Dear Sascha:
Thanks very much for your inquiry! I'll offer a first response, and I'm sure others will add/correct things I've left out or not explained very well.
Dotlrn is commonly understood as a "thin skin" on top of the openacs developer toolkit, a collection of powerful, integrated web tools developed over the past ten years. A
brief history is available on the Openacs site, and there is a
brief list of Openacs companies and hosting services representing the larger community. Some people have estimated that there are a few thousand developers who have used this kit in recent years, a few hundred are using it now, about 150 are active in the forums over a few months, and about 30 developers have the rights to add code to "head", the most current collection of code from which releases are made from time to time.
By "thin skin" we mean the specific adaptation of a selected number of tools in an attractive interface first by the Sloan School at MIT about three years ago, and since then, including leading contributions by the University of Heidelberg, the E-Lane Project and Galileo University; please consult the current
Partners and Users list on the official Dotlrn site (please forgive me for not representing everyone's contributions in any kind of accurate proportion).
I don't know any more where the feature list for 1.0 is. There is a
current feature list, and the
.LRN Releasesforum entry opened yesterday by Rocael and the link at the bottom to other relevant forums will give you an idea of where the project might be going and how application development depends on a variety of suggestions and initiatives, including university-specific modifications that are often enough generalized and added to the current "tarball" or package release. I'll leave it to someone else to talk about why so many developers love to work with this toolkit and participate in the forums and application development.
I would add that among this application's distinguishing features is internationalization, whereby you can easily switch the interface from one to another of dozens of langauges, and the way this was built: a collaboration involving MIT/SLOAN, Heidelberg, Greenpeace, and such developers as Collaboraid. This makes the system extremely attractive to users in non-English speaking countries. Another feature I think most powerful is the automatic notifications in the Forums, whereby the system can be set to send an email to everyone in a group every time a comment is added to a forum: a message is "pushed" into the user's inbox with the effect that group members are informed immediately of new contributions AND one can find each contribution listed in the forum in chronological order. You can test this powerful feature by turning it on in the .LRN Q & A where you posted your inquiry. If I were to choose two features reflecting this application's uniqueness and power, it would be the strong group and group communications orientation these features support.
I hope others in the community will add/amend this brief account, but this should get you started.
All the best,
Bruce
