crispinw

Many thanks Ephelyon, I have been guilty of taking my eye off this thread over the last couple of weeks but I hope that EduGeek members, as they hit the new term, might now have a look at it and add their thoughts to the useful feedback that I have already had. I hope that we can then make the connections with the industry and the DfE, as Ephelyon suggests. Best, Crispin.

Roberto, Many thanks for the comment and sorry for the slow response. August etc... Very useful feedback - two clarification/questions though 1. the "G Cloud for Education" idea is basically an online catalogue or price comparison website thing. It would have the benefit of offering price transparency and user-reviews, and a reliable interface where products could be certified against education-specific standards (either minimum quality or technical/interoperability). Suppliers might pay to get on but there would be no membership commitment for you. I think you are referring to some sort of consortium buying service. Would you still think that such a catalogue would not be useful? 2. My own view is that this would be useful for educational software, which is a market "yet-to-emerge" and specific to the education sector. Generic ICT services - hardware and networking infrastructure - is a well established market and one that, from your own feedback, sounds as it it is easy enough to navigate. That being the case, would you give a different response if the question were about education/learning services, esp. software? 3. Are you a relatively large secondary or college and, if so, do you think your comments, even about generic hardware, would apply equally to smaller primaries? Many thanks again, Crispin.

Hi Ephelyon, First I should clarify that I am not employed by BSI and do not speak for them - I just chair the committee in this area. But obviously I work closely with the guys at BSI and I think it is safe to say that they would be interested in any such standard, contractual and/or expertise, where there can be shown to be broad consensual support. Where strong consensus does not exist yet, then there are various pre-standardisation options for putting forward straw-man proposals with the aim of building consensus. With regard to contractual frameworks, I know that there has been a lot of talk between government and BSI about working for better price transparency, so I think that this whole area is one where you would find a favourable reception. One aspect about the whole standards game is the question of money - my role is voluntary but standards organisations need to make money, and this generally occurs through one of several business models: * subscriptions (W3C and for education, IMS GLC). While the model seems to work pretty well for W3C, it is widely criticised as giving undue influence to the large players, who may not be interested in level playing fields. * free participation but pay-to-view standards: this is BSI's traditional model (and European CEN and ISO/IEC) and it works in other industries where there is enough money in the market to allow people to buy the standard (generally £100-£150). It generally has not worked in education, though I think that in the case of the sort of standards that you are talking about, it could do. * sponsorship - the model for the traditional BSI Publicly Available Specification, often requiring £50K-£100K. Could work in areas where the DfE could be persuaded that there was a requirement, though money is obviously tight at the moment. * certification fees. This is the model that I am proposing for slightly speculative, technical standards tied to non-consensual innovations. A problem bigger than money is implementation. The fact that a committee sits around a table and approves a specification means nothing unless the standard also achieves traction and recognition in the market and people actually implement it. My perception in all this is that, rather like printing paper money, it is all about confidence: the value of the paper depends on people believing that it has value - and the decision to spend money conforming to a standard is rather similar. Building that level of confidence from nothing requires consensus among the key players (DfE, BSI, industry, users, international standards bodies in Europe & ISO/IEC) and a certain critical mass of standards activity. In that respect, I think we need a standards process which brings together requirements for different types of standard: Ian Shaw's e-safety standard, your contractual and professional competence standard, technical standards for data interoperability etc. Not only to build "brand recognition" within a family of standards but also to persuade the key stakeholders like the DfE that there is stakeholder support for the general approach. One common message that I think is useful in building that critical mass is that this is about specifications being created by genuinely open, consensual processes involving user and other stakeholder communities - and is not about things being worked up behind closed doors. In short, there is an open door and a process and an institutional framework that can enable us (you) to build consensus around any appropriate requirements and specifications. But ultimately what makes the standards it not the institutions handing things down from a position of authority, but the ability to attract a critical mass of stakeholder support. I look forward to discussing further. Best, Crispin.

