Would just “dimension”, short for “dimension of ability” or “dimension of competence”, work as a term to replace what I was calling a “rankable” competence definition? To me, calling it a dimension does properly imply that there are different places along it, but also sits happily with various different measures of that dimension.

The only drawback I can see is that several competences represent more than one dimension, which have been merged together somehow. That would suggest the word “space” as in “competency space”, which would go well with “positions” in that space.

What do you think?

http://osswatch.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2013/03/21/open-source-meets-open-standards/

http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/openstandardsopensource

– why do some standards succeed and others fail?
– can we identify optimal conditions for engaging in standardisation?
– some standards are considered harmful: why, and how do we identify them?
– what governance structures are successful in attracting participation?
– what is the appropriate scale for a standard? For example, number of participants x complexity.
– is there a relationship between governance model of SSO and adoption/success?
– how can governments and their agencies participate in, and gain benefit from, standardisation?
– what is the nature of the relationship between R&D and standardisation? When does it become problematic?
– what do standards cost? How do you quantify the benefits?
– can we revise the conventional model of standardisation (i.e. the 3-box model)?
– are there tools that can improve the standards process? (writing, doc mgt, testing, feedback…)
– is the idea of a “standards incubator” worthwhile? (e.g. W3C CGs, CEN WSLT->TC)

Leeds Metropolitan University officially changed its name to Leeds Beckett University on the 22 September 2014.

Following the change of name we have also changed our web domain name to leedsbeckett.ac.uk. Although our pages will redirect old leedsmet.ac.uk links for a period of time these will eventually expire. We are therefore contacting external sites that are kind enough to link to us, to ask them to update their links to ensure users can access the content they require.

We found links and email addresses to our old domain on your website. Here is an example of a page with our old brand name and web address:

http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/asimong/

Old brand mentions:

Leeds Metropolitan University
http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/
Euraxess@leedsmet.ac.uk

Please kindly update our brand name to:

Leeds Beckett University
http://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/
Euraxess@leedsbeckett.ac.uk

We would be most appreciative if you could arrange for someone to update the information on your website accordingly. Thanks in advance for your help.

Yours sincerely,

Marketing Team at Leeds Beckett University

To take the debate forward, perhaps we could focus on your distinction “to put in place the infrastructure for competitive markets, rather than trying to forge a consensus”. To me, this assumes something about consensus that, while understandable, is not necessarily true. That is, you seem to assume that consensus is about how to do the thing itself. Rather, as I see it consensus could also be about the “infrastructure for competitive markets”.

For any market, there are necessarily some shared assumptions. Not fixed in stone, of course, but assumptions for the time being. The more assumptions that are shared, maybe the keener and more competitive the market will become? Well it’s possible anyway. But then, what if some of those assumptions are mistaken?

In a pluralist (economic) society, that’s the real challenge that I see. The challenge — and this can be address by standardization or otherwise — is to optimise the shared assumptions, and to allow variant shared assumptions where this seems fruitful. In technology for learning (or better, information systems for learning) one of the big questions is, what is the model of learning that is actually shared? In other words, what assumptions are being made about education, about training, or about learning in general? Are these assumptions sound?

That’s where my suggestions for pre-standardization are relevant. Don’t constrain the sets of assumptions that people may want to make, but ask them to bring them all to the table. If there is consensus, all well and good. If not, let’s try to understand each other’s assumptions, and work on creating a space where there is room for all, and where people understand the relationship between different sets of assumptions.

Can you work with that?

You can count me in on the violent agreement that the key to all this lies in the pre-standardization stage. But “pre-standardisation” covers a multitude of different sorts of activity. In my view, you could see the problem as the conflation of specifications development and standardisation, which I think should not occur in the same place.

But I am probably more sceptical than your account suggests TC353 was about the ability of the formal standardisation committees to bootstrap their own pre-standardisation processes. Pre-standardisation is obviously prior to standardisation – and that means that it responds to causal influences (such as commercial dynamics) which lie outside the standardisation community. Why are these lacking?

I think that the main reason that education does not standardise like other commercial sectors is that so much is run by government, which through its regulatory action acts as a sort of proxy standards issuer. The difference being that while technical standards enable diversity – just as you argue the point – regulatory standards suppress diversity. When these regulations are issued by civil servants who are duty bound to avoid risk (and therefore to avoid any sort of innovation) you have the reason why government-led ed-tech has suffered from a chronic failure to innovate over the last twenty years.

I think there is some hope in the current questions being asked around the ETAG group (Education Technology Action Group set up by the UK DfE) – but I am not at all optimistic that the current bureaucratic community that is bound to have the chief influence over this process will agree to set up more genuinely innovative, market-led processes with any greater enthusiasm than turkeys will vote for Christmas.

Which is why I think the most likely outcome is that the genuinely innovative ed-tech is going to come out of the US and not out of Europe.

Which will not dissuade any of us from continuing to try and break the log-jam. My efforts focus on arguing the case that the role of government is to put in place the infrastructure for competitive markets, rather than trying to forge a consensus that I think is bound to be premature, when we are still in a world where there is very weak empirical evidence for ed-tech having any significant effect on teaching and learning. But who knows from which direction a breakthrough is most likely to occur?

Best, Crispin.

Maybe we are in violent agreement? Where I think we are agreeing is that the TC should not be itself organising (“facilitating” is your word) the pre-standardization process, but playing a part in motivating it (“demanding” is your word). I’m not sure how far the terms differ. The important point, to me, is that the TC does not try to own the pre-standardization process, but makes standards for entry into the EN track. I personally don’t think this should be a “sit and wait” stance, imagining that the “EN” cachet is of some obvious value to people in LET-ICT. We should constitute a large sensory mechanism, involving all the mirror committees, to earn us some kind of authority to say what is needed at present in the European standardization of LET-ICT. And we should be using those same National Body networks to invite together groups of people, including implementers, who seem appropriate for any particular piece of work. But we should not be funding anything. The only reward at the end of the day is an EN to your credit.

Does that make sense?