When it comes to designing e-learning, the five questions to help us point north seem great..but what does that mean for SCORM? There are a lot of great ideas in here, but I'm strugging to figure out how to apply them to SCORM 2.0. It brings up a larger question in my mind: "Should SCORM (or standards in general) codify existing practice? Or, should SCORM (standards) seek to enable new practices?". Phillip Hutchins talks about that in a blog post taking lessons learned from the EMCA. I would love to see the e-learning community embrace some of these ideas, but I'm not sure what we can do to help them do so at this point. I could be short sighted. Do you have any specific ideas about what SCORM 2.0 can do to help the learning industry adopt more Web 2.0ish practices? In doing them, will we be codifying existing practice or trying to innovate for the industry? Is our path forward perhaps better expressed as "What limitations does SCORM 1 impose on people trying to create Web 2.0 innovations that should be removed in SCORM 2.0?".

Aaron brings up some excellent points about the present shaping of pedagogy and learning as a result of Web 2.0 and social networking tools. I too wonder how we could make this a part of SCORM in a standard manner. There have been talks in the past about standardization of the LMS. If the LMS where ever standardized then I think this type of social networking functionality should definitely be at it's core. Even if LMS applications were never standardized I would hope that the LMS vendors of today would at least start to incorporate some of this type of Web 2.0 functionality into their products.

The problem is that there are W3C standards used to support "Web 2.0" functionality, but there is not a standard way that any of these social networking tools employ them. They all do it differently. Here lies the same problem with the LMS market in our eLearning world and what I believe is an underpinning for Aaron's paper: Too many LMS companies have developed the same crappy products with a lack of strong business models.

Tim Berners-Lee described the term "Web 2.0" as a "piece of jargon." "Nobody really knows what it means," he said, and went on to say that "if Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."

In other words, the web is finally catching up to what Tim envisioned it would be all along. I think LMS vendors will eventually catch up to incorporating "Web 2.0" functionality and what features we currently envision an LMS to have, but I don't think it can be done without out SCORM pushing them (the LMS vendors and market) in that direction. What other existing learning standards or specifications are driving LMS vendors to support "Web 2.0" functionality? None that I recall. I do think there are ways we could expand SCORM's horizons to support specific W3C specs associated with "Web 2.0" (e.g. RSS, CSS, SOAP, WSDL, XML, XHTML) but the LMS vendors and other applications that will consume and support these "knowledge objects" will also need to play a role in the SCORM 2.0 process before we can push them in that direction.

I believe many users who have grown-up and are growing-up in the internet networked community, are constantly copying/pasting code and tagging content to share with everyone they know who would be interested in the same content. That is one concept behind every commercial website providing code access and tagging to their content.

I wonder what percentage of the global online community has a basic understanding of the basic syntax and use of just HTML code compared to 7 years ago? I will bet that the percentage has risen drastically. Most of us in this, the SCORM community, know how we can get content from a course, going directly to the 'SOURCE' during runtime to use that code. What i mean by source, is how to use live course content html, js, xml, assets and embed into other content. This knowledge is in much more use. Often content servers are completely open to hit the html pages, xml, javascript, assets, etc for embedding in other locations.

One of the reasons many tag and embed content in a variety of locations is passion for sharing this with others. Ideally, when a learner is engaged in instructional or performance assessment content, they have a strong interest in the topic of instruction. Granted, who wants to collaborate or tag on 'Business Ethics' course? Well someone does, because someone had to have the education, instructional background, and training to develop the 'Business Ethics' course. That is a very broad example, what about a specific topic which is focussed to a specific group/community. For this point, i believe your points Aaron, clarify that online users today are highly engaged and collaborating online through many shared systems and approaches. If we LETSI and SCORM 2.0 do not lay the way for extending engagement and collaboration to the learners, learners could easily move on to using other forms to do so eventually.