Ephelyon, I agree that transparent pricing is a key goal but this assumes some sort of stability in the definition of what is being offered. That is where I suggest that some sort of categorisation of products would be useful. I have not bought off the frameworks myself, but it seems to me that they offer poor definition of what is being supplied, relying instead on producing a limiting list of those who are allowed to supply it. On a proposed G-Cloud / online catalogue, I would reverse this, being permissive as to who was allowed to supply, but tighter in defining different categories of what was being supplied. Guide prices would soon emerge. Another aspect which I think would be subject to standardisation would be pricing models and contracts. As far as I can tell from the BBC article, it was the small-print of the contract and not the ostensible unit price that was at issue. Again, new suppliers could propose new contractual models - but these should be vetted and approved by procurement experts first, giving small schools the confidence that they were not being ripped off.

Ephelyon, I agree that in both of these scenarios, good network security is critical - and I don't think any standard would say otherwise. But there may be areas - I suspect the Royal Society was thinking more of web filtering - where accepting some risks by taking a more permissive attitude might be justified, even if there was a risk of e.g. online bullying from a social networking site that was designed to support class discussion. So the point of a risk assessment, in my opinion, is to discriminate between those risks that should be minimized at all costs and those risks that are worth taking.

I agree about companies joining the list half way through. I did a FOI request on the number of call-offs against the framework, which were very few indeed. Of course, people might still use it as a recommended list, without formally calling off against it. My main objections to it are (1) the supposition that suppliers were going to provide a one-stop-shop set of learning services (when the market is very immature and innovation needs to be encouraged); (2) the failure to define what products are actually being provided, (3) the fudging of data interoperability, which in my view is critical to getting learning services to work.

Ephelyon, thanks for the link to ProBand, which I did not know about. I will look in more detail and have dropped them an email in case they would like to contribute to this conversation. Re Ian Shaw's e-safety standard, it is still in the starting blocks and is waiting for a large network or mobile supplier to come in an back it. I did not initiate that standard, but I am doing my bit to try and find the missing players. That is following a traditional PAS route, which requires up-front funding from a number of sponsors. I think there is scope for that, but I am working on a different model, based on downstream certification charges, which depends on the G-cloud/catalogue concept and I think is more appropriate for innovative technical data standards. In fact, "standard" is the wrong word in this case - it would be a pre-standardisation specification, which might just have a small group of SMEs to back it, while the traditional PAS model requires consensus. But whichever model we are talking about, I think the wheels would be oiled by providing suppliers with a commercial incentives to develop and adopt standards - and that is why I think the current dysfunction in the educational standards world boils down to current procurement models. On Becta, I wasn't a fan of very much that they did, except that they did have the aspiration and ambition, which I guess we all miss. But I am past quibbling about the details - I think what we need now is the right processes that allow anyone to innovate.

I take your point about payment - even if the advice is valuable, payment can corrupt the system. I was thinking more of a gentle pay-back / award for reviewers who offered real value to colleagues - but you may well be right that this would not be necessary. On vetting contributors, I think there is a balance between pre-approving people and letting reviewer reputation (and just the quality of the review itself) decide. My preference would be to register all community members through their schools and then let the community establish the credibility of reviews and reviewers. If the RE teacher started posting reviews on subjects that he/she knew nothing about, (a) the community would soon correct the record, and (b) someone at that person's school might question the effect these eccentric reviews were having on the reputation of the school. If someone started posting malicious negative reviews because they had an interest in a rival supplier, then everyone would know exactly who they were and they would be playing with fire. But however you do it, I think there are mechanisms for avoiding irresponsible and malicious reviews. On the question of indemnity, I am thinking of a comment made by the Royal Society in "Shut down or restart?" about excessive "health and safety" network security in schools, which inhibited learning. I saw similar questions about net filtering software recently on Twitter. But who is liable when something goes wrong? My point is that a certain level of risk is sensible and professional - but it is hard to make the case that the risk was reasonable after you have thrown the dice and got a triple 1. At that point, it would help to say "we were taking a level of risk that industry & practitioner consensus agreed is reasonable and proportionate". I think the sort of contractual standard you suggest is another real possibility. It might just be a contractual framework that made this sort of information about patching and support transparent and trustworthy. You could visualise it as a certification mark accompanied by an information grid. So... a conversation on edugeek establishes what that grid should contain, we recruit a dozen suppliers who are willing to implement (maybe offering them a year's payment holiday on certification) and with both supplier and user communities, work out a legal framework of remedies in case of breach; we pass a Publicly Available Specification through BSI (it can later progress to a British, European or ISO standard if it does well, giving these suppliers a helping hand in their export markets); and given the catalogue, we start badging conformant products. After year 1, the companies start paying for the certificate, which they do because they realise that you guys are not going to buy their products unless they do, and the certification charge is set at a level which makes the whole process sustainable. If on the other hand the new certificate does not affect anyone's buying behaviour, then the suppliers decide it is not worth forking out and the standard fails - just like a bad product would do. This use-case makes the point that there is no reason why YOU (i.e. the user community) should not initiate whatever standard you want to see - the catalogue would just become a platform that would allow those standards that were of interest to buyers to prosper. And the catalogue and the standardisation organisations would be de-coupled, so the catalogue could display certificates produced by different organisations - so no-one would have control over the whole process. Too often, standards have acted as a sort of covert regulation by the central administration, which is not in my view what they should be.

