Technology Offerings
Jeff Kahn has been developing software applications for 25 years, working on one-man efforts up to development teams of over 200 engineers. Jeff has built highly custom applications as well as mass-market products. Jeff has commercial industry experience at Lotus, Microsoft, Borland, and IBM as well as a number of small software companies. Jeff has built a number of applications at colleges and universities.
System Architecture, Specializing in Repository-Related Interoperability
· architectural and design implications for standards-based integration boundaries
· issues relating to federated search
· issues related to using an "adapter pattern" for adding engagement-specific business logic
· issues relating to authentication and authorization
· issues relating to configuration
· issues relating to digital rights management and asset protection
Technical Reviews and Reports
Verbena Consulting LLC has been brought in to analyze technical designs and comment and suggest improvements. This work has taken the form of a paper-based design review, "real-time" webinar, field visit to meet with engineers, or a fact-finding tour and report out. The depth and format is determined in consultation with the client and, in the case of multiple parties, involves advance work, a "structured" conversation, and reporting.
Software Development
Repository Design and Development
For about the last 5 years, Jeff has focused on repository-related issues foremost among a number of areas. This work has run the gamut from product evaluation and selection, schema and metadata design, content ingestion, search / browse, content export, and integration with other systems. Jeff has worked with systems of a single media type such as image or video, with document libraries, referatories, learning object repositories and so on.
Browser-Based and Desktop User-facing Applications
Verbena Consulting LLC is well versed in user facing application design and implementation both for browser and desktop deployment. For brower applications, concentrations are in HTML, JSP, and similar technologies typically deployed in Tomcat. For desktop applications, concentrations are in Java using Swing or Mac applications using Cocoa.
Rapid Prototyping
Very often there is uncertainly in how to proceed, whether from a business or techincal perspective. One way to mitigate the risk in a "go / no-go" decision process is to rapidly develop a proof-of-concept, a proof-of-collaboration, etc. Many times, you just can't get an accurate feel for what a solution looks like without a working model or prototype. Jeff has been involved in a great number of such efforts and understands well how to very qickly term concept into exercisable illustration.
Interoperability Demonstrators
It is sometimes the case that multiple applications or systems need to interoperate or exchange data. The industry has a tradition of holding "plug-fests" or other activities where developers demonstrate interoperation, either by working on the problem right then and there or prior to a community event where the fruit of collaboration experiments is on display. Verbena Consulting LLC has assisted both the IMS Global Learning consortium, the Open Knowledge Initiative, and others in all stages of this kind of process. This includes explaining the purpose to participants, scoping demonstrations, project managing contributions, contributing to development, report out, and judging. Note that this kind of work can be made in the context of a vendor selection, standards development, and elsewhere and can be internal to an organization or out.
Apple Macintosh Related Experience
Mac User
Graduate of the "Big Nerd Ranch" Cocoa Developer Program
Developer of an Objectivce-C biding for the repository interoperability specification published through MIT
Demonstrator for iTunes U integration, Apple booth at Educause
Participant in the Apple MacLearning inaugural webcast on the Visual Understanding Environment
Member, MacLearning Steering Committee
Coordinator for the iTunes U Alt-i Lab demonstrator
Joint developer with Apple for the "Search Party" federate search demonstration project
Commissioned by Apple Education Marketing to develop a Blackboard Building Block for iTunes U integration
Technical consultant to the Apple Learning Interchange on federate search
Learning Management System (LMS) Integration
Blackboard Integration / Blackboard Building Blocks
Verbena Consulting LLC is a member of the Blackboard Developer's Network and offers consulting services to third parties relating to Buidling Blocks
.
What is a Building Block?
Blackboard is a Learning Management System (LMS). While Blackboard contains a wide range of features that cover many of the needs of institutions and those engaged in teaching and learning, there may be features your organization wants that are not included in the product. Verbena Consulting LLC has developed a number of such features using tools Blackboard provides to developers in its technical program. Another common use of a Building Block is to offer a tailored version of functions that an organization already offers on a dedicated website or in a dedicated application. The need may be to offer these capabilities, right in the LMS, and just when faculty or students want to take advantage of them.
