[school-discuss] Re: XML in Education

[vernier@vc.bc.ca (Bruno Vernier)]

On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 11:23:59AM -0600, Les Richardson wrote:

> >        c) Use a XML Format (EduML, EML) for all lesson plans to allow 
> >	   easy transformation of the data to any other format. 
> 
> Ditto. How? (Sorry to be negative...)


On the contrary, Les, you are being constructive :-)

After 3.5 years of working/thinking about XML in education, I currently
think that:

- Storing Data that is potentially going to be interchanged is best done in
some sort of XML (technically speaking)

- that planning for interoperability of education-related data is always a
"good thing" (TM) but that there is a huge downside:

- writing education-related software that allows XML interchange of data is
hard because most people either don't have the skills or are just starting
to acquire them ... and people who are more than beginners (like me) are
still bogged down by another problem:

- that we don't have a universal concensus on a specific XML for education.
This is not for lack of candidates  (EduML, EML, IMS, SIF, and their
siblings) but that the concensus-building is happening among commercial and
institutional entities in a closed manner (it costs 1000 dollars to be in on
this game with IMS for example) ... so we try to make sense of the "open"
documents released from time to time without the context of the closed
deliberations. 

- Finally, my gut summary is that we, in the open source community, are

1. largely unaware or naive about this particular process (the process of
establishing a universal XML for education), 

2. unsure of the political/cultural/technical aspects of adapting ourselves to the
emerging standards coming from the aforementioned closed committees

3. wondering how long this process will take, and what to do while we wait
for a standard to be universally accepted


Now to answer the specifics of where we are with EDUML:

- 6 of us have participated in various ways in building up a website
http://www.edu-xml.org which contains the some thoughts and exercises on the
creation of , and possible uses for a standard XML in education.  It is
incomplete and work has ceased for the past month ... and I have described
some possible reasons for that in the previous paragraphs

The next step was to be to select an XML schema from the list of candidates
we have compiled. I hope you now see why I am just not sure that we are ready
for that today... 

<dream>

My dream is to discover tomorrow that a group of highly qualified experts in
educational data interchange working in an open forum, publish their
recommendation, get it recognized by the W3C or IEEE  so that we can get on 
with building software around that standard and that our future debates
about XML in Education be reduced to reminding ourselves to stick to this established
standard.

</dream>