Wes Fryer and I happened to accidentally Skype each other today. (How many edu-techs does it take to learn Skype? Don’t ask…) But we took the opportunity to catch up and touch base, which is always fun. I was in the middle of banging my head against an Elgg install that was befuddling my sys admin and me. (It’s working now.)

But as we try to put together some of the pieces of the Moodle / Gallery / Elgg / SquirrelMail / etc… puzzle, a few things questions percolate

1) How can we create APIs for these amazing edu-web apps so that they talk to each other more easily — to wit, why can’t Moodle and Elgg share a user table? (and if anyone has done this, please let me know before we attempt to reinvent the wheel.)

2) Can Open Academic please hurry? ":-)"

3) We’re starting to build amazing course-management / student publisher tools, but where are the open source tools that allow schools to run more efficiently and how can they be integrated with the CMS / Content tools?

Nine years ago, I started writing the code for Beacon’s Web Portal. It was long on school community software and short on CMS stuff. But as it evolved, it allowed teachers to post homeworks, write web-based narrative reports, track student progress across multiple classes over a period of time, create lesson-plan databases, post course-descriptions and a few other nifty tools aside. Now, I’m enough of a hack programmer that it really is nearly impossible to strip out the "Beacon-ness" of that code to make it publishable and usable for others. (Although, any developers out there are more than welcome to try!) But it makes me sad that I haven’t seen open source developers try to create similar tools.

Now’s the time to bring it all together, I think. With the amazing work being on the course side with apps like Moodle and Elgg, with the imminent release (I hope!) of OpenAcademic, with SchoolTool hopefully on the way, we’re moving closer and closer to that KillerApp. Any developers out there want to work with SLA? We’re in.

(And if anyone knows of an easy way to port users from Moodle into Elgg, please let me know.)