Thanks, Joel, for starting this thread and to Til for the great setup: the room was windowless, but there was plumbing, plenty of heat, a steady supply of sandwiches and drink, excellent high speed connections, and great company and cheer!
The .LRN afficionadoes were a happy minority, and besides enjoying meeting each other I think there were three things we worked on that will benefit us all.
First, Jeff and Lars did some great work explaining how CSS works and how it would contribute mightily to the building of an infrastructure to implement improvements in the interface. Dirk and I are jazzed to learn how to do this, and we learned that the guiding text is: "Designing With Web Standards" Jeffrey Zeldman.
Second, while witnessing the powerful testing operating organed by Joel, we thought: "if only we could harness that energy", delivered elaborate incantations the forking daemons, and discussed the long-term strategy of folding as much of .lrn as possible back on openacs. Lars has written this up and Carl has posted it somewhere (where?).
Third, Malte, Carl, and I developed an elaborate conspiracy to improve the forums, and since Malte has not yet mentioned it I will note that we benefitted considerably from his reporting to us from the Learntec conference, and particularly, the excellent work on the forum developed by a programmer in Goettingen (maybe Malte will describe this in detail) that can be seen at http://www.studip.de, where you can sign on to the demo server as a guest, join a class, and find the niftiest forum setup I've seen, including the ability to rate forum entries and a very cool navigating and color scheme.
Finally, I want to thank the many people who gave me all sorts of advice and tips: I'm comparatively new to this fascinating technology and so enjoyed and benefitted tremendously from the warm welcome and cooperative atmosphere!
Bruce
ps: I'll be posting some photos soon!