Thank you David. I agree on all counts, including the importance of enabling small vendors to participate. The cost of specialised test harnesses (and the unreliability of interoperability when such test harnesses do not exist) has been a key problem in the past. One of the reasons why SCORM achieved the visibility it did in the early part of last decade was due to the amount of money that the US DoD put into its self-test suite. So I also agree that a generic test harness is really important. Given a limited range of transport mechanisms, it would not be too hard to check data validity against appropriate XSDs or other machine-readable schemas. Of course, all this has to be paid for and government seems reluctant to pay for anything very much these days - but it should be possible to build a business model on differentiated certification fees. For example, in the case of the ability to return a mark to a common markbook, the providers of the common markbooks (as infrastructure providers) should be able to afford higher certification fees than you would want to impose on the developers of the activity instances and tools. Where this discussion meets the procurement discussion is in the need to ensure that suppliers who meet appropriate interoperability specs achieve commercial benefit by the ability to certify their products in a way that drives sales. That is at the root of the money tree. But this whole discussion is really one for the IMLS framework, which is a little way down the line - I think IMLS is due for renewal in 2015 or 2016, depending on whether it is extended into a fourth year. In political terms, if a case is going to be made for the online catalogue approach, it would have to be made for the ICT Services Framework, which is what is up for renewal now. Crispin.

Thanks Pete for the useful answers. To respond to your questions on the G-Cloud concept - my proposal is that there should be only a minimum of standardisation hard-wired into the catalogue - more below. With regard to star-ratings, I would have these given by user reviews, with mechanisms in place to avoid abuse. What that means in practice would be for the community to decide, but I would start with a presumption of no anonymity and registration as a reviewer through your school or college. Second, you would have a mechanism of developing a reputation (maybe even a supplementary income) as a reviewer, established by reviews of your reviews by your peers. Expert reviews could be added into the mix by established and reputable review sites. But the basis would be to get a responsible, expert and accountable reviewing community... a bit like EduGeek? "'Aggregated procurement' ... Centrally-organised procurement?" That point re. Becta euphemisms is one that I have made several times myself. My blog on the IMLS Framework, for example, is at Stop the IMLS framework | Ed Tech Now But I also take your point that bulk purchasing schemes might be useful, depending on the scheme. So why not have a section on the G-Cloud for aggregated procurement schemes? Let the users of those schemes, not central civil servants, say what they should look like. I mentioned certification in an aside, so let me explain what I mean. I should declare an interest as Chairman of BSI's committee for IT in education (IST/43) and a long-term advocate for better data interoperability for education software. I would see a certain level of certification being implied by inclusion on the G-Cloud, but this being at a fairly light level. There might be a really minimal level of due diligence applicable to certain categories (e.g. learning content) and more e.g. financial credentialing associated with products with higher values and on-going support. But my concept would be to make the threshold of entry onto the catalogue as low as possible and the discriminator down to star ratings and brand reputation. Other standards/certifications could be optional - and this would create a meta-market for standards which also ran through the catalogue. In other words, just as products (and aggregation services) could use the catalogue to establish reputation, so would the standards/certifications which products might choose to adopt and the user community might choose to rate. They wouldn't be something that was mandated or even recommended from on-high. The standards would be likely to come in a couple of flavours: * minimum standards for e.g. online safety, network security, safety and accessibility of equipment * technical standards for interoperability (as far as education-specific standards are concerned, these would really affect the learning services and not the ICT services frameworks. As far as the first is concerned, their role would not only be to establish best practice, but also to some degree to indemnify NMs who wanted to allow a little more freedom to users of the network in the interests of learning. So long as you and your equipment complied with agreed standards, it would be difficult to call you irresponsible when something went wrong. The second of these is where I think there is a huge potential to develop more powerful, plug-and-play learning software. Let us say we are talking about learning activities/assessments that return marks or other forms of performance data automatically to a common markbook. Here we are after 20 years and billions of pounds of government spending, and this basic functionality is still not being offered by the market. But give ed-software developers the opportunity to certify their products as implementing an appropriate technical specification to allow this to happen, and the industry will develop such standards, as long as schools show that they are interested in buying this sort of interoperable software. As for removing certifications for non-compliance: absolutely, this is essential. Certification agencies that do not do that will lose credibility, buyers will quickly ignore their certificates, and companies will stop paying for those certificates, and the agency will go bust. So my vision for the G-Cloud catalogue would be a platform that would allow competition at many levels: products, support services, aggregated procurement services, certification services - all of which would sink or swim depending on whether they are attractive to a well informed user community. In short, I would see certification addressing issues of objective fact (product A does or does not interoperate with product B, and does or does not conform to the minimum standards set in one respect or another) while star ratings would represent more subject, evaluative judgements.

