the thingstitute
20 Apr 2015
This weekend, Tyler Mulligan, Jeff Segall, Anthony Altieri and I spent several hours participating in the xAPI and IoT hackathon. It was a well-fed, well-mixed group of curious folks, and I think we all left with concrete steps (both in terms of design and implementation) toward allowing xAPI to make the Internet of Things work.
While a lot went down in Rockville this past Friday and Saturday (that I'll write about at a future date - I'm fading fast at the moment), I think my favorite hour of the whole thing was spent with Alice Jefferson.
As someone whose job it is to explain ADL technologies to instructional designers and learning developers, I worry a lot about the fact that explaining the significance of xAPI takes time. Alice doggedly pursued answers and didn't accept ambiguity or my lack of clarity. She helped me help her understand the fullness of what xAPI means, and in the end she got it. That moment - her realizing the paradigm shift, me realizing that we had succeeded - was pretty great. It also made me thing about how much more hands on we must be in talking about xAPI.
Huge thanks to Dr Brenda Bannan, Shelly Blake-Plock and Dr Shane Gallagher for organizing this event, and thanks to David Helms of Radius Networks for supplying beacon technology.