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For this book club chat, Between the Chapters, Laura talks with Lorna and Phil all about eLearning Standards. What they are, why they were developed, and what we can learn from these now.
25 Years of Ed Tech is a serialized audio version of the book 25 Years of Ed Tech, written by Martin Weller of the Open University and published by AU Press. The audio version of the book is a collaborative project with a global community of volunteers contributing their voices to narrate a chapter of the book. Bonus episodes are a series of conversations called "Between the Chapters" to chat about these topics and more!
"In this lively and approachable volume based on his popular blog series, Martin Weller demonstrates a rich history of innovation and effective implementation of ed tech across higher education. From Bulletin Board Systems to blockchain, Weller follows the trajectory of education by focusing each chapter on a technology, theory, or concept that has influenced each year since 1994. Calling for both caution and enthusiasm, Weller advocates for a critical and research-based approach to new technologies, particularly in light of disinformation, the impact of social media on politics, and data surveillance trends. A concise and necessary retrospective, this book will be valuable to educators, ed tech practitioners, and higher education administrators, as well as students."
Credits:
Text in quotes from the book website published by Athabasca University Press CC-BY-NC-ND
BG music Abstract Corporate by Gribsound released under a CC-BY license. Track was edited for time.
Artwork X-Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is licenced under CC-BY-SA.
Audio book chapters produced by Clint Lalonde.
Between the Chapters bonus podcast episodes produced by Laura Pasquini.
0:03
Between the chapters, a weekly podcast discussion focusing on a chapter of the book, 25 years of edtech, written by Martin Weller. here's your host, Laura pasquini.
0:18
Alright, welcome to chapter eight 2001 elearning standards. Today I'm joined for the book club conversation with Lorna Campbell and Phil Barker. Welcome. Alright, let's get into it. I've previously talked about learning objects, but we're going to talk about the E learning standards that maybe are surrounding the past two chapters on E learning and learning objects and bring it together, maybe, maybe not. What do you think you two you two are the experts I hear.
0:50
I think I think learning technology standards, where are the hope was that they would underpin interoperable learning objects and interoperable systems. That was really the that was the aim of learning technology standards. And it was actually, I think, a very admirable, admirable goal. What we wanted, or what people who were involved in developing standards were trying to do was to prevent education organizations from being locked into systems because we all knew that if you invested in an institution wide system, suck all your content into all your data into all your information into and they wanted to shift another system further down the line without interoperability, then that's a hugely costly overhead. So I think the goal of education technology standards to make these interoperable systems and to make this interoperable content was a really, really good idea. But the problem was that it didn't really work in practice for a large number of reasons, which I think we'll probably get into during the course of this conversation. So yeah, I think standards to some extent, are inextricably inextricably bound up with the idea of learning objects. And I think maybe the some of the reasons why learning objects did not really work is the same reasons that learning to not all, but many learning technology standards work did not do the job that they set out to do. What do you think fell off that?
2:31
Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. But I for me, it wasn't just a case of having your own content and putting it into a system and then wanting to migrate to the next system that you used. A lot of the really high quality learning resources that I saw, at the time, just took so much effort to develop, that it wasn't feasible to use them for just one person's course, or you're in just one place. So you needed to be able to create content that could be shared among several different organizations and used in different contexts used in, you know, across many different universities, for example, that were teaching similar courses. So, you know, for me, it seemed that if we were going to get high quality learning resources, they couldn't be developed for just one course. So they needed to be interoperable. They needed to work across many different systems that were being used by the different people who might benefit from the resource.
3:31
Yeah, the previous chapter. And Brian talked about this on our book club too, is we just had these little pieces and objects that were standing on their own, and we never had anything to kind of loot them together. And around the mid 90s, on EDUCAUSE is one of the groups that was mentioned this chapter, but they started that instructional management systems, IMS, to kind of think about how elearning standards might come together and address some of the problems with our platforms and content developers and using different formats and having them speak and talk to one another in a more cohesive way. And so I think this is where YouTube come in, because you started thinking about these standards in a different way across the pond in the UK. Can you share a little bit about what your background is in that area? Because I was really great to learn that I have the people who started it all there and tried to figure it out.
