Harold’s thesis, to me, at its core is one of how to manage the knowledge. He’s throwing it all in the same sink, which is fine at a high level, but when you get down to it there are deeper dives. Harold’s right on the money with how to deal with the challenge; I posit that the deeper dives are where we find bigger, fundamental challenges.

“Content” is one of those closest to the surface, and it’s the most obvious way we can talk about what’s not right with our struggles with the abundance of knowledge in the world; we all have the most experience and comfort with content. The last ten years have made it faster, cheaper and easier to creating good content. Filtering content is improving, and that’s in large part because aggregating relevant content before/after filtering is solid.

As one large human network, we’ve developed better-than-primitive tools (like sticks and stones turning into hatchets) to do these things for us (there’s my shout out to @moehlert, @dennisschleiche and other cultural anthropologists).

“Content” only presents one perspective. What about “community?”

We have constructed only primitive tools when it comes to managing knowledge, in terms of our relationships with people and the communities that form out of disparate (or even conjoined) networks of people.

We’re definitely aglow with the egalitarian nature of 140-character limits because it gives us a common perspective with which to observe the merits of connecting to other people, but Twitter is still about the content at least as much as it is about the people.

Facebook can connect you to your first kiss back in Kindergarten (Holly Konopka, btw) — but Facebook can’t connect me to sociologists who happen to have experience turning big-picture visions in my head into business capabilities (as an–ahem–example). To find such a person, he/she needs to be a friend of a friend (community) or they need to have published (content) stuff that would identify them through search engines.

We have workarounds, which may eventually help us in solving this problem, but these indirect means bypass people who don’t publish much (so SEO never picks them up–BRITNEY NAKED), or are otherwise inaccessible to me because I only know academics and nerds who have no business sense (present company excluded, of course).

We have primitive means of filtering and almost no means of aggregation of people.

So even with content and community, there’s potentially still ANOTHER view of the problem with “curriculum” Harold identified, which is that in addition to not being able to handle all the content and communities that exist, we also have no way of dealing with all the “context” needed to situate an understanding, individual or communal.

I mean, we don’t even have the primitive tools for this yet. Take for example this very thread of discussion: Harold presents one point of view regarding what he sees as a root cause to a problem (I’m paraphrasing here):

“Curriculum, as a concept feels outdated… why?”

I’m now presenting a potentially more complex point of view on the issue.

There are derivatives to be drawn from even what I’m presenting to you (remove comma?) as a reader and possible participant; yet you must manage all these perspectives, including Koreen Olbrish’s and Mark Oehlert’s and Clark Quinn’s perspectives on this same issue. There are some tweets on this topic, and you can throw those in the mix.

You might be reading this and have the full advantage of being situated already in this discussion with an ample handle on context. What if this post is where you first jump in? What does anyone need to do to catch up to the discussion if you want to make sense of what Harold, Koreen, Mark, Clark and now I are all talking about?

Now go a step beyond: what would someone else, other than you, need to do in order to get themselves to a point where he or she could take these ideas and run with them?

We have difficulty in making context sharable in and of itself. Because of that we have almost no way of aggregating contexts let alone filtering them. We can only imagine what that would be like. Science Fiction (or even the last ten years of online search capability) models that if we can capture things, we can make them available in lots of ways. I can recall movies like Dreamscape and Brainstorm that deal with capturing and sharing experiences, but we’re a ways away from the Matrix style of downloading that degree of context.

Besides, the hard-line transfer mechanisms are awkward or look damn uncomfortable in The Matrix.

So this brings me back to the wall Harold alludes to. I believe the scope of the problem is more dense than just that there’s so much more to “know” than we can possibly ever learn. These statements are, if you connect the same dots I’m connecting, supported by Harold himself (thanks for the link, Harold!) in “What is Weighing Down Learning“:

• There are so many more people to get to know than we can possibly ever build a relationship with;
• There are so many more experiences happening in a single day than any one of us can possibly participate in, given a lifetime!

Our notion of connecting to each other is rooted in metaphors based on connecting to content. We need to flip this on its head. So what do we do about THAT?

Well… I had an idea (// @z_rose @timpmartin).

