Great post, this gives me a much broader “hiistorical” context for the questions surrounding learning object repositories -I recently have been talking to a developer friend who was talking about a learning object repository premised on CMSs like Typo3 , Drupal, or WordPress. I think, in some regards, it makes a lot of sense and was wondering if you see this move, gien a robust community (a big gven I know -humor me) as a potential step toward a “large tool.” I have been using the small peices loosely joined and personally have had some real successes, one of the questions i am currently facing is how to archive these virtual learning spaces effectively. How do we catalogue the work done to be an effective resources easily found? For the small tools loosely joined will create a dynamic community over the course of 10 or 15 weeks that will, by the nature of the game, begin to diffuse. Perhaps the necessity of a large, or not so large, repository might be efective in the shape of an archival space for cataloguing these resources so that they remain both relevant and at the same time low maintence.

As for backing up – how about archiving the various RSS feeds? You could suck them all into an appropriate aggregator (Eduglu, anyone?) and set it to archive the distributed and loosely joined conversations/contributions for the duration of a course or activity…

The higher education vs school thing is simply a matter of different needs. If you remember, a few reports noted that a push to the schools sector was needed, but very little was done in that sector. Also, very few at the schools level had the ability (or time) to see the advantages of the technology, keeping in mind that it might look very different when used at the schools level.

I cant think of any sector where a repository/digital depository can be more useful than in schools. The transferrance of media is intensive and in a working invironment that is increasingly busy, there is no better place for a tool where teachers and students can quickly access the resources needed for assignments. Hence a rather desperate cry for help in that sector. It would have been nice to have seen the http://www.edusource.ca tools in a box available because one aspect of this is the setting up of repositories by people who need a simple fix (perhaps a simpler fix would be a better term to use here), if there is one.

I think that the next push will come from the schools sector because that is where the needs are getting crucial. Teachers need the ability to access a vast reportoire of resources (in many formats) but at the same time teachers need to be able to control student access to those resources. Hence, expect rather closed communities with the ability to get outside the school community when required.

You might be right about drugal, or drugal derivatives! In any case those of us in the schools sector will be looking for tools that will meet the needs of the learning environment for teachers and students (another blot in the mix is the current accountability in the schools sector in some provinces forcing teachers to emphasize curriculum and testing as apposed to thinking skills, but that is another issue). We are not there yet but it would seem that the technology is there! I think the packaging is what is now required.

I enjoyed reading you blog and appreciate your contribution to the field.

Edusource.ca wound up being about as far from a simple fix that it was a complete failure as a software development project. There were many valuable lessons learned as part of the process, but nothing I would even jokingly describe as “easy”.

I really think Drupal (or something similar) is the way to go. The days of having to write custom software from the ground up is thankfully over. Open source projects are now at the level where they can be adapted and deployed with little or no effort, providing more effective and certainly more efficient development paths than we had back in the CAREO days. And they can be deployed on even the lowliest webservers, without fancy high end hardware or infrastructure.