Dear CCK08 and SCORM 2.0 Colleagues,
I sometimes forget that the most difficult problems can be solved with a compelling business case. Take the issue of Web 2.0 technologies e.g. wikis, blogs, social networks etc that are becoming part of the fabric of the informal learning industry.
“LMS vendors are busily adding or recently have added wikis, blogs and social networks to their core offerings” says Bryan Chapman a long time learning strategist and a respected reviewer of learning technologies over the last ten years. The rhetorical question is “Why, when most Web 2.0 tools are basically free?” The answer says Bryan is “for years training teams have been working to eliminate content silos in our organizations so we don’t continuously wonder “who has the master content”. Without careful planning, we may end up with redundant and sometimes conflicting content embedded inside our core learning technologies, learners will be able to search the entire repository, whether created by an instructional designer or contributed by regular employee, and leverage the contend t across both domains.”
This sounds like a compelling business case and I don’t think we need a SCORM 2.0 specification. What do you think?
Thanks Frank
SIMNET Weblog 
First of all, Frank, welcome to the wonderful world of blogging.
Second, of course we need a spec 😉 Seriously though, we do need some things specified. There are parts of SCORM that we need to provide clarity around to help people build systems and content that are interoperable. That doesn’t happen no matter how much the social web wishes it to just magically happen. Facebook has their platform for sharing. Google is pimping out OpenSocial — and all of these frameworks for interoperable APIs in the social web are still in their infancy. Netscape came up with Embed tags… Then Microsoft came along with Div tags.. some stuff sticks and some doesn’t.
For example, if we decided to follow the “OpenSocial” format for socialized web experiences, we may have a very easy time building Google-ized services that meshed well with Google’s framework. There’s a compelling case to be made for this, but it comes with some risks of alienating or downright turning away non-adopters.
My point being that just because we don’t have the answers yet doesn’t mean we can’t start to answer the question. We need to spec SCORM 2.0… but how… is another question entirely.
Comment by mrch0mp3rs — September 16, 2008 @ 2:11 am