Discussion at the !dea conference have focused on a couple of things today:
- eLearning Frameworks
- repositories
Some of the thoughts I’ve gleaned…
eLearning Frameworks
The overwhelming direction that things appear to be going is in the direction of Service Oriented Frameworks for eLearning. As already mentioned, Scott Wilson from CETIS provided some useful input on this topic, using the ELF framework to illustrate his approach. Scott listed the following important properties of any framework:
– must be based on practical experience (not just theoretical)
– must support partial implementation
– can’t mandate a single development approach
– must support a range of implementation patterns
Repositories
General agreement here with the statement that 2004 was the year of the repository. Kerry Blincoe provided a useful overview of a number of Australian Government funded projects:
- ARROW involving Monash University (Lead Institution), Swinburne University of Technology, The University of New South Wales and The National Library of Australia – exploring whether a single repository infrastructure can suport multiple types of digital content.
- Australian partnership for sustainable resources funded by DEST looking at the managenent of existing repositories.
- Australian Digital Theses program looking at moving from individual institutiional repositories to a national referring and discovery service.
- Australian Flexible Learning Network
- the Learning Architechture Project (LeAP) run by the Tasmanian Dept of Education which is a service oriented approach implemented over a range of repositories.
John Towsend from Harvest Road provided a useful overview of the development of respository architectures to the point where now they are being designed to cater for the semantic web. He also suggested the following list of research ‘frontiers’:
– interoperability
– Semantic web
– meta data interchange
– trust and authentication
– adaption of content by educators
– quality
– community
– ePortfolios and blogs
– Learning design
Plenty here to occupy the time of lots of people as we move forward into this exctiting world!