One possible solution that some friends and I are actively working on is, at a very high level, to use the Internet itself as a giant database (rather than putting data in stovepipes like actual databases) to assign data to people, instead of digital artifacts. We think we’ve found a way to enable more complex social networking than we can currently accomplish under the conditions that networks are based solely on who you currently know and by extension through friend-of-a-friend relationships. If we get that right, we think we’ll be able to enable sharing contexts.

For future reference, we’re calling our solution a Brokered Anonymous acQuaintance Open Network, or BAQON for short.

Related posts:

1. Catching Up
2. What About BAQON?
3. How Change Changes You

You have to be a member to download it, but associate memberships are free, and the eLearning Guild is a great club to join in this space (*disclosure, I’m a member).

I did my best to be accurate, passionate yet objective — and I had a lot of help in fact-checking my accounting of history and in working to avoid the finger pointing and derision that usually accompanies the task of differentiating these organizations.   Obviously, as a member of LETSI I have a certain point of view.   I hope if it’s not an objective truth, it’s at least objectively truthy.

Thanks goes to Tom, Zoe, Ellen and Bill for their very constructive and informing feeback on earlier drafts.   If the article is any good at all, it’s a credit to my wife, Suzy, for doing a stellar job of helping me make more linear sense.

Related posts:

1. Why LETSI Matters
2. Shaping Future Learning, or Why You Should Be Writing a White Paper for SCORM 2.0
3. Standards Documents

I don’t think of myself as all that busy, but the more people keep telling me how busy I am, the more I start to believe it.   I have so many ideas about social learning and knowledge exchange that blogging about them is daunting because I just can’t write that much into a post.   At the same time, I don’t feel comfortable writing a book about social learning yet.   There are books that have not been written that should have been a while ago, and the one book I can at least help to write is on SCORM.

I want to test my tome-writing skills writing about something I know a lot about and clear the decks for what’s next (which will likely still be in learning technology)

I don’t know how large an audience such a work would have.   I also don’t know what kind of book I would write.   Do I write a narrative history that gives perspective on, love it or hate it, the impact that SCORM has had in learning online over the past ten years?   Do I cobble together a comprehensive guide to content development for SCORM?   Do I go more accessible and put together a best practices show-case that shows different types of E-learning content made with different tools and have their designers and developers provide the breakdown of how things were put together?   Do I call in my extended family of friends and peers and tap them to write about topics like Instructional Design, Usability, Accessibility & Section 508, SCORM 2004 Sequencing, Workarounds LMS Compatibility?

But the biggest question I have is is there even a need or desire for such a book?   I kinda think there still is, but I need guidance from the people who would want such a book on what kind of book you need.   If there’s an audience for such a tome, I’ll commit to putting it together somehow and some way that makes sense.

I can tell my stories in a lot of ways.   I need some encouragement that there’s a need for this, and then some guidance as to what the ingredients of such a bouillabaisse would be.

Related posts:

1. The Way Forward
2. Catching Up
3. The Star Wars Management Guide

LETSI

The organization that would seek to build upon SCORM into a 2.0 state that meets the needs of distributed learning today and tomorrow has a new site up: https://www.letsi.org/ . You’ll still be able to look to any number of blogs that talk about our various activities, but this site is poised to be the definitive (and user-friendly) source of information about our activities, including what’s happening with “SCORM 2.0″ — put in quotes because, quite frankly, it just might not even be called SCORM anymore for a variety of reasons that have been discussed (and will continue to be discussed) elsewhere. My involvement has grown beyond that of just a contributor of mindshare to the effort. I’m now, for intents and purposes, heading up the LETSI blog, which will feature several members of LETSI and the greater community. From here on in, if I’m blogging about SCORM or LETSI on this site, it will be largely in the context of my personal opinion (not a big stretch), or a technical explanation that is relevant to SCORM as it is today (2004 or 1.2) which would be not as relevant on the LETSI blog.

Avron Barr started the blog off with an excellent post, “What Are We Saying to Each Other?“

Work

Around the middle of December, a new leader was brought into my area who is changing the dynamic of my organization; in my humble opinion, it’s quite for the better. About four weeks ago, he asked for my input on how I see formal instruction and knowledge management in light of each other, and what resulted was a (still growing) 30+ page white paper addressing the relationships among formal instruction, knowledge management and collaboration for our enterprise — going forward over the next 10-11 years. I had quite a bit of help organizing my thoughts and ramblings from several of my coworkers and peers. I will share pieces of it here on the blog in coming posts, but in this post I’ll just say that to some surprise it’s now the foundation we will build several strategic threads from. Rather than just languish as the techie/fix-it guy around the department, I’m now helping to coordinate these strategic threads, each with their own project teams, milestones, etc… Many will be working in an agile way, which is a significant shift from only following an ADDIE model for learning content — we’re going much bigger, much faster, and much more aggressive.