4:27
Yeah, and yeah, we should probably this is where we either disclaimer, or perhaps the declaration of interest that both Phil and I worked for an organization called cetus, which was the Center for Education, technology and interoperability standards. And that was National jusque service. So we were funded by the desk, which was our national technology, body, and era job. We were a distributed organization that was spread out across the UK and our job was to represent up higher and further education on a number of international standards bodies. We did other things as well. But that was that was one of our core remits. So we actually sat on a number of the standards bodies, we were members by mace, for example, members of IEEE participates in Dublin Core, and we were there to represent UK, higher and further education interests on those standards bodies. And I think it was recognized that developing standards, the hardest thing about developing standards is achieving consensus, particularly when you have very many different interests in the room, and our job was to be able to present a UK consensus within the standards bodies to ensure that the standards that produced would meet the requirements few key higher and further education. That was extremely challenging when you looked at the breadth of organizations participating in the standards initiatives, and particularly in an organization like IMS. where a lot of standards were very much coming from a more industry perspective. So So yeah, it was it was interesting work, but it was challenging.
6:22
We talked about across industries, I still think I read is one. And I do think but you're right. We have some different terminologies, binoculars, objectives, motives, I say. And I think it was interesting to read this because in my talks with the just talking about the learning objects, folks, and john Robertson was on the conversation that we, as a librarian himself, I was surprised to see the Dublin Core come into this chapter. And the way it was talked about because I didn't see any librarians at the table that were actually in these conversations, or was I wrong? Am I wrong to think that was there other people helping support interpreting what was mentioned, of the Dublin Core metadata applied to learning. So that's what I want to follow up here, a little background a lot.
7:09
filled your pocket. That's what
7:12
we did in the UK have library input, we had a sister organization called Yukon, which was, I can't remember what you can't stand stood for can you've flown? I can't, I think, I think UK Office of library network, or something like that, I think. But their remit was similar to ours, you know, how good the development of standards, but for them, it was in the library world. And we worked very closely with counterparts in Yukon, when it came to any standards that were relevant to your metadata, for example, or two repositories, you know, the ones that touched on the library world. And we did when we were gathering requirements, discussing the specifications while they were in development. We did talk to librarians, and we had librarians come to our meetings and talk about what they were doing. And they found it very difficult. I think that, you know, the the fully trained, cataloguing librarians were so used to describing a resource, the resource in hand as it was there in Objective terms to describe the content, that's fine, you're the subject matter who will take that sort of thing. But then, you know, we had the educators coming in and say, but, but how might it be used? And that's when librarians began to sort of get you mean, how might it be used? You know, we can describe what it is. But, you know, I guess with a book, you read the book. So you know, traditional library cataloging doesn't go a great deal into how it might be used. And that's, that's when we started looking at things like power data, you know, recording how a resource had to be used, and things like that. This
9:10
is one of the real paradoxes. I mean, if you're if we look at the standards that were designed to describe educational content, so for example, the IEEE loan, which is frequently held up as probably been
9:26
probably one of the most difficult standards to where I'm trying to be polite here.
9:33
spent lots of time working the standard, it wasn't good. It was very complex. And one of the reasons for that complexity was it wasn't just describing a thing. It was describing many different aspects of that thing, and in particular, how that thing might be used. So you're once you get into that territory, you're getting further and further away from the intrinsic nature. The thing and more and more into very speculative realms of how, you know, the myriad possibilities of how it could be used. And that is the real paradox of trying to describe how a resource can be used in the learning because that is not something that is intrinsic to the result, because you can use it anything in learning, I mean, villainize years, years in meetings, trying to define what a learning resource was. And of course, the answer to that is it can be anything. But if you're trying to codify that and pin it down in a standard, it's really difficult because what makes a thing a learning resource is not the thing itself, but how it's used. When it gets really, really difficult.
10:45
Yeah. And, you know, we have to remember that learning is not something that's delivered, you're learning is an activity. Learning is not content. learning, learning is a verb, not a noun.
