I’ve revived the site for the CanCore Learning Object Metadata Initiative –complete with all the guidelines documents and updates to 2007. I’ve received the odd, periodic request for the guidelines in the last few years. It probably is a good thing that technical standardization is no longer seen as the driver of change in e-learning or open ed. (Of course, the latter was only in its infancy when the sun was setting on the LOM). Openness rather than technical sophistication and interoperation is a far more worthy and (I hope) attractive selling point for change in educational practice.
Say what you will about the fad of Learning Objects (and of course, many have). The early 2000’s were a time when the planets were aligned in a way that they have not been since, at least in the Canadian context. Federal and provincial governments, proto-edupunks, programmers and academics all took up common cause. And they did so from Europe to North America and around the Pacific Rim.
This terrain has since clearly become splintered and balkanized. Indeed, 2013 seems more like 1997, still with lone rangers roaming the plane (but now all on twitter), techno-progressivists and -libertarians still anticipating education’s final crisis, and others always eyeing a chance for a quick buck. Except that everyone knows that the stakes are somewhat lower: the NASDAQ isn’t going above 5000 any time soon, and “the big university campuses” (however expensive their maintenance may be) are not becoming “relics” as Peter Drucker predicted.
Maybe this history will end up appearing more along the lines of one of my favourite explications of the subject: This scene from Alain Tanner’s “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (from 1976): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8fhqHyRj6M