I like it a lot.

The downturn in the economy is opening up the possibilities for trying out new ideas in small lab settings — which is a huge win. In one example, one of my colleagues is moving forward with reinforcing focus and memory skills for our pickers in our Distribution Centers. We’ve been doing an instructor-led program that has proven to work for a couple of years now. This year? With one group, we’re going to buy Nintendo DSs and the Flash Focus game. They wanted to make the instructional exercises available online, and they wanted me to build it. Being lazy, I suggested they buy them DSs and the game — which altogether would be a lot faster to implement and cheaper to execute and maintain than for me to build it in Flash. Funny thing when you can innovate on the cheap — right now people are interested in giving it a shot.

I’d like to use it as an opportunity to actually study the impact of a game, when we can compare it to the ILT, and the audience we’re delivering to is heavy on metrics. If you have an idea on what we should be measuring, please respond in the comments!

Bottom line — between LETSI and work, things are going well and there’s a lot of activity going.

Business

I’d like not to blame the economy, but I was insanely busy with my little consulting shop towards the end of last year — so successful that I shrewdly bought a block of advertising on LinkedIn and Google AdWords to help deal with the possible downturn. Well… that was $123 not well-spent. I got no business from it at all. I hardly got a bump in traffic. I’ve been slow going for sidework of any type. Maybe it’s the time of year for E-Learning work… who knows? By posting this, it’s possible things start to pick up. I’m not stressing over it — I definitely have enough to keep me honest

The wonderful news is that I’m slated to speak at both the Innovations in Learning conference hosted by the DAU at George Mason University, and I’m also slated to speak at the ADL AcademicFest at UW-Madison (REPRESENT, MAD-TOWN!!!!). I love these opportunities to hang out with big brains, swap ideas, drink — I’m looking forward to these events quite a bit.

I’m almost positive I’ll be attending both the Masie Semi-Annual Gathering and the Learning Systems 2009 Conference, both back to back in Chicago. I’ll also likely attend the WordCamp Chicago in June, too.

Blog

The next couple of posts will be about the work I’ve done with Knowledge Management and Collaboration. The very next one will give you some context on what drove my thinking and what’s resulted from sharing those thoughts — this is important because like any creation worthy of sharing, the how is as important as the what. After that, I’ll share the highlight reel on the strategy — at least the parts I feel comfortable sharing for public consumption, which will likely use Creative Commons so there’s no misunderstandings.

Twitter

I had a small exchange via Twitter with “Meet the Press” host David Gregory (@davidgregory) last week, and since then the number of followers has exploded! I’ve been privy to some great exchanges in the past week and it has dominated my iPhone time that could be spent on Zombieville, USA.

Related posts:

1. What Will SCORM 2.0 Look Like?
2. Curriculum is Not the (Whole) Problem
3. The End of Year Rant

1. Why am I good at keeping friends but bad at starting businesses with partners? I’ve been married for over twelve years and we still love each other.   I’ve moved several times across the country with my expanding family and I’ve been able to hold onto friends from everywhere I’ve lived and worked.   We talk/IM/email/tweet almost every day.   I’m even finding friends from the long long ago when there was no Internet to speak of.   I’m an a**hole, but the evidence clearly demonstrates that I’m the kind of a**hole that has a lot of real friends with high tolerances for a**holes.   That said, two times now, I’ve tried to start a business venture with former co-workers (who were also friends), and it hasn’t worked out.   The first time was like six years ago, and the chips were stacked against us with everyone physically moving so far away from each other, and I went passive aggressive in trying to deal with the frustration (mea culpa).   I thought I learned from that experience, but I guess there’s something more for me to learn as my new consulting business went from a partnership to a solo effort barely a month after launching.   So in 2009 I’ll continue to be a company of one.   I still love the idea of partnering in business — maybe not with former co-workers?   It seems to fly contrary to logic…
2. What the hell happened with Rhymefest’s second album, “El Che?” It was supposed to drop in April of 2008.   The Michael Jackson tribute “Man in the Mirror” was so fantastic, I was really looking forward to it — and the album never came out with no news (not even news on MySpace) as to why it was delayed.
3. Why is so much E-Learning content done in Flash if there’s no Flash “coolness” going on? Don’t get me wrong, the more maintenance on your old courses are chores and pain spots, the more sidework I’m going to get updating it and converting it to SCORM or AICC — but if a page-turner is a page-turner, there’s a lot of easier (and cheaper) ways of creating E-Learning content than putting it all in Flash.   This is a topic I hope to explore with Learning Ninjas in 2009 (more to come on that).
4. Why is growing old so painful? Seriously, this tendonitis I have?   Everytime there’s precipitation this last month (and there’s been a lot), my left leg/foot and back hurt like hell.   I could accept it, I guess, if I was some kind of athlete with a storied career that was hard on my joints or whatever — but I’m a nerd whose joints for the most part have been mostly guarded from anything that might cause them stress or harm.
5. How many life and career coaches does the Internet need? It seems like I get followed each week by a new career coach (on Twitter).   Some punk just out of college is going to coach me on my career?   Really?   Try having a career (or 3) first before imparting me with all the wisdom from your BA in English (note:   not ranking on English majors — I’m married to one).   I know of one career coach who’s doing “something” (that’s you, @melissapierce) and she’s not even trying to coach me.

Technorati Tags: twitter, life coach, career coach, tendonitis, pain, growing older, e-learning, flash, page-turner, scorm, aicc, learning ninas, consulting, sidework, business, partnering, partnerships, friends, relationships, rant, opinion, 2008, 2009

Related posts:

1. Catching Up
2. Curriculum is Not the (Whole) Problem
3. Life in Perpetual Beta

Avron Barr asked members of LETSI to do some reality checking for him.  He listed reasons (whether they’re a collective list or his own reasons, I can’t attribute) for moving beyond the SCORM as a reference model and using only accredited  standards  to a technology platform (remember: Linux for Learning) using informal standards and open source implementations.

 

• This is established industry practice, e.g., W3C, in situations of accelerated technology and business innovation.
• Group consensus, self-governance, and transparency allows more rapid innovation while maintaining interoperability where possible
• Sharing base code supports more consistent and less costly  
• Lowers barriers to entry for innovative products, even more than standards themselves  
• Supports architectural modularity and service-oriented infrastructure, which in turn supports product and market  
• Dramatically reduces total community investment in software tools and infrastructure

 

I may be wrong, but I don’t recall Unix being an ISO or IEEE standard when Linus Torvalds was developing Linux in his pajama pants.  Maybe it was.  Maybe he had to ask a whole bunch of permission to even get to writing Linux.  But I don’t think that’s how it happened.  I think, much as the lore suggests, that he reached out to people he knew he could work with who were intelligent, productive and probably contrarian and as the project grew too big he just handed parts of the development out to the willing and trustworthy and it… just… came together.  LETSI doesn’t have a Linus, but in a 2.0 world, maybe we don’t need one.  At any rate, the point is this:  if there are specs and standards that will help us do SCORM 2.0 faster and better, we should by any means necessary use them.  But we shouldn’t be sitting around with our thumbs up our butts debating and negotiating if there are other models available that are just as useful and (keyword mentioned already) “available.”

Now, Avron also asked another question:

“What software would be open source? What is the platform layer equivalent to Linux? What are some examples that would be broadly useful without unduly interfering with commercial product developers?”

Avron went on to rattle off a number of technology ideas (products) that LETSI could address, but I think that’s putting the cart before the horse.  What I’d like to do is answer Avron’s question with what I’m calling (to keep the meme going) the BAQON model:

The Baqon Model

The products LETSI can sponsor/support/steward may include ideas like Avron listed, such as:  

• Reload Redux: Raw XML editor for the new content aggregation  
• A migration tool from SCORM 2004 into the new format  
• A testing harness for SCOs
• A modular testing harness for LMSs
• An multi-student “lobby” for a game or simulation with sample interfaces to student and content data services.

