Watch for emerging information about the PENS specification and related events here. Also check the AICC News blog, ADL web site, the European Institute for Elearning (EIfEL), the CEN/ISSS Learning Technology Observatory and other elearning resource sites.

Hosted PENS Tests Localized to French: Merci beaucoup to AltaVista Babel Fish Translation (and Tom King) EIfE-L and the volunteer efforts of Marc Van Coillie there is now a somewhat- localized french (français) version of the PENS HTML Test Harness en français and the PENS Command Validator- (http://pens.lmstesting.com/collect-fr/).

AICC PENS AGR-011 Localized to French: Merci beaucoup to Marc Van Coillie of EIfEL, and Bernard Bouyt and Jean-Louis Bravo of Airbus for their gracious volunteer efforts to translate the AICC Guidelines and Recommendations (AGR) into french. The AGR provides a valuable summary of PENS and the rationale for advocating its use. Having this important PENS document available "en francais" is a fantastic enabler to support the iLearning Forum Plugfest in February in Paris.

Download AGR011 - CBT Package Exchange Notification en français [PDF, 168K] from the AICC web site.

iLearning Forum 2008 to includes PENS Interoperability Plugfest, again: Once again, the organizers and exhibitors of the iLearning Forum Conference and Exhibition have chosen to include an Interoperability Plugfest featuring PENS. Marc Van Coillie, CTO of the European Institute for E-Learning (EIfEL) reports that several PENS early adopters and a few newcomers plan to participate. Past participants and current iLearning Forum sponsors include: Questionmark and X-PERTeam. In 2008 the Plugfest will be in the exhibition area, free to the public. This year the Plugfest will emphasize concrete demonstrations of interoperability over presentations about the specification itself or protocol process process.

The iLearning Forum Conference will be held in Paris on 4-5 February 2008 at the Palais des Congrès. The theme of the Conference is Learning in the 21st Century.

PENS.LMSTESTING.COM discontinues HTTPS/SSL service: Sadly, this site has found it necessary to discontinue support for testing over SSL (HTTPS protocol), due to the additional cost of hosting and SSL certificates. Service may be restored in the future if demand warrants the additional expense. Comments or feedback about this can be sent by email at: pens @mobilemind.net.

The PENS Resources page has been updated to strikethrough the references to the SSL-hosted PENS Test Harness and SSL-hosted PENS Command Validator. However, implementers and evaluaters are reminded that it is still critical to support HTTPS URLS with PENS, and they should code and test accordingly with PENS clients, servers and content secured by SSL.

Questionmark Perception supports PENS: Questionmark released Perception v4.4, the first release to officially include PENS support. Questionmark was a PENS Work Group Founder with the AICC, contributing both key PENS concepts and initial code for the PENS HTML Test Harness. The PENS community welcomes their robusy commercial implementation.