e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: JISC

  • How to Grow Standards

    Scott Wilson has a terrific response to my recent post calling for “more standards.” To begin with, he articulates one of the underlying issues that I think was bugging Scott Leslie as well. In the abstract, it’s hard to argue against standards. In practice, however, the particular Standards that are Issued from the Official Bodies that Bless Them sometimes seem like they add a whole lot of complexity to relatively little benefit.

    So how do you solve this problem? How do you increase the probability that a given standard is going to have significant practical value? Scott W. offers solid formula which I will paraphrase and expand just a bit as follows:

    1. Identify a user problem that you need to solve.
    2. Check to be sure that you can’t solve it using an existing standard.
    3. If possible, find a few other organizations that have the same problem and talk it through.
    4. Build a pilot solution implementation with standardization in mind.
    5. Test the solution and encourage your peer organizations to test it as well.
    6. Refine based on testing.
    7. When you believe you have a stable, workable solution, then select an appropriate Standards Body to have it live with. In general, avoid having education-specific standards bodies (e.g., the IMS) Bless the Standard unless you are solving an education-specific problem.
    8. Have the appropriate Standards Body examine the proposal, suggest changes when appropriate, and Issue a Blessing.

    In this scenario, the Standards Bodies really act as a quality assurance and dissemination mechanism. While they certainly could assist member organizations in the early stages of preparing a standards proposal, it would be healthiest to cast a broad net and encourage grassroots solution development as broadly as possible. Scott W. holds up JISC’s eLearning Framework (eLF) as good example of that approach, and while the jury is still out on how productive eLF will ultimately be, I agree that it’s a good example of the right approach.

    Here’s an example of how this sort of approach could work, drawing on a discussion that’s happening right now in the Moodle community: (more…)

  • Stephen Downes Missed the Point

    OK, so Stephen Downes doesn’t like the LMOS:

    I have been sort of sympathetic to the concept of the learningmanagement operating system (LMOS) because, after all, the concept includes things that I favour: distributed resources, user access to the underlying system. But I began to falter when Mark Feldstein said “We don’t just want to offer many different affordances. we want to orchestrate them.” And following his link to Bernie Durfee has sketched out a first use case implementation sent me over the edge. I’ll say it bluntly, and apologize later: this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen. Durfee is describing what the rest of understand as ‘upload a file and base a discussion thread on it’. Something I did right here in about 10 seconds today. But he requires J2EE containers, portlet containers, service integration agents, native Java interfaces, a whole mess of stuff. Ridiculous. Absurd! That’s it – if that is what is meant, toast the whole LMOS concept.

    I’m going to ignore the fact that he got my first name wrong. Frankly, I think language like “ridiculous” and “absurd” is unnecessarily hyperbolic when used in reference to a plan that simply articulates a language-specific implementation of fairly widely established standards for enterprise systems in general and enterprise learning frameworks in particular. It’s also not terribly collegial or respectful. And finally, it doesn’t reflect a grasp of the problems we are trying to solve. (more…)

  • All Hail the Mighty B-Rex

    Yes, yes, we’ve all heard the news by now. BlackCT Wednesday has hit. Will it be remembered as The Day the Music Died? I don’t think so. Unfortunately, it could be remembered as The Day the Music Was So Badly Wounded That It Became Barely Listenable for a Really Long Time.

    You know. Kinda like the ’80’s. Except with software. (more…)