JISC’s non- technical guide to E-Learning Frameworks

http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/nontechguide1

I expect this is actually as ‘non-technical’ as one should expect a document to be about something as nerdy as E-Learning Frameworks but it’s not necessarily for the faint of heart. (actually, it really is pretty well non-technical!) Still, I’d encourage you to have a go if you’ve come across the Framework before but aren’t really sure what it’s about.

For my part, I keep wondering how long its going to be before the ‘small pieces’ folks (you know who you are!) protest this – these needn’t be antagonistic, but if your goal is to abolish all enterprise computing (instead of the silo’d monolithic systems that are the target of this type of approach) then you’d better come out shooting! Seriously, I’m just taking the mickey, (it’s Friday afternoon and all,) but certain calls to arms would have you believe we’d do better to have a student information system on every desktop (or better yet, none at all!) – SWL

IMS releases elearning specification Abstract Framework

http://www.imsglobal.org/af/index.cfm

“The IMS Abstract Framework (IAF) is a device to enable the IMS to describe the context within which it will continue to develop its eLearning technology specifications. This framework is not an attempt to define the IMS architecture, rather it is a mechanism to define the set of services for which IMS may or may not produce a set of interoperability specifications.” It’s hard to describe how huge this is. A lot of work has gone into this. It is not for the faint of heart. Start with the white paper, that alone is worth a few days or reading and digesting, and is invaluable for the appendices alone. – SWL