D’Arcy Norman dot net

We’re working on a whole bunch of related (and sometimes dependent) projects here at the Learning Commons, and it’s sometimes difficult to communicate how they all fit together.

Although we are coming at several related problems from several directions simultaneously, we see them all as One Big Project, with each component making up part of a larger puzzle. Here’s the extremely simplified model of how the projects fit together:

Perhaps the easiest way of thinking about these projects is with APOLLO acting as a kind of malleable glue that can hold distinct and separate technologies together. We see things like ties to Blackboard LMS happening somehow via APOLLO, which can serve as a bridge between any of the other project puzzle pieces.

One important thing we keep striving toward is interoperability. Interoperability amongst our own tools (ALOHA, APOLLO, CAREO, etc…), and interoperability amongst external tools (Blackboard, Pachyderm, Weblogs, etc..). They are both important kinds of interoperability, and we take it all quite seriously.

It’s also feeling like we’re in the process of hitting critical mass, where the project puzzle pieces are finally fitting together well enough, and covering enough of the whole puzzle, that we’ll be able to do some extremely cool and compelling things in the coming weeks and months. This is an excellent time to be playing around with this stuff.

Here’s a partial list of some of the related projects we’re working on at the Learning Commons:

• APOLLO
• ALOHA
• CAREO
• Natural Sciences
• Pachyderm 2.0
• SciQ
• …

There are several other smaller projects (and possibly some larger ones) I’ve left off, but you get the point. We’re trying out a bunch of stuff, and working to get it all playing nicely together.