Thank you both for these replies. Just to clarify, I am not an apologist for frameworks, though my real interest (or more accurately, pet hate) is the the Learning Services and more recently IMLS frameworks. As far as the ICT Services Framework, I am just doing some open-minded research! It sounds to me as if you both want the autonomy appropriate to a NM who knows what's what, and are skeptical of outside consultancy or standardisation. I presume you both work in reasonably sized schools or colleges. But what about the small primary school which doesn't really know what it is doing? I should have thought that they would be suckers for the sort of mis-speccing that psydii relates. My interest is in a combination of standardisation and a "G-Cloud for Education" online catalogue concept. Do you think this would have the ability to provide, if not like-for-like, then at least similar-for-similar comparisons? Let us say a group comprising users and industry suppliers came up with a categorisation for desktops according to requirement: level 1 (entry level for light word-processing) to level 5 (for intensive applications) etc. Make the classification system as complicated/simple as you like. Suppliers could put forwards their solutions in each category - and then the performance of those offers can be rated by users, as happens on Amazon. There are then two sorts of peer-to-peer conversation: 1. what category of desktop is required to populate e.g. a suite of computers which are to be used primarily for KS3 computing lessons; and whose is the best offer for that category? Maybe there is a third sort of question about how you fit together various categories of desktop with various networking and other infrastructure elements. This model would allow some flexibility. Prices could vary as commodity prices changed. Suppliers could vary their spec as technology improved - but a supplier which had established a reputation would want to protect that reputation and word would quickly get around if the e.g. HP's latest version of its mid-range desktop was not as good value as the previous one. It would help schools with limited procurement/technical expertise to put together specs from a menu, following generic guidance perhaps. I completely agree with Oaktech that any G-Cloud catalogue should not be a limiting list: those who wanted to go outside the standard specs (or modify them) would be free to do so - and new suppliers should be free to join the list with a minimum threshold of entry. But the existence of the standard specs would help smaller schools and help establish brand reputations for educational suppliers, which can surely only help improve value for money for buyers? The real discriminator would not be whether you were on the list or not (the framework model) but what star-rating and reputation you developed, once you were on the list. As far as procurement advice is concerned, the answer I take from both replies is that the only way to get it is to pay through the nose and the frameworks themselves, while they may provide a certain level of reassurance, are not really sufficient to ensure that the school is getting what it needs. Any further answers/reactions? Thanks again. Crispin.