10:58
No, I love that you both said that. Because I think of the standards and why you stumped librarians was Yeah, Dublin Core bidadoo for noon wants to get nerdy I'll put a link in the show notes, is really about descripting and descriptors for content. And you probably struggle with industry folks that were beyond higher ed, because they're delivering training, I hear that all the time. Virtual instructor led, and I was like, we're talking about these content objects, instead of talking about the pedagogies, the processes, the strategies, and the methodologies. So standard is an interesting term. And those who define the standard also come with, I think, some sort of bias or assumption of what that standard might be for anything. And when it comes to learning, we all have our own two cents on that. And I could see where some of these, what you're talking about is the UK learning object metadata core, UK, long core, kind of butted heads. It sounds with IEEE or what IMS was thinking about at the time at EDUCAUSE, and maybe even with the librarian set of standards, because we all have different perspective of what teaching and learning was, especially in the online digital spaces. We're kind of playing it, kind of
12:13
kind of No, I think, and I think this is where there's a little bit of confusion. And the chapter is how all these standards related to each other. And I'm sure Martin won't mind to saying this. And again, I think this is something that we want to pick up in the conversation is but but the two main standards that were being used to describe learning resources were Dublin Core and IEEE love it, there were only was the tff. The law was such a huge standard that very few people implemented the whole thing. So what they tended to do was implement an application profile off it, they would choose the elements that they would want, and just use those. And then the idea was that if you published your application profile, people will be able to take that and know which elements you use. So you could exchange data. So what the UK long core was, was an application profile of the law, it was a subset as much smaller subsets of the main standard, which we designed for use within the UK higher and further education sector as part of like, just projects. So it wasn't anything different from the law MOOC, just this little subset of it, we provided guidance on how to use these elements. So that that's kind of like the relationship. So Dublin Core is a much simpler standard. The long was the one that has the what is it 8486 elements is to know them all can't remember any of the long core was a subset of that. And I think we will eventually got the wrong Core Data subset of between two years, or even less. So I think that's how they're related. But Phil, do you want to sort of raise a point about you know, why there is this confusion between them?
14:09
Yes, I mean, it relates back to something that I mentioned earlier that we tried to get input from educators like Martin, on what would be like to see in metadata. And that meant that we gave them these documents that were full of XML, large tables with strange terms in them, like what does it look like? permitted maximum permitted maximum? Like you're asking educators for feedback on this and that mounting raises the point towards the end of this chapter, the the standards that are successful have sunk into the background was what we were doing is we were bringing them into the foreground and Asking educators about them and just confusing these educators for what we did get some good feedback from them. But I think the overall effect was detrimental to everybody's well being. And, you know, so yeah, Martin, I think in the chapter has said some things about Dublin Core implied some things about Dublin Core being difficult to use and good bringing educators out in cold sweat or something like that, but, and I felt a little bit bad reading those because now I know, I know, the people who are involved in Dublin Core, and they do a good job of everything. If he'd said those things about the EU about alarm, then I would have fully agreed with him. On the other hand, Lorna, how would you fancy reading out the long I mean, reading out 15 elements of Dublin Core for the for the book was bad enough, if we'd have to read out the alarm that would have not worked so well for them.
16:06
But I think that is an interesting point there that Phil's raised, which isn't it? I mean, it's Martin mentioned that briefly in the chapter, but I think it does bear repeating is, but we're talking about standards it, Phil and I just know, the majority, the bulk of the chapter talks about standards that were not successful, you know, they're trying to do something useful, the meter data standards. They were really successful in their approach. But as Martin said they did. I think they were a useful jumping off point for what went on to become open education resources. But there were quite a lot of other standards that were actually very successful, what people tend to forget about. And I think one of them was Kti, question and taste interoperability standard, which, again, was pretty bad. org, but actually worked, it works quite well. And it was one of the reasons I think it did work quite well. It was more practice. People wanted to share test items more than they wanted to share educational resources to us.
17:09
So for that standard, can we unpack that a bit just for listeners that here dropping in going? What are they even talking about? Can you give an example of something that might be shared from an educator?
17:21
So the question on test interoperability standard was designed for exchanging questions, so assessment items, so that you could have a bank of question types that you could, you can draw from to make different assessments. And the idea was that if you use this specification, you can exchange questions between item banks, so that that was all it was designed to do. And it actually did do that. And it did quite well.