…but in any case, the “platform” as pictured above support the use-cases.  That’s the vision.  Some of these bulleted items may be part of the Learning, Education and Training (LET) pillar that supports the platform, some of them might be part of the platform itself.  But in any case, the current players in LETSI are probably only going to be able to support the LET-specific pillar.

More on this subject in another forthcoming post…

Related posts:

1. The future of SCORM isn’t necessarily “SCORM”
2. SCORM 2.0: Call For White Papers
3. Shaping Future Learning, or Why You Should Be Writing a White Paper for SCORM 2.0

Recently, Avron Barr emailed many of us as the Sponsors’ Meeting approaches this month.  LETSI very soon will need to get firm onhow to proceed we’ll proceed with the SCORM 2.0 effort. Avron writes…

“In addition to continuing the requirements gathering effort well into 2009 and possibly not calling what we are doing “SCORM” at all, we’ve also discussed the possibility of an open source software platform for e-learning systems and not just an updated reference model.

 

The actual open source effort might be a LETSI Working Group, a self-managed SourceForge community, or a Member Section in OASIS. We have a lot more planning to do. I’d like your thoughts about how best to explain why were are moving to an open source or “community source” model and what we might actually see coming out of this effort.”

 

I think he’s right on.  Some of us talked about this very notion at the close of the workshop and going on since then.  The way I’ve been thinking of it, LETSI is the organization that shepherds the process of gathering the requirements, shepherding the partnerships and architecture and holds the vision for what needs to happen, in terms of a platform for open-sourced organizational learning and performance improvement activities.  Some other organization, even inexorably linked, handles the open-source development of the technologies and tools that implement what LETSI comes up with.

For what it’s worth, while a bunch of us at the workshop bought the domain name as a joke, we do own baqon.org… because SCORM is simply better with bacon.  But I digress.

SCORM, per Dr. Eric Roberts (and Philip Dodds before him), solved two big problems back in the late 90s:  vendors selling LMSs who were tearing a fledgling industry apart with proprietary implementations that made content and data impossible to transfer (thus driving costs of implementation sky high), and lower the costs for acquisition of learning technology for the government while helping to future-proof their capital investments in both content and the technology to get it to soldiers and employees.

Those problems still exist, and SCORM has worked with glaring efficiency to solve those problems, but what’s happened since then is that a global community has gone through a lot of the same struggles working with SCORM.  There’s a lot we want to do with online learning (see those white papers and use cases).  But SCORM can’t solve all these problems by itself — and by that I mean that the same vendors with an installed base of clients who’ve specialized in solving specific types of problems over the past ten years now aren’t the only people who need to be involved with how their LMS technology integrates with performance management, customer relationship management, talent management, business application systems, etc.  LETSI has to pull in decision-makers, engineers and visionaries with a wider net.

Let me get specific so there’s no confusion:  LETSI needs Moodle.  LETSI needs Blackboard, too. LETSI needs WebEx.  LETSI needs SAP and Oracle.  LETSI needs SalesForce.  LETSI needs a bunch of partners who aren’t traditionally in the learning space.  All the ways in which educators, managers, owners and senior leaders want to see training and learning data mashed up with other types of data in their organizations — we need to work in concert… together.  I’m almost positive it’s not just the learning professionals who want to mashup this data — we all need to really think about our APIs because we can imagnineer (if you will) for the problems we can visualize today — but the best thing we as technologists can do for the future problems we can’t imagine is provide a way for people to interoperably combine our data with other data.

My goal over the next week is to enumerate what I’m thinking in detail.  My hope is that some conversation stirs up both here and on LETSI.org where we can get the best ideas out in the open.

Feel free to question or disagree with me.  I can take the criticism.

Related posts:

1. Shaping Future Learning, or Why You Should Be Writing a White Paper for SCORM 2.0
2. SCORM 2.0: Call For White Papers
3. SCORM 2.0 Data Model and Structure

It’s been a day.   I’d wax on about this, but I’m kinda sleepy.

Needless to say, :

• Fluid Content Aggregation
• Integration of KM and Learning
• Adaptive Ongoing Assessment
• Collaborative Learning and Assessment
• Content Tracking
• Work-related Software Application

I plan to comment on all of these (I’ve at 4/6 tonight).   What I need YOU to do is provide some comments of your own (preferably on the LETSI site, but I’ll take your thoughts here — whatever makes you comfy).   The ten most compelling scenarios are going to be the first ones out of the gate that the SCORM 2.0 Architecture and Business groups will develop to.