Hello, I am engaged in a number of conversations about the renewal of the old Becta ICT Services Framework, regarding which the DfE and the Government Procurement Service are currently consulting with industry. I would be very interested in any feedback from Edugeek members about your experience or perception of major infrastructure procurement in schools and colleges. Relevant questions that occur to me are: * How easy is it to procure significant ICT infrastructure for your school/college? * How useful was the old ICT Services Framework (or indeed frameworks in general)? * How easy is it to get reliable advice about (a) what to buy, and (b) how to buy it? * To what extent do you think your local requirements could be standardised (assuming that was a participative process) and to what extent do you feel that your local requirements are unique? * What are the main pitfalls that you need to guard against when procuring significant infrastructure (e.g. companies that go bust, proprietary lock-in, lack of pricing transparency, poor requirements analysis...) * What is your perception of the benefits of aggregated procurement as a way of saving money? * How important are OJEU (EU) procurement rules, which kick-in for public procurements valued at more than £150K? * How easy is it to get information comparing the performance and value of competing products? * How valuable would it be to have a "G-Cloud for Education" - i.e. an online catalogue of IT products for education, with transparent pricing, certifications and star-ratings? ...and any other questions that occur to you. This is not a scientific survey, of course, but if people are prepared to post their thoughts and experiences in reasonable numbers, I would be happy to do some legwork collating them, so that they can be shared with the DfE, the Governmnt Procurement Service, and other interested parties. While the current consultation is about the ICT Services Framework, the Information Management and Learning Services Framework will also come round for renewal in a couple of years and some of the same questions might apply again. Thanks for any feedback you can give, Crispin Weston

As the conversation above shows, SALTIS has been working for some time to improve interoperability between VLEs and learning services, tools and content. Over the last few months, we have been working in support of a BECTA project to create an agreed "content" packaging standard that can achieve acceptance throughout the industry. I put "content" in inverted commas because we are not talking just about static web pages, butalso about dynamic web services and applications that deliver interactive, creative and social learning activities. Proposed requirements for this project, backed by a detailed technical rationale and survey evidence, have recently been circulated to SALTIS members. We are very concerned that the project should meet the requirements of the end-user community as well as the requirements of the industry - and we are particularly interested in the hands-on perspective of the EduGeek community. While the detailed requirements documents are still not publicly available: 1. I have posted (a) an executive summary and (b) a detailed report on a consultation with content publishers and tools developers to www.saltis.org/papers.htm . 2. I have made an 8 minute video overview, which you can see at www.saltis.org (at the bottom of the page). 3. there will be a webinar at 1400 GMT this Friday. You can register for the webinar at SALTIS Webinar Registration. After a presentation of the key requirements, there will be a discussion chaired by John Rogers of EdICTs - so come with a microphone attached to on your computer. 4. if anyone is interested and thinks that they are able to represent an end user perspective on the shape of these requirements, please send an email to [email protected]. John is responsible for issuing invitations to attend a SALTIS meeting in Milton Keynes on Tuesday week (17th November) – where there will be an opportunity to discuss and amend the requirements document. Any other questions you may have about the project, please drop me a line. Crispin Weston. Apologies for cross posting.

Hi Penfold, Apologies that I never spotted your reply - I guess 9 months late is better than never. I agree with you that OS interoperability is a problem but I would say that it is a different problem, for which larger people that SALTIS will have to find solutions. If you want to run product A, you have to first buy operating system B. OK - that's tough. But the problem that SALTIS is addressing is, if you have product A working with OS B, can you move data to product C working on OS D? If you move the data using web services in combination with an agreed data model usingan XML binding, then the answer is yes. And even though the purchaser of product A might still be bound to OS B etc. I think that is still a very important win. Crispin.

You may be interested in SALTIS’ announcement today of the start of a BECTA/ISB project to improve interoperability between digital learning content and learning platforms. The SALTIS press release is at SALTIS press release (14/08/09). You may also be interested to read two SALTIS papers available at SALTIS Papers: Benefits and barriers in the use of managed content is written to stimulate the consultation which will be occurring in the next few weeks to inform the project’s requirements document. Supporting Interoperable Learning Content, which was published last BETT, makes the case for better interoperability as a key driver in using ICT to raise standards of teaching and learning in schools and would be useful background reading if the significance of interoperability escapes you. If you want a hard copy of this report, drop me a line at [email protected]. Both this formative stage of the project, and the final sign-off of project outputs will involve consultations with three key stakeholder groups: learning platform providers, content publishers, and representatives of end-users. Although the formal end-user panel will be selected by the independent consultancy EdICTs, we are interested in informal inputs from all interested parties. The views of teachers and educational leaders are of great interest to the project. Please let me know what you think, either by private email ([email protected]) or through this list or on the SALTIS forum atGeneral -. If you are interested in joining the panel representing end-users, please write to [email protected]. Crispin Weston Chairman of SALTIS. SALTIS Home Apologies for cross posting.

