Dave, I did find the newsletter interesting. It gave a few concrete examples of what's going on in the world of online learning. For those of you who don't bother reading it, the newsletter is a collection of reports from various projects and individuals sharing their experiences with trying to implement LOM applications.
The overall impression is that everybody is doing their own thing, very seldom aiming for full compliance with the LOM standard promoted by heavy bodies like IEEE, IMS, and ADL (SCORM). Most developers focus on their particular needs and downplay the interoperability issue, thus.
Judging by the reported problems and solutions - along the lines of "what we put into the content repository turned out to be practically unmanagable, so you might want to consider trying to standardize the format of the input" - not all of these projects come very close to displaying OpenACS-level engineering, IMHO.
The major problem reported by the more "developer-type" folks was that of context. A learning object is not always presented within the same learning context, and so its metadata cannot presuppose such a context. LOM has to be extended to deal with "dynamic" (context-aware) and not just "static" (context-ignorant) metadata, they argue. It seems to me that this need arises only if people try to turn a content repository into a course (as in sequence) management system.
The way we've intended it for OpenACS (following IMS) a stand-alone Curriculum package will store information about the curriculum's learning activities and the particular metadata that describe their context within the sequence. These set-up learning activities in turn refer to auxiliary resources, such as learning objects in a SCORM repository.
There is no reason for the learning objects to know that they are part of this or that curriculum sequence (or both of them). Therefore there is no reason for the LOM to contain information about that sort of context. From my point of view, the LOM in the SCORM repository has to be atomic, containing information about the learning object that is true regardless of its context. This seems to go along with Ernie's data model.
By the way, the article on online discussions perfectly described why Infogettable.net is relatively well trafficked and nevertheless has Internet's lamest discussion forum. It's all my fault, apparently. All I have to do is post a thought-provoking question every week or so and people will start singing like birds. The catch is, I would then have to spend my time facilitating the discussion... What happened to coffee talk ("Talk amongst yourselves.")?
