Openness – George Kroner

George Kroner’s session (Customizing the Blackboard Virtual Learning Experience with Openness) was very interesting, although slightly slanted towards defending Blackboard’s closed source strategy. Which, I suppose, is understandable; have to keep an eye on who signs your paycheck, right?

All kidding aside, he makes a good point about the advisability of modifying source code for a product like an LMS. Every time you modify source, you mess up your next upgrade. Either you have to keep meticulous records about every change you make (which would, of course, be a great practice, but would likely never happen in real life), or have some or all of your changes undone after the upgrade. That is, if the upgrade even completes without running into issues based on your changed code. Even if you did have perfect records of every change you made, you’d have to evaluate each change before the upgrade to see whether it needed to be reapplied, applied in a different way, or skipped. Then you’d have to reapply all the changes after the upgrade, with the inevitable debugging and fixing of issues.

The alternative, according to George, is to consider the LMS a platform on which you can build a customized system using plugins (Building Blocks), API calls, and CSS modifications. Blackboard’s new focus on standards and interoperability will lead to the creation of many tools that will work with not only Blackboard’s LMS(s), but also with other compliant LMSs like Moodle and Sakai. It’s a rosy vision, but only time will tell if Blackboard is now ready to walk the walk instead of just talking the talk. The promise: as long as your customizations are written to the APIs, future upgrades won’t break them.

To this end, BB9 has many web services. BB9.1 will add many more. No official word exactly which web services will be available with 9.1 and what they will do, but I assume more to come in the future (wouldn’t want to make any “forward looking statements”, you know).

Also in BB9, Blackboard has opened up the CSS stylesheets, which allows customers to extensively customize the look and feel of the interface, in a way that will (or should) survive future upgrades. WebCT users have long asked for this… it’s nice to see it come to fruition.

George also put in a good word for www.edugarage.com (the Blackboard Developer’s Network site), the newly launched www.blackboardextensions.com (intended to be a central repository of Building Blocks, both free and commercial), and  www.oscelot.org (the Open Source Community for Educational Learning Objects and Tools).