17:52
Also, I mean, I remember not the conversations that we had with our colleagues at UConn. And with Scott Wilson, as well, was whether education specific standards were the way to go. You know, a lot of the standards that have been most useful in education weren't entirely developed for education in the first place. You know, one, which is really successful, and but nobody knows, is what lets you use your educo. If you've your identity management standards that allow you to log on to Wi Fi, if you're affiliated with one educational institution, you can log on to the Wi Fi at another one. In many countries around the world. Yeah, that's been a great success. And, you know, of great benefit, I think, to educators. And another example, we're doing this as a podcast. So, you know, we can talk about the podcast, as being content that's embedded in an RSS feed with metadata so that your description of that content can be syndicated to different feed syndication points, and the content can be downloaded onto people's devices, and you get a nice display in your, your podcast app telling you, you know, what are the different episodes? That's a great example of the sort of, of interoperability standard, allowing content to travel from one device to another. Pretty much what we wanted to do with you know, things like iOS content, packaging, and I Tripoli law.
19:33
Yeah. Yeah.
19:34
That's a great example. And I think you're right, Phil, you earlier said, the educators didn't want to see the standards. They actually just, it's like the mainframe of a house. They just wanted to have the fancy the carpets and the or the wall. It's in flooring and paint, but they're actually built around these things that were created in your standards. I think you said you had 84 Uk long core standards at one point. Is that true? And you went down to 20? What's the number?
20:04
What's the number of elements in the loan? And you know, I used to do all this stuff.
20:09
I have 76 in mind, but there's so many different ways of counting them. Okay,
20:16
okay. And one Yeah, it does. It depends on UK. But the other thing about the the UK long cord, that application profile, we had several versions of it for different things. And that again, that was the way application profiles were supposed to work is that you please modification profile for a specific purpose. And it might be bigger or smaller, depending on that purposes.
20:37
Your customized customizing essentially, what a standard could look like, depending on how or where it's used, it sounds like
20:44
you're cutting it, you're cutting it down, and you're gonna say, Well, I'm going to use these five elements, because they're the only ones that I need. And you you've published that. so other people can, if they want to interoperate with you, they can see how you're implementing standard.
20:59
And this is common like and using myself using Dublin Core other things to create databases or catalog catalogs. On each institution, campus organization will choose what metadata they want to include, they might have, like, these are the standards across, and they may not use all like Dublin Core, I'll pick on for the 15, they may not use all 15. And they might say we must have these must be the must haves, just so we can talk across, share and include your item into whatever. And so for learning, I guess that sounds like a great idea is to customize it because there's no way as as an educator, I'd be like, how many do you want me to do and look at and write about? And that's a lot?
21:38
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
21:40
Were there other things when you're reading the chapter that kind of stood out that you had a second thought about? Or you're kind of considering as I reflect back, because I don't think it was all negative? I think what you all were part of at the time, did really lend us to evolve into our own education resources, and other things that we take for granted online these days.
22:03
Yeah. And I was I thought it was a very fair chapter, like said, you know, barring this, this slight confusion between the different stuff. I absolutely agree with everything Martin was saying. And I think, you know, he, I think we had to go through that process,
22:21
too.
22:23
And again, as I said, right back in the beginning of the goal of what these standards were trying to do was really admirable. But it just didn't really work. But I think to some extent, we had to go through that process to figure that out and to figure out what we didn't want to do. One example of that is 2009,
22:49
eight or nine year
22:51
facing online in 2009, I think it was there was a large program funded in England, not of all of the UK, but an England called the UK or your project. That was about I think it was it ran over three years, nothing was about five, 5 million pounds worth of public funding within two that it was administered by just going higher education Academy. And the organization that Phil and I worked for, provided the technical strategy for that program, that program so we advised how the resources should be managed, how they should be exchanged, so I've just been joined by my cat here.
23:37
Cats in the pipe.
23:39
This is Josh,
23:40
Josh, nice to meet you. You have something to say about the UK Oreo project. What would Josh tell us? You've learned from that.
