Segue was an innovative content management system that won a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration in 2007  from the Andrew Mellon Foundation.  It was the primary learning management system used at Middlebury College from 2002 to 2011.

Synthesis of Wikis and Blogs

Segue was a curricular content management system designed for teaching, learning and research.  It was essentially a synthesis of wikis, blogs and traditional content management systems.  Segue borrowed from the blogosphere the notion of multiple entries or posts on a page, each with their own URL and attached comments.  Segue then provided a version history of each post and allows users to link between posts using “wiki” markup.  When a “wiki link” was created to content that did not exist, a “create node” link was displayed that allowed users to add that content.  Finally, like many content management systems, Segue allowed users to organize their sites hierarchically and control access by specifying who can discuss, edit or delete any existing content as well as who can add new content.

Versioned Microcontent

Segue was designed for collaboration, its very granular access control enabled Segue to be used to manage individual and group blogs, wikis, courses, e-portfolios, peer review, portals, research collaboration and personal repositories.  Central to Segue was the notion of “versioned microcontent”, of many individual content blocks on a page, each with their own URL, RSS feed and version history.  These content blocks could be sorted in a various ways including reverse chronological or completely custom ordering.  As well, these content blocks could be organized hierarchically (i.e. top-down) through sets of navigation links and associatively (i.e. bottom-up) by means of tags and tag aggregation.

Open Knowledge Initiative

The first version of the Segue codebase evolved organically based on feedback from users, primarily faculty and students at Middlebury College.  Segue v2 introduced a completely new codebase that was fully object-oriented for more robust, manageable code and was built using an application framework known as Harmoni.  Harmoni implemented of the Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.) open service interface definitions (OSID) that were being developed at MIT.

The vision of O.K.I. was the creation of educational platforms that would be build using service-oriented architectures (SOA) that could interoperate with other platforms by exposing their functionality as services based on open standards.  The hope was that this would enable platforms like Segue to interoperate with other curricular systems such as Sakai and Moodle that at that time were also planning to use these same standards in future releases.

Segue v2 also had an innovative content rendering engine, that allows users to control the layout and flow of content on their site through a drag and drop user interface.