Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Adaptive learning
There is just one problem; by the end of this thread, when we have reached that new level of adaptive learning enlightenment, the once so keen financers will have followed your expert advice and dropped out, and we will have no practical use for our insights. We'll probably laugh at this irony in the long run. However, though this laugh would hopefully prolong our lives, the lack of food on our table in the short run is likely to prevent us from ever experiencing that long-run benefit. When you say that you wouldn't want those who feel a need for Curriculum to be discouraged by you, everyone knows that the damage is already done. You have "weight" and I haven't. Please don't take your (temporarily?) pessimistic outlook out on us. Keep your skepticism coming, though.
You're making Simple Sequencing out to be a rocket science. Having studied the IMS specifications, we cannot agree with that portrayal. It's a complex material, yes, but rocket science, no. If it is flawed, those flaws will be detected. If the flaws are as fundamental as you say, they'll be sorted out on a fundamental level. We immediately realized, for example, that without considerable caching the implementation would truly suck. However flawed, IMS offer universal standards for Simple Sequencing, adopted by SCORM. Their specifications are more or less exact instructions that can and will be tested and improved. Your organics are certainly important considerations when making Simple Sequencing useful, but they don't constitute an architectural blueprint for developers.
In regard to the 30 years of failed attempts to produce adaptive learning systems, what can I say? It is indeed a depressing anecdote. I wasn't born then, but from what Discovery teaches me, back in those days rocket science was actually a "rocket science", whereas today it is more of an industry. I can imagine that a corresponding development has taken place in the field of Simple Sequencing. With IMS standards being adopted by major players in the industry, we are now experiencing a period in time when people are actually working in the same direction, or within a common framework. This raises my hopes that we won't be telling each other that discouraging anecdote 30 years from now.
Now, over to the real arguments for avoiding Simple Sequencing - and those I projected onto you. You claim that there is a horse and a cart, SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 1.3. Thus you want to postpone the Curriculum implementation until other more basic functionalities are in place. This was the reasoning I was trying to track and pin down, semi-successfully. I was assuming that your horse was of a fundamental sort, with the cart being dependent on it. To me, there is no horse and no cart. Curriculum is a standalone package; it does not make a case for or even imply SCORM this or that and in this or that order. If there is a horse that has to be before our cart, it is OpenACS. I assumed that this was your horse; hence presupposition (2). But nope.
In my mind, this leaves us with the "no acute need for"-argument for postponing Curriculum. I will not pretend to know what rank or rating Simple Sequencing has on the evangelization chart, and hence its priority for development. I only know that people within and without the OpenACS/dotLRN world take an interest in it. I also know that it is quite possible to take interest in several things at the time. Now that dotLRN, along with its community of developers and vendors, is in a phase where it has to expand or stay forever obscure, it may even be the thing to do. Strategically, it can pay off to support initiatives from wannabe professional developers rather than to remove the carpet from under their feet, especially when the institutional users/promoters actually are interested in their proposals.
Let's drop the pessimism. Let's start off this project and you'll have the chance of your life to break that 30-year-old spell that has plagued your industry. Let's chase those demons away!