23:49
But the the approach we took to that program was not so good data standards, heavy route because we had tried that in previous programs and learn that it didn't work. So when it came to the ukiyo e our program which was like the first large scale art initiative in, in the UK, we basically said to people put the resources anywhere that that is going to be useful to you. Trying to put them somewhere that you can get an RSS feed data of so they can then be could be aggregated. We give them we didn't even tell them what metadata standards to use. We just say make sure that your resources accompanied by a title, your name, date, subject a couple of other small bits pieces.
24:40
Hashtag Yeah,
24:41
hashtag UK we are. And there was some discussion about this approach or that people like how, how are people going to be able to find things? Everyone's gonna disappear? It's all gonna be a big mess, blah, blah, blah. The problem ran for three years and And that hashtag is still in use. So you can actually still look on platforms like YouTube and Twitter and find resources tagged UK we are, some of which dates right back to the original program for over 10 years ago. And some of them are new. And I know people on Twitter who still use that hashtag. And I think that shift from formal standards to what at the time was called things like books on folksonomies, and web two, and you know, all that kind of stuff, I think, did mark, a real shift that came in rained about the same time as open education. And we are, and I think that was really significant.
25:45
And it's also an alter at that point, and go going back to metadata. We switch the focus from sort of structured metadata to providing a description of the resource. Something you mentioned earlier, and which is in Martin's book, is the idea that you've got this resource, and then you catalog it. And that was something that we said, No, no, no, it shouldn't really worry about this. And it was john Robertson, who articulated this best when he said that the resources themselves will be self describing, you wouldn't know academic would write a paper without putting a title at the top list of the author's underneath that, underneath that, there'd be a, you know, an abstract, and then if you you probably get some keywords, the date that it was written that sort of thing. These are things that, you know, they that academics would naturally put into a research paper that they were writing. And yet, you take the same people and tell them to create a learning resource. And suddenly you get something with no contextualizing information whatsoever. So, you know, the first was to sit to look at you put the contextualizing information into the resource. And, you know, hopefully, we'll be able to, you know, pull that information out later. Better still is, if you're using a content management system, that allows that sort of contextualizing information to be entered as separate fields, then you're creating the metadata at the same time as you're creating the resource. And I think this is touching a little bit on, you know, one reason why I think a lot of these a lot of the education standards failed, is because the tooling that was created for it, for them, was really quite crude. Your Mark Martin gives the example in the chapter of the UK university where you know that they'd have a resource and they'd be cataloging it. But if any change was made to the resource, all of the metadata had to be created again from scratch. And, yeah, when I read that part of the chapter, I thought, yeah, yeah. That's why they failed.
28:09
Yeah, and anyone listening? As we've tripped back the Wayback Machine to the 90s to early, early aughts, this wasn't a time where we had those interconnections. So I love Lorna, that you brought up the UK Oh, er project, I'll put the hashtag and see what's still over there in the world. Because I think part of what is being said in a few of these between the chapter episodes is, we never really had the means at that time to really share web 2.0 was just starting. We weren't social with our media. And we also didn't see value in that sharing. So a lot of these ground work chapters, including the E learning standards, I do think form, not only OCR, but Creative Commons, like how do you kind of license share remix, and these are some of the early groundworks and rumblings and also the idea that you're thinking about that long tail, you're not just like, let's put this up for this term or semester. But how could we go back to that? A few years from now, five years from now and could we even access that like, people don't remember like, who in our offices still have maybe floppy disks from God knows when hard little square discs that they've maybe yes, like, I know that Phil's gonna show us right now. Yeah, there you go square hard disks, like I'm thinking about all this. Yeah, and even like that's important USB keys in there. So zip keys, USB keys are probably going to be obsolete because we haven't really thought about long term on not just storage, but use and movement and evolution that we are now if it wasn't moving that fast back then. And we really need to think more about that. Because I think that's somewhat of what the standards, it seemed like we're doing technically but you also were saying standards that were helping people I think logically, they're
30:01