If you want to have a direct hand in shaping what organizational learning looks like over the next 5-10 years, I know it sounds too simplistic to be true but…. this is your chance.   This list is going to be vetted and refined in the next two weeks, and then we roll on.   It’s an exciting time to weigh in and there’s a lot of talented brain power behind this effort.

As always, you are more than welcome to go to the LETSI site without logging in and read what’s there.   If you want to comment on the LETSI.org site, you need to be registered and logged in.

Technorati Tags: scorm2.0, content, aggregation, km, learning, collaboration, assessment, content, tracking, business applications, letsi, scorm, sap

Related posts:

1. The future of SCORM isn’t necessarily “SCORM”
2. Shaping Future Learning, or Why You Should Be Writing a White Paper for SCORM 2.0
3. What can SCORM 2.0 Look Like?

Me and the first official implementation of Baqon.

I returned from the SCORM 2.0 Workshop last night, my head still spinning from how much work got done over the last three days at the Institute for Human/Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, FL.  Not to belabor the point:  this is the first standards-type of meeting that I’ve been part of that lacked vitriol and arguments over the most mundane topics.  We didn’t talk a lot about tech, and we banned ourselves from using the words SCORM, learning management system, SCO, etc.  In other words, the Learning/Education and Training group focused themselves squarely on one thing:  what does organizational learning need to look like for the next ten years, and how can we describe it to the architects, engineers and the business people who have to make it happen?

This is no small breakthrough, as silly as it sounds.  When SCORM was conceived in the late 90s, it was (per Dr. Eric Roberts) to get an industry that was tearing itself apart as it was getting off the ground moving in the same direction.    SCORM addressed a handful of use-cases and because there was no community of implementers at the time, the only community that could push such a specification framework forward were the LMS Vendors and the Department of Defense, who put it on the line that this effort was vital for training delivery in an ever-complex world.  Because of this, looking back now on the ten years of evolution that SCORM has, it’s pretty clear that SCORM 1.x is a vendor-centric model of organizational learning.

The world is different now.  For one, the adopters of SCORM 1.x are global.  They’ve been using SCORM and systems (and content) conformant with the specification for ten years.  The adopters of SCORM are segmenting, and trying to make a technical communication and aggregation specification fit in with lots of other things related to higher-level learning — things SCORM 1.x never addressed — and more importantly, the adopters (you and me) are trying to do it all interoperably, and finding out that interoperability is much too difficult and painful.

The bottom-line:  whatever SCORM is to become in a 2.0 version — there is a diverse global community with lots of different models of how organizational learning works.  SCORM 2.0 will be a client-oriented model for organizational learning.  The LET group that I was part of with new friends like Lang Holloman, Dan Young, Mark Oehlert, Ellen Meiselman  and others who might be shy of recognition — the Business Case and the Architecture groups waited for our narratives  about what kinds of scenarios we envisioned.  In SCORM 1.x, it was the engineers who dreamed up how to do stuff, and the pedagogy would have to adapt to the systems.  This resulted in focus areas like “Run Time Environments” and “Content Aggregation Models.”  The focus of how Business and Architecture will work will focus on these use-cases, based on the first-tier themes:

Learner Data
  -Tracking  
  -Reporting
  -Security
  -Authentication
  -Profile

Adaptivity
  -Instruction
  -Assessment
  -Longitudnal Tracking
  -Role-based

Management
  -Lifecycle Management
  -Configuration
  -Archive
  -Data Persistentence

Availability
  -JIT
  -Mobile
  -Offline
  -Multiple contexts
  -EPSS
  -Prescriptive
  -Text analysis
  -Content
  -Design

Social Learning
  -Collaborative
  -Team-based (fixed)
  -Multi-user (formed)
  -User-generated content
  -Authority
  -KM

ADL never considered design issues.  LETSI knows it must consider design issues.  Look at that list to see how much Instructional Design has a role in the architecture (and look at its priorities, too).  Knowledge Management is a sub-category of Social Learning — I didn’t even mention it out loud and everyone in the room agreed.  Consider how Instructional Design is focused working with SCORM 1.x systems — THIS IS A SEA CHANGE.