People may be interested in the SALTIS report "Supporting Interoperable Learning Technology", available at SALTIS Papers. Hard copies are also available, free, by emailing me at [email protected]. The report is about technical interoperability standards - explaining why the industry increasingly regards them as essential to the implementation of more effective e-learning solutions in schools. I hope that the report may be of particular interest when read in conjunction with the OFSTED's recent summary of the state of learning platforms at Virtual learning environments: an evaluation of their development in a sample of educational settings / Thematic reports / Documents by type / Browse all by / Publications and research / Ofsted home / Ofsted - Ofsted. I'd be very pleased to respond to comments and criticisms on this list. Best, Crispin.

I'm not against pump-priming, as long as it is part of a genuine attempt to pump a well-targeted pump and not a constant flow of expensive govnt-sponsored content with no evidence that anyone wants it. If it is to be an exercise in pump-priming, they need to make sure they have a clear vision of where they are leading and that the industry is in the loop, and going to follow where they lead (and the industry has a lot of technical experience which can help inform the policy deliberations). Those were really the conditions laid on BBC Jam (which, as a supposed pump-priming exercise, clearly had to provide something that wasn't already being provided. But there was no clarity about how it was going to be different (I would have 100% welcomed it if it had been used to bring in robust technical standards) and there was very little engagement with industry. If anything, Becta's engagement with industry has become even weaker over the last year. I think the magic ingredient is "interactive" (and also including a lot of the creative and Web 2.0 pedagogies which i doubt are useable in the classroom without being "wrapped" as curriculum-specific content. Particularly when many of the consultants don't really know what they are talking about. When Becta produced a "Best practices guide to content packaging" in 2004/5, they employed a consultant who had never even *heard* of SCORM before she started the work - and it showed. Becta should stop handing out "advice" of very dubious quality. But programmers have to be pointed in the right direction and the development of imaginative new software involves considerable risk - that is what industry is happy to do. It just needs to be given a market environment which incentivises it to do so. I have produced a draft for content packaging within SALTIS (50 pages and quite technical). At the moment it is confidential to the group (talk to GrumbleDook) but after the next meeting in early Feb, I shall see what the group feels about publishing the second draft and perhaps more supporting documentation. But there is a limit to the amount of unpaid work I am prepared to do, unless government engages with the process. The content packaging proposal has been welcomed on the group and also by IMS in America (who owns IP in the content packaging standards) who proposed in November that Becta sponsor SALTIS to take the proposal to the IMS working groups - the signs are that the proposal is very complementary to what their K-12 sector is thinking (and many companies in the UK are naturally concerned that any UK proposal should be globally compatibile). Becta appears to have responded by issuing a tender for the production of non-binding guidance (a re-run of the 2005 exercise) on distributing interoperable content, to be directed at publishers and practitioners (who shouldn't be troubled with technicalities) but *not* at their learning platform providers (who, being on the framework, naturally do all that is required already :? ). They have not yet responded, either to the proposal from IMS, or to my request for a meeting, or to my expression of concerns about the usefulness of the non-binding guidance... but I hope that after BETT, we might start to have a more useful dialogue. Do come and say hello to me at BETT on stand Q32. SALTIS is being launched at a press conference at 3 p.m. on the Wednesday. Crispin.

I take your point, and agree that the world isn't perfect. Some things are necessarily dependent on each other - including a computer and its operating system. And an operating system is itself an infrastructure which should support an open market in applications, while a flipchart program is an end-use application which doesn't act as infrastructure to anything else. I have to admit I am against government-commissioned content because the end-user is disempowered. I don't think its a question of public vs private sector supply, but rather top-down vs end-user as purchaser. Though there may be a case for pump-priming (but you have to show that it is a genuine case for pump-priming, and not just an excuse to claw money back into central budgets). Again, I agree that there is huge need for good development/high-level authoring tools (they just don't exist at the moment) - but I really do not think that Becta or any other government agency is in a position or has the skill-set to provide them directly. I thought Stephen Crowne hit the nail on the head in his introduction to the Harnessing Technology conference, when he said that their job was not necessarily to solve every problem, but to create the environment in which problems could be solved. My feelings on that are very mixed. I turned against BBC Jam because (a) their content was not truly interoperable and (b) they were hard-wiring it to their own management system (which, on competition grounds, the DCMS conditions had forbidden them to develop). I made a fuss about this but I don't think anyone took it seriously - what sunk Jam was the issue of "complementarity". I think that if the BBC had produced truly interoperable content, and had spelt out at the beginning of the project that this was the sense in which their content was complementary to the existing market, they wouldn't have had any trouble. So I don't think you can put the thing down to wicked businessmen - though the content might have been good, the management of the project was very incompetent. By ensuring that it carries credibility in the market. No-one is interested in "nanny says" kite-marks, but if the kite-mark carries real information, then it will influence people's buying decision; and then business will make sure that they have it. Crispin.

