http://www.imsglobal.org/community/forum/index.cfm?forumid=9 FuseTalk Standard Edition http://www.imsglobal.org/community/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=29&threadid=354 2010-04-19T08:53:51 -05.00 rabel 1
It was an eclectic group that crossed military, corporate training, government, K-12, and higher ed (minimally). The meeting was held as a way for ADL to hear about views and, I guess, determine what role it can play going forward in the registry/repository space.

The information about the meeting is here on a Google site: http://groups.google.com/group...-and-repository-summit

David Massart from European SchoolNet attended and represented the IMS LODE work. Also, Jon Phipps represented the JES&Co work on ASN (Achievement Standards Network), etc.

Because of the wide spectrum of attendees, it was difficult for the meeting to coalesce around "what problem is it we are trying to solve?" Of course, there are two basic problems that registries/repositories might solve:

1. Organizing content production to achieve some efficiency in the process.
2. Having a better way of searching and finding learning materials.

But, depending on which segment you are in, the issues/challenges around these two basic problems can be quite different. And, sharing content among the different segments does not seem to make sense at all - because context is such a crucial part of learning.

The backdrop to all of this, of course, is that while institutional/organizational content management for learning content has found a small niche over the last decade, the grand registries/repositories that cut across jurisdictions have been trying to figure out a bunch of stuff, like: what is the compelling need? is this more about content or community? why aren't shared assets used more in real production environments? etc.

For instance, ADL and the U.S. government invested heavily in something called the ADL Registry and based on something called the CORDRA specification over the last 10 years. I am not an expert on this activity, but the general perception is that it did not produce any return on the investment - other than perhaps some experience in what works and what doesn't. Interestingly, neither the ADL Registry or CORDRA were discussed at this gathering.

IMS LODE came across as a positive step forward, if for no other reason than it is focused on the REALITY that one of the likely pieces in moving forward are ad hoc collections of repositories that are springing up from various government funded initiatives. At the 30,000 ft level, IMS LODE describes a way to publish a registry of repositories and handles the conversion from a common language to access all of them to the specific standards that each one may be using. It is a very pragmatic project based on the real issues being encountered in Europe right now.

So, the timing of the recent release of the LODE Base Document is good and it should be a useful piece of work for the European ASPECT project or others that wish to leverage it. IMS established a new approach for the publishing of the document to allow for a "Creative Commons-like" sharing of derivative works from the effort.

It is also very clear that in the educational context "repositories" are really morphing into social collaboration sites for teachers, domain experts, or students. This, in my opinion, is the primary lesson learned in the last 10-15 years from the various major activities. I spoke about this at the GLOBE conference in early 2007 in Japan as the lead-off keynote - and one speaker after another got up and confirmed establishment of better collaboration and context as the goal going forward. Unfortunately, I have seen relatively little progress on this in the last 3 years - I think primarily due to the lack of sustainability of efforts focused around content. The model I like going forward is one of Digital Learning Network - one of the trends we have seen in the Learning Impact Awards - which takes the collaboration aspect and puts it up front - with repositories and content playing only a supporting role.

One final note - we all agreed at the ADL gathering that "we don't need any more standards and specifications in the repository area." This reflects the frustration that many have had in the time and effort spent on things like metadata, CORDRA, etc. with marginal results. I couldn't agree more. However, I will have to say, "Duh, don't expect much from specifications that precede wide agreement on the compelling problems that they need to solve (as opposed to an envisioned problem that doesn't really exist yet." However, I will add this: The reason that Google has become the de facto web registry is because it established the de facto standard for ranking searches - and, the de facto standard for ease of search. More on that at a later date.

Many thanks to the kind folks at ADL for hosting the meeting.

-Rob Abel]]> http://www.imsglobal.org/community/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=29&threadid=39 2009-04-06T10:06:34 -05.00 LisaM 1 http://www.imsglobal.org/community/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=29&threadid=38 2009-04-01T03:56:44 -05.00 David_Massart 1
My powerpoint presentation of the Information for Learning Object eXchange (ILOX) is available on slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/dmassart/ilox20090305.

Best regards,

David]]>