As Scott is talking--very fast--I'm thinking he's trying to straddle a delicate fence. On the one hand, he wants to allow a kind of freedom in education and get away from the idea that we can manage anything. On the other hand, his position requires him to think about bigger picture issues--connecting different pieces of technology together.  He has to think about security, etc.

Tight vs. loose coupling of pieces. Loose vs. hard-wired. Hard-wired is a more of a commercial model. Leaning towards an open source model.

What's next? Elearning frameworks. Think about netgen faculty.

NITLE is using LMSs as a collaboration tool. The tools that they develop within them are usually built to enhance collaboration.  Discussing Marratech. Includes a whiteboard and other tools, like application sharing. This seems similar to the Learning Times application I've used. I can't remember the name of it.

The tool includes an API so you can integrate it with other things.

Alex Chapin is now talking about all the various web tools that we're using and they're in what he calls "integrated stacks."  He shows a continuum of publication from wikis to archives. Wikis and blogs are evolving content while archives are more stable. We need to support content granulation and organize it however we want and aggregate it however we want. He's showing Segue, the cms that Middlebury uses. This sounds a lot to me like Google Pages, and it makes me think, we're building all these things, but if Google already has it, shouldn't we use that instead? What's the benefit of building our own tool?  It's a nice looking program though.  Alex just answered my question. They want to use the authentication system. I followed up by asking if any of the material is public.  The material is made public by default and then at a very granular level, faculty can decide what's public and what's not.  You can see some examples by going to http://segue.middlebury.edu and clicking on Course Web sites.

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