We hosted the IMS Technical Forum here at UBC last week — I personally attended the spin-off Eduspecs meetings and the subsequent Open Technical Forum. I’m still processing what went on, but it’s safe to say that the Canadian contingent took the opportunity to forcefully articulate emerging views on learning standards and their adoption that are making the rounds north of the 49th parallel…
At the meetings I enjoyed a brief chat with Wilbert Kraan, a very nice fellow representing CETIS, and he does a nice job of summarizing the event, with a special focus on the Canuck contribution.
There already are a number of specific, working communities in Canada and beyond that are delivering practical, standards based solutions. One is the eduSource network of learning object repositories. They’ve been busy building infrastructure, but, as Douglas MacLeod of the project pointed out: the issue is not technology, but community building. Making sure that what you build meets everyone’s needs. Much the same sentiment was voiced by people involved in setting up provincial portals like Alberta’s, which aims to get teachers, authorities, curriculum experts and industry on board and cooperating.
This is not limited to just Canada. In IBM’s Chuck Hamilton oriola cookie schema of learning objects, elearning been busy at the technical core (packaging, metadata), but now really need to move to the human outer rings (presentation, information flow, collaboration). As he put it, we need to move away from decontextualised ‘prisonware’ to properly socially contextualised learning experiences.
David Porter’s Learning Technologies Program NewMedia Innovation Centre is doing exactly that with a range of ‘convivial tools’: tools that are relatively small, run on your PC and have an immediately graspable purpose. Thinks Napsters for education. At present, they already developed eduSplash, a personal repository that hooks into various institutional repositories and makes content widely available. In the same vein, there’s the Possibility network, a personal portal that gets the content you want to your site on your machine.
Community is also a driving factor in the ongoing discussion about conformance. As Peter Hope of the Canadian Department of Defense pointed out, one reason for pushing for conformance is to prevent vendors from having to retest their tools every time another institution is looking to procure some tools. Do it is as a community, and vendors have to do it only once. More than that, the one well designed suite they are planning to build could test a large number of application profiles and specs. This is important, because, as Dick Hill of UK eUniversities found, the most important question to ask of specifications is why they are important to you. i.e. which ones you need for your community in order to do what you want them to do.
