Date

2011-01-14

Lecturer

Dai Griffiths (CETIS, UK)

Summary

The IMS LD specification has attracted considerable interest since its publication in 2003 as a means of modelling and orchestrating educational activities. It aims to make these models interoperable, but one major barrier to this, has been the inability to make a range of services available across multiple systems. This has also meant that Learning Design runtime systems are often rather impoverished with regard to services.

The Institute for Educational Cybernetics developed the Wookie widget server as a response to this need, together with authoring and runtime systems which can author and run Learning Designs including widgets. The Wookie server is a reference implementation of W3C widgets, and has been accepted into the Apache incubator.

Wookie can handle multiple users, making it possible to implement forums, chats and other social applications through widgets.

The system does not implement its own identity management and authorisation processes, but inherits these from the host application in which the widget is embedded, while anonymising all user interactions. This means that wookie can be embedded with ease in a wide range of systems.

The search for a solution to the flexible delivery of services in IMS LD has thus led to the development of a system with a wide range of applications. In IEC we are using it to develop an "Educational App Store" for use by teachers in a range of systems and classroom contexts, and also using it as the basis for a mobile mash-up platform.

Slides

Video

Seminario eMadrid sobre "Diseño de aprendizaje" - Oferta de servicios flexibles para IMS Learning Design con widgets from eMadrid net on Vimeo.

Author Biography

Dai Griffiths (CETIS, UK)

Dai Griffiths is a Professor at the Institute for Educational Cybernetics (IEC), where he coordinates research activities. His background is in the arts and in education, and he has taught at many levels including primary and secondary education, higher education and continuing education, and in industry. Since the early 1990s he has worked on a range of projects focusing on various aspects of technology and education, as a developer, researcher and project manager.

His professional engagement with eLearning started in as a multimedia developer, and expanded into research focused on the use of robotics with young children in the éTui project. In recent years a principal concern has been the development, use and implications of specifications for eLearning. In particular he has published extensively on IMS Learning Design. He was coordinator of the UNFOLD project, funded by the IST programme, during which led six international events for communities of practice involved in IMS LD. He led the IEC contribution to the TENCompetence project, within which IEC developed the Wookie widget server, (Apache Wookie). He is now coordinating IEC work on two projects which make use of Wookie technology in the areas of telecoms mash-ups and in secondary school classrooms.