wrong. Oh, yeah, no, definitely. And I think I think it is easy to forget what the technology landscape was, was like them because it has moved so fast. I mean, I remember, like people sort of like putting score on the idea that, you know, one day people would use Google to fight to find educational content. But what, Caroline Google? Well, um, you know, there's an argument to be happier I ran for I think it is it particularly, you know, web tool hadn't really happened at that stage. And I think it's impossible to talk about education and technology standards in a critical way without thinking about the, about the technology landscape at the time, and the type of, of what red tape looks like, and how we thought it would work. And particularly when we're talking about Resource Description standards, metadata standards, there were so bound up in this idea of the repository, that content had to be stored in repositories. And a lot of that came, it was a bit it was a real hangover from the, from what they call the open access space, scholarly workspace, where you keep things in a repository now that that works for, for static resources, whether they're books or their journals, or their papers, they are, they are things that are at the end point of their development process, they're not really going to change. Education Resources are much more fluid, they change rapidly, they change continually. They're revised, they're changed, they're used for all different purposes. They don't fit well into formal repositories. But despite that being the case, in the UK, and I know, in other countries as well, there was a lot of investment in learning object repositories. And I don't know if the guy spoke about this in your previous podcast. But the learning object repositories were really struggled to survive, they were hugely expensive. I mean, vastly expensive, required, and sometimes called teams of people to manage them. They're acquired by in from the educators, particularly if they weren't national repositories, putting content into them, as Phil said, you know, frequently, you had to like fill in all these complicated forums and whatnot. And of course, as soon as the funding dries up, the ripples just disappeared. And along with it, and it's the content that we're into places like YouTube, and flicker, but actually survived.
32:37
And a lot of the learning object repositories were essentially closed, you know, that they were gatekeepers telling you, you know, what you couldn't, couldn't put in. In, you know, in some cases, you have to be a member of a certain community in order to get access to the material that was in there. I think that was one of the things that we did that was very good was that it focus people's attention on the main objective, which is sharing these resources, getting as many people using the resources as possible, and not wasting money on things like access management. Yeah, I
33:24
think the opening up of the gates and this is something I think in higher ed happens a lot in the academy, we'd like to store knowledge and think we are the keepers of versus what would it mean to have a community around, sharing and exchanging and critiquing that, and I love that. That's where some of this background work of elearning standard sounds like, it did just weave into the next kind of few chapters that Martin will write about, but also the work that we're still doing today, I think it's still relevant. And when you ask someone with an E learning standard is now they probably don't know this history, and they probably don't, aren't even aware of how it's woven into the fabric of how they work in learning technology, or being online or digital learning, instructor faculty. They're just trying to figure it out these days. But I think it's the building blocks of what we could have deeper conversations, which I found interesting as now in the living in the US now, we have other standards that are somewhat less technical, but come from the background of like, we need to make our information accessible, we need to think about ways we can create some sort of communication interaction with our courses. And I really love that some of the groundwork that you all started is exposing more of the other guest teaching and learning needs really than anything else.
34:47
And I think I think you're right, I think that's a very good example of the fact that you know, it's, it's very easy to, to, you know, to pour scorn on the the whole learning standard Don't say, oh, it didn't work. And to some extent, a lot of it didn't work. But it was a very significant learning experience. We do still need, you know, as you both said, we do still need standards, and we are still using them. It's just that they are night down in the weeds where they should always have been, you know, we don't need to see them, we need but we all rely on them. Well, I mean, one of the other standards that was really successful, that was developed just a little later than the ones we've been talking about was the the LTI standard, the learning and learning tools interoperability standard, which is widely used by many institutions today, to join there, that I'd take systems together. And it just works. I mean, talk about or know about it too much. It just, you know, just does the dot the job. And similarly, metody. So, you know, Google's knowledge graph does still use me to data. It's where it's just, you know, educators would need to see if
36:02
you're still working in this space, you love you learning standards.
36:06
I'm still working on metadata standards, yes. Doing a fair amount of work with Dublin Core, still defining application profiles. And londa just mentioned, how Google uses metadata. One of the long running projects that I've had, skin over 10 years old now is putting some of the allowing people to describe some of the educational characteristics of resources, using the same sort of same metadata schema has Google uses. It's still relevant, finally on Yeah, trying to focus on small simple things that can be done to, you know, with simple use cases, like help somebody who's suddenly found that they've got to learn, we've got to be teaching online. For some reason. Yeah, they haven't planned to do it a few months before, but they're doing it now. And they've got to find online learning resources that will help them teach some particular points in a curriculum that they're they're teaching to use cases that are still relevant.