In our Thursday session, after a lengthy alignment session on Wednesday afternoon, we produced 29 scenarios.  We each took up one or more to champion, which means I need YOU to help me vet the following scenarios (information forthcoming).  After reviewing as a team our different scenarios, the Architecture group came in to help us clear up information about the scenarios we drafted.  The big reveal (that was not that surprising):  whatever it is that we design as an architectural solution (called SCORM or “ISLA (Interoperable Services for Learning Architecture)”), it will likely be a Service-Oriented Architecture approach.  This isn’t locked in stone, but it seems to emerge as a general request among almost everyone involved.

So emerging from this workshop, we have put together some very clear pictures of what we’re going to build to and even some vision of how we’re going to build it, at least at a high level — and that is probably the most important reason why LETSI matters:  SCORM 1.x was about a framework of how different standards and specifications could work together.  SCORM 2.x will be more — it will layout how a myriad of open standards will work together — but it will likely also spurn off an open source community that will fuel the development of a next generation of interoperable services for learning.

SCORM 2.x will likely be a platform.  On Thursday morning I floated the notion publicly that  ”Maybe, as LETSI, we should be the LINUX of the E-Learning software community.”  As Lang  noted, the room seemed to agree:

“…all in attendance responding that this is the overall perspective we seem to be in complete agreement as the business model and community approach to make LETSI thrive.”

So that in a nutshell is why LETSI matters.  I’ll admit that I had some doubts going into the meeting about LETSI’s viability — but now that I get a real sense that we’re looking beyond being a standards body into becoming an organization that supports interoperable standards and services that work together to build platforms… I feel very very committed to the cause.  I think I participated in a singular even that will spark an incredible movement.

Related posts:

1. LETSI and the Past and Future of Interoperability Standards
2. Shaping Future Learning, or Why You Should Be Writing a White Paper for SCORM 2.0
3. What Will SCORM 2.0 Look Like?

I just finished reviewing one of my new “Bird Dog” assignments for the SCORM 2.0 workshop. The white paper was by Chris Raasch, the Technical Lead for the ADL Academic Co-Lab.

Chris frames the need for an evolution in SCORM Run-Time Data Modeling, SCORM 1.x allows for data storage within an LMS, but this ability is limited in what it can store and how data can be used for groups of learners (synchronously or asynchronously). SCORM 2.0 must address an expansion of the uses of the Run-Time Data Model for synchronous and asynchronous collaborative learning experiences, facilitated and stand-alone.

Chris advocates for

• Revision of the Run-Time Data Model
• Maintenance of a “Simple” data model
• Strong  content typing for easier content development
• Increased data storage bandwidth
• Rules for scoping learner data to content.

Chris proposes that this can be accomplished rather quickly by vetting out the extension of the Run-Time  Data Model through the LETSI community (a practice I’d certainly endorse) and modeling the SCORM 2.0 Data Model after ECMAScript.

I generally agree with the points Chris has brought to bear in the paper. That said, I have some questions about the idea of how to make multi-user learning experiences available in SCORM-based systems, even going forward with everything up for grabs.

I’m a content developer who’s pretty familiar with the existing 1.x data model, I’ve watched the evolution of the authoring tools that help non-technical people build content that runs in Learning Management Systems –they may be the lowest common denominator, but  I’d like to know who among the masses of content developers will be able to develop content to such a data model that supports interactions (small “i”) with the LMS as a persistent storage unit that will be used by other learners. One example comes to mind immediately: training sales teams on how to use a customer relationship management system (CRM). You could conceivably simulate a CRM with the LMS by having an interface that allowed sales learners to enter their contact notes as an instructor facilitates with the phone calls, and the sales team in training could then build off each other’s notes.

I get the instructional use of the model. Again… who can build to it?

It’s a question I would pose to Gafford/Blackmon, Ullery/Grata and several others talking to a collaborative data model. When the complexity of doing collaborative tasks is put on the server side, it improves the chances of implementation by content developers. Like Sequencing, however, if the complexity is placed on the shoulders of content developers –you’ll have a lot of templated systems writing to a select few data model elements.

Related posts:

1. The future of SCORM isn’t necessarily “SCORM”
2. SCORM 2.0: Call For White Papers
3. Shaping Future Learning, or Why You Should Be Writing a White Paper for SCORM 2.0