A Tale of Two Explications: SCORM Explanations Past and Present

While reading up on what SCORM was, I noticed that Rustici software's one-minute overview of it had a note in its header signifying that their new SCORM Explained page provided more information. Clicking that link, I found myself taken to a splash page of sorts for their newer explanation. On it, it seemed that the writer took significant efforts to dumb down his previous one-minute overview, adding analogies, a colorful bar graph, and removing virtually all technical language. Whereas the prior overview explained and attempted to clarify far more than the new splash page does, it also provided less detailed technical and business-related information than the company's SCORM Explained page did overall.
Past the splash page, the new page provides information and context about it from a business and technical perspective, as well a glossary of SCORM-related terms. While it is certainly informative, it also lacks the elegance and ease of digestibility of the simple overview presented by the previous page. Within two paragraphs the overview explains that SCORM is a particular way of constructing Learning Management Systems and educational content in order to allow interoperability between SCORM conformant systems. The second says it is the industry standard for this, and then proceeds to present an analogy of DVD format compatibility to explain SCORM's funciton. It follows this up with a red and blue bar graph (simply titled "thegraph") with images of clocks and dollar signs pasted over each bar, indicating content integration's costs before and after SCORM. The graph lists no units, sets no scale whatsoever, and otherwise does nothing to indicate its particulars but its somewhat ham-fisted assertion that: BIG RED BAR BAD! MANY CLOCKS AND DOLLARS COST. SMALL BLUE BAR BETTER. LESS CLOCKS. LESS DOLLARS.

Works Cited

“One Minute Scorm Overview for Anyone.” SCORM.com. http://scorm.com/scorm-explained/one-minute-scorm-overview/

“Scorm Explained.” SCORM.com. http://scorm.com/scorm-explained/

Educational Objects via digitally-archived articles.

This may be an odd way to open a post, but while reading Norm Friesen's explanation of Educational Objects, I noted something that struck me as quite interesting. Specifically, the version of the document to which we were directed was a copy of the page which had been stored via the electronic archiving efforts of the internet archive's Wayback Machine. I found it fascinating, given the frequency with which scholarly articles are locked behind paywalls and the like, that a publicly available source such as the Wayback Machine would have a copy stored in their records. It makes me curious as to what the copyright entanglements that might crop up as a result of it. Likewise, I wonder if the service's operators had simply worked out an accord in their reproduction of the content.

Moving on from that curiosity, however, I should dig into the meat of the article itself. In it, Friesen examines the definition of an educational object. He begins by citing the Learning Technology Standards Committee's definition: "any entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used or referenced during technology supported learning." He goes on to point out that such definition is often replaced with a narrower one based upon the sort of programming which granted the concept its name. He proceeds to denote three characteristics of objects:

• Discoverable: able to be discovered, accessed or searched due to the metadata which describes and categorizes it.
• Modular: able to be adapted by outside parties without assistance of its originators, yet nonetheless able to stand on its own.
• Interoperable: in a general sense, workable with a variety of hardware and software. in a specific sense, that of the ability for programs and their components to cooperate and share data.

Work Cited

 

Friesen, Norm. “What Are Educational Objects?” Interactive Learning Environments 9, no. 3 (Dec. 2001): 1. http://web.archive.org/web/20041015064204/http:/www.careo.org/documents/objects.html (accessed April 9, 2014).