37:18
Yeah, I'm in an industry. And it's funny to see how metadata and SCORM is part of the formal standards, because we still use it in x API, things, finding out how things are being utilized or not or failing. So I think it's the underlying technical things that Yeah, many, many people coming to this podcast that aren't loving the event naming standards and metadata life, but they're coming to it knowing that this is woven into the fabric of what they're teaching and learning with, I think will be really critical. Are there any other questions that you want to pose to either Martin or the community about learning technology standards, or what you're thinking about from this chapter that we haven't talked about? Oh,
38:03
that's a difficult one. I mean, I
38:05
think,
38:06
I think it is important to, to remember what we learned from this process. So that we don't do it again. I think we're kind of, we're very good at for dancing the history of a take. And I know, this is something that, you know, all the water has written, a lot of eight need to be in, who gets to write it take history. And I think that's one of the reasons why, you know, I really, really liked Martin's book, because it just puts it down there year by year. And I think it is important to remember all these things that we try and release things that we did. Because if we forget about that, then there's a good chance that a vendor is gonna come along and tell us that, you know, they're going to disrupt education and look at this fabulous new thing that they've done. And you know, there's gonna be half a dozen people in backlinking. We tried out 15 years ago, we knew what doesn't work, but nobody listens to them. So I think it's, I mean, we were talking about backlinks earlier on I'm actually an archaeologist by background, that's that's really what I'm my academic background is on a historian, I do think it's really really important that we remember the history of eight take how we got here and I think it's particularly important that we remember the stuff that the stuff that didn't work because there is a tendency to you know, to try and brush that under the carpet. And like I said, if we do that we risk wasting a lot of time and effort trying to recreate things and repositories that are Case in point that we just know the work so I think that that would be not so much a question but I think that would be my take away from this chapter in particular, which is very much talking I think about not every you know, something's work but I love it didn't but we need to remember why.
39:59
Yeah, I have nothing to add to that.
40:03
Well, no, I thank you so much. I think what I'm going to take away from this is, we could do more pre mortems. So we've learned lessons already. So going into a potential new project or a new innovation, that's all comes out. It's not being the negative, Nancy, on my side. But it's more about thinking about what are the challenges we're going to face from what we've learned? And what can we call out before going into it. So instead of taking these lessons learned going into anything new, because we might have to get to a point where we think about these standards again, because we have to build it somewhere else. I don't know what's going to happen with the web and all online, learning things. But maybe we come in there and talk about the potential blockers or challenges that we've learned from elearning. It's in development in the early aughts is kind of what I'm thinking about these days, and not to be negative about it and saying, well, I've done that before, but more around the, what can we do better? From what we know, in the past? I really like that, Lorna. So thank you for sharing that.
41:05
Yeah, absolutely. And it just, I can just add one other point there. Yeah. You know, it's like you said, it's very hard to predict how the technology landscapes going to develop, because we can't predict what's going to happen to the world. And I think we're a case in point is right now we are, you know, for the last four or five years, most education institutions have been outsourcing a lot of their tech, with organizations have been shifting into the claim, because that was a more efficient, more cost effective way to do things. Now, with a pandemic, with everyone suddenly having to be everything online. The sheer volume of content that is being put into the cloud is astronomical. So the costs associated with that are really hitting the companies, the ad tech vendors, and they're starting to try and push these costs back down onto the institutions, understandably, and something's gonna something's gonna give something, you know that that's not sustainable. So I think it's going to be interesting to see what happens if that model breaks. But this idea that we can just keep shoving stuff into the cloud, and it's cost effective, and I'll be fine. Because suddenly, it's becoming very, very expensive. And maybe it's not going to be fine soon. So it could be that we, you know, we might end up doing another sort of full cycle of tech development and the whole idea of interoperability standards of a different kind, comes back round again.
42:35
Well, we'll never not have work out there. I feel, Phil, Lorna, thank you so much. I'm glad that we could have this conversation. So I appreciate you joining me to have a chat.
42:44
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
42:50
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