California State University Digital Marketplace
Verbena Consulting LLC has been an advisor to the California State University Digital Marketplace (DM) project for several years. The project focused on three areas: affordability of educational content, accessibility of applications, the artifacts they produce, and the accessibility-related metadata that describes such artifacts, and choice among open educational resource, traditional library content, and commercial publisher and subscription content. Part of the DM involves integration with a campus leanring management system (LMS), which in the first implementation of the DM was Blackboard. Verbena Consulting LLC developed several building blocks to support the integration of authored content and of viewing a course syllabus and resource list in Blackboard that is stored in an institutional repository.
Search of the MERLOT repository of learning objects
Verbena Consulting LLC worked with the MERLOT project to develop a search application as a building block. MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Teaching) is a referatory supported by a community of colleges and universities. Most content refered to by MERLOT is available under a Creative Commons license.
MERLOT maintains a variety of information relating to each learning object to which it refers. Discipline-specific communities offer peer-reviews of content.
The builing block provides a search user interface that accepts a keyword or phrase. The application searches the MERLOT refatory and returns matching results alond with the metadata for each learning object. The building block allows a user to paste links to content into their Blackboard Course Documents folder.
London International Development Center
The London International Development Centre (LIDC) is a collaborative project bringing together social and natural scientists from across the University of London's six Bloomsbury Colleges and undertakes original interdisciplinary research and training to tackle complex problems in international development. LIDC worked with Verbena Consulting LLC to integrate a Google Spreadsheet application they use for membership with a Building Block.
INTELECOM Online Resources Network
INTELECOM is a premier provider of digital learning resources and curriculum-based courseware for higher education. INTELECOM worked with Verbena Consulting LLC to offer a Building Block that allows Blackbaord users to discover video in the INTELECOM system and insert links to the content into course documents.
iTunes U
iTunes U is a part of the iTunes Store featuring free lectures, language lessons, audiobooks, and more. iTunes U is specifically tailored to universities, museums and public media organizations. Verbena Consulting LLC worked with the iTunes U team to develop a way to launch iTunes U content from within Blackboard.
SoftChalk LessonBuilder Publish to Blackboard
SoftChalk's LessonBuilder is a software tool that made it easy for educators to connect with their learners and is used by more than 500 institutions worldwide for K-12, Higher Education and corporate training. SoftChalk worked with Verbena Consulting LLC to allow LessonBuilder to publish content directly into Blackboard from within the desktop application.
Birkbeck S.O.U.R.C.E Project LMS Migration
The primary aim of the SOURCE project is to create a standard and commonly used repository "plug" which will enable a bulk migration tool to "plug-in" and automatically transfer content from one repository to another; this is reflected in the name of the project: Sharing Objects Under Repository Control with Everyone. The project worked with Verbena Consulting LLC to be able to migrate content into and out of Blackboard Academic Suite and Content System.
Telephony
ETC Dev Corp is a Microsoft Telephony development company that is focused on building Add-On applications for the complete Microsoft suite of communication products. ETC worked with Verbena Consulting LLC to integrate their products with Blackboard.
Sakai Integration
Starting with a consulting role on the MIT team, a founding member school of the Sakai project, Jeff Kahn and Norlaria have been involved in several Sakai integration efforts. Jeff has worked on Sakai projects for the Sakaibrary feature, for integration with VUE, and for integration with SoftChalk.
Mark's experience includes:
Chairman, Requirements Working Group
Served on Sakai staff (June 2006 to Jan. 2008) to manage the collection of requirements, ideas, and feature requests and packaging them to promote development of new Sakai features and contribute to the continue improvement and performance of Sakai as an enterprise class collaboration learning environment.
Liaison, Sakai Educational Partner Program
Served as liaison and coordinator between the Sakai Educational Partner Program and the Sakai Project. Included participation in Sakai architecture and framework development and communicating emerging concepts and software to SEPP members. Requirements, comments, and feedback gathered from SEPP members were returned to the Sakai project. SEPP folded into Sakai in Fall of 2006.
Moodle Integration
Verbena Consulting LLC has been following the Moodle community for a number of years and has some experience with the product as an integration target. Jeff also works with partners that have deep Moodle experience that could be brought to bear.
Niche LMS Integration
Verbena Consulting LLC has worked with a number of software providers that offer a learning or course management system that is either commercial (e.g. Giunti Labs Learn Exact or The Learning Edge's Equella) or open (e.g. Middlebury College's Segue or MIT's Stellar). This experience allows Jeff to facilitate these integrations, either counciling the CMS/LMS vendor on how to be easier to integrate with or to a content provider on how to integrate with a particular system.
