put more about this stuff in my JoinIn blog

Over the next few days I’m likely to be concentrating on writing bid(s!) for the latest JISC Design for Learning call. Also hoping to meet up next week with Ernie Ghiglione from LAMS to get the ball rolling properly with our JoinIn project, especially regarding the split of the work between OU and LAMS.