Hi Al,
Thanks very much for the acknowledgement and your kind words ('crown jewels' 😉. I really appreciate it.
But, there are much more people to acknowledge, so let me please mention some few of them who have helped great deal:
Tils Singer, once I sent him my first specification document on LORS he said something along these lines "Well, it sounds alright technically, but don't ask me if it's going to work" hehehehee... That was some good encouragement. Of course, Malte, Denis and Venky helped me a great deal to get this on skates. Rafa Calvo played devil's advocate in each step of the way, which forced me to be really careful on the development. Rocael and Don made a technical review of the first version of LORS and helped out with suggestions to improve and make it scalable (although there are still lots of room for improvement).
The E-LANE (Eduardo, Natalia, Carlos, Luis, et al) fellows were really helpful thoroughly testing, making and suggesting improvements. Jeff's View package helped me simplified user tracking and Dave Bauer's file storage implementation made my life very easy storing files and all. Also Dave's tsearch2 package made LORS searchable.
Caroline Meeks and her whole crew (Roel, Deds and all) took LORS to the next level and made it a state-of-the-art learning object repository. Personally I want to thank Caroline for seeing the potential of LORS at times when I thought it wasn't going anywhere.
Giancarlo Luxardo and Michelle improved Adam Ullman's SCORM RTE to LORS making it possible for deliver SCORM 1.2 courses and track results.
If it wouldn't be for Matthias Melcher, I would have never made it thru the dryness and boredom of the IMS specifications. Nima was the first tester in every single release 😊
Gerald Low at USYD added an online IMS metadata editor which is the most complete and thorough online metadata editor I have come across.
The E-LANE fellows internationalized LORS, which makes it a step closer to be part of the .LRN distribution. Now we just need an Oracle port.
So I think it's fairer and more accurate to say that LORS is a product of a good number of talented and committed people in the .LRN and OpenACS community. I just happened to be the one pushing it 😊.
Therefore, I believe LORS is a clear example that -contrary to some of the posting we have seen recently, the community is active and is moving forward. Maybe just a bit silently.
At any rate, my sincere thanks to all people involved. Thanks very much
Ernie
PS: Al, as soon as I get access to the webpage, I'll update the LORS section.