Metadata Schema Development / Conversion
Verbena Consulting LLC has been involved in metadata design, controlled vocabulary development, mapping to standards, validation, etc. Recently, Jeff has worked with the PBS Digital Learning Library on developing a varient of PBCore as their metadata convention as well as with the CSU Digital Marketplace on their metadata convention for learning content, transactions, users, etc. Jeff is familar with metadata standards such as
Jeff works with Ed Walker and Mark Norton, both of whom have extensive metadata-related experience.
Accessibility
Verbena Consulting LLC has worked on accessibility under the CSU Digital Marketplace project, both looking at accessibility-related metadata and at ensuring that applications meet accessibility guidelines. Jeff also worked on a survey of online repositories of accessible content and on a demonstration project for distributed contribution of accessibility-related asset metadata. Jeff performed a similar metadata-related role for a PBS project. Jeff works with Ed Walker and Mark Norton, both of whom have extensive accessibility-related experience.
Localization
Guidance on Interoperability Standards
Jeff has worked on a number of standards-related activities, most often in the area of federated search, repository integration, LMS integration, and asset metadata.
· supporting open, community, integration standards, distinct from proprietary vendor mechanisms
· lessons learned from 7 years in standards-based integration
· lowering development time and support costs for integration with the LMS and other applications
· bundling content and consuming applications using a standard; thereby speeding time to market and lowering the cost and risk of integration
· using a standards-based integration approach internally to get more value from existing systems and smooth technology migrations
· using a standards-based integration approach to speed unification under merge or acquisition
· using a standards-based integration approach with third-party content
· specifying standards-based integration approaches in RFPs
· sales, marketing, and branding implications of standards-based integration
Jeff works with Ed Walker and Mark Norton, both of whom have extensive standards-related experience.
Ed's experience includes:
His career includes the CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium, Vice President of BBN Systems and Technologies, Principal Research Scientist at MIT, Member of Staff at Bell Laboratories, and staff member at the CMU Software Engineering Institute. He has a Ph. D. in Psycholinguistics and is a graduate of the Greater Boston Executive Program in Business Management of the Sloan School. He currently serves as Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the consortium for Multimedia Resources for Learning and On-line Teaching (MERLOT) and is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Curriki Foundation and the Open Knowledge Initiative. Dr. Walker is a member of the Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Human Factors Society, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Mark's experience includes:
Director, Specification Development
IMS Global Learning creates standards for distance learning and eLearning systems. Responsible for the entire specification development process from inception to completion. Seven major specifications developed and approved in 2002. Managed six active working groups with 10 to 15 people in each. Duties included project management, motivation of volunteers, some training, document preparation, process management, fund raising support, and quarterly progress presentations. Served as co-chairman of the Accessibility Working Group. Contributed to the development of the IMS Abstract Framework (eLearning architecture). Contributed to the common Cartridge specification development effort in 2007.
Guidance on Open Source Projects
Jeff and colleagues has been a participant in a number of open source efforts, as part of the organization placing something into open source, as a contributor to an open source effort, and as an integrator of the fruits of open source into non-open source projects. This broad experience allows Verbena Consulting LLC to offer guidance in the following areas:
For those contemplating distributing their software under open source licensing
At some juncture, usually early on, a project needs to determine the kind of license under which products or product elements will be distributed. The pros and cons of choosing the open source licensing path for a commercial firm are not as simple as whether to give something away for free vs charging a fee. Verbena Consulting LLC can help organizations understand the business and technical implications both in the immediate and long term of either direction. For example, some organizations with a commercial product elect to distribute a component of their system under an open source license.
For those contemplating contributing to an open source community
For any organization, making a meaningful contribution to an open source community is not a step that should be taken without forethought. There are business and technical implications that should be considered. On the business side, these decisions have an impact on sales, marketing, business development, alliances, and brand. On the technical side, these decisions have an impact on design, development, test, release engineering, maintainence, and support.
For those evaluating whether to use open source software in their solution
Choosing to adopt an open source licensed product is not as simple as deciding to get something for free rather for a cost. The total cost of ownership may be the determining factor and such a total is comprised of a number of elements of which cost of acquisition is only one. Informed by experience, Verbena Consulting LLC can walk and organization through a more comprehensive evaluation of their options.