CETISs' Scott Wilson is proving himself an excellent reflective practitioner and communicator via what he calls his 'workblog'. In Frameworks: Work in Progress (18 January 2005) he opines:
“I think the ELF should be less about 'architecture' per se than about creating a community that communicates design concepts; a place where we can share ideas about how capabilites can be realized - an opportunity to converge naturally on common approaches and patterns of solutions. This is much more difficult than a few people making top-down design decisions, and this is going to require a lot more effort, especially as government agencies are involved.” Note particularly, that 'converge naturally', 'top down design decisions', and 'government agencies are involved'.
If I'm reading the message in Scott's narrative correctly he's alerting us to the danger of the ELF becoming a just another attempt at a top down architecture where a 'few' end up making decisions that the 'many' find wanting in practice. Having said that if the ELF had existed way back in the mide to late 1990s then we all would probably have been able to have more sensible discussions, and made better decisions about what's needed to faciliate learning and teaching online, rather than locking our thinking and practice into the MLE/VLE mindset that so bedevils us now. As yesterday's Auricle pointer to Scott's article Future VLE - The Visual Version shows, CETIS shows that it is 'thinking out of the envelope'. It's reassuring to know that they can ask challenging questions even of themselves.
We're participating in a small way to populating the ELF and I can tell you it's hard to plug in to an architecture which in reality is a 'statement of intent', a vision, a conceptual framework or whatever your favourite descriptor may be. Nevertheless, I would like to see it succeed but I've got a hunch implementations based on the ELF will end up closer to Scott Wilson's syndicated vision which makes use of RSS, FOAF, et al, rather than just a tight set of well defined Web Services or even web services. Yes, Web Services will be there but they will be part of the mix not the mix.