Hi Russ - I agree with this - but in what sense is that wider body of SCORM / Flash / web content "IWB content"? Isn't it just part of a continuum of VLE content, e-portfolio / tools etc. I also question the value of a "flipchart viewer". Isn't the point of a flipchart that you can write on them? And I don't think the Becta software is going to be anything more than that - I doubt it will view SCORM content. But I think it came to an end last January. Even while it was running, I don't think you can remove people from the framework as they have a contract. That is why I don't think Becta is in any position to do anything about learning platform standards for 3 years - because it has no way of imposing its standards on people who are on the framework (what was the outcome of all the workshops that we all went to in the autumn? - I haven't heard a squeak). If I were in Becta's shoes I would (1) get serious legal advice on whether the licensing and technical restrictions on whiteboards breaks competition law, and (2) kite-mark products against a wide range of technical interoperability standards (i.e. lots of different feature-marks, not one big one). Anyone who met the tightly defined conformance criteria could get the kite-mark at any time (and could have it removed at any time if they broke the conditions). I would then explain very clearly to schools what these marks meant and why they were thought to be important and then leave the buying decision entirely to schools. Crispin.

I am sure the standard can move, though as it requires a degree of consensus, it will inevitably trail individual companies' ability to innovate - and this also presupposes that there is a body to manage continuous development of the standard. Will Becta do this? I think they are 'open' to the extent that anyone can read from them, though not write to them or control their development. I agree that a recognised de jure open standard is preferable to a de facto standard which is in fact proprietary; but a de facto standard may be preferable to a de jure standard which, having ticked all the boxes, sits on a shelf and isn't implemented by anyone. If the common file format isn't just going to sit on a shelf, Becta is going to have to put serious backing behind it in order to ensure it achieves general recognition. I understand that so far, no-one has committed to support it other than RM which is developing it. The fact that the whole system is dysfunctional is not a reason one shouldn't attempt to improve it. So instead of just going through the motions and producing more bits of expensive paper, isn't it better that we bring the pressure to ensure that these initiatives are properly thought through and produce real benefits? A dongle is different because it has no function other than to validate the software. Nobody says "I've bought this really good dongle and I'm really disappointed that I can't use it with any other bit of software". The problem is the linkage of two things which do different things and each of which have independent value. If you don't think the linkage of different components is anti-competitive, what happens when you string together a whole set of linked components - so company X sells you a flipchart and you create a lot of content with it that can't be used on anyone else's software. Then they say "if you want to use this system with a whiteboard, it will only work on our whiteboards; and if you want to use it with a voting system, it will only work with our voting system; and if you want to use it with a VLE, it will only work with our VLE..." and this is all done incrementally so that at each stage it becomes increasingly expensive to trash the very large investment you had already made, in money, time, and training of staff. And if you think that this is all fair game then why was Microsoft fined $600,000,000 for unfairly bundling Media Player with Windows? Crispin.

Thanks for all the interesting replies to this. Which is not to say that you can't have both types - one common format without the bells and whistles for sharing and another proprietary format with the latest gizmos for those who are only working on the proprietary systems. With an equivalent of the “warning: you will lose formatting information” message when you save as a less advanced format. But: 1. Aren’t there already open file formats which would support most of what is required? Isn't most of the flipchart functionality to do with runtime interactions going on in the classroom (text annotations etc), meaning that templates of material to import into a flipchart, before doing flipcharty type things with it, could be distributed in e.g. PPT, HTML, Flash, PDF (I see that Promethean ActivStudio imports most of these, how well I don’t know). 2. This still does not address the issue of a free market in flipchart applications. Take the analogy of Windows Media Player - there was no problem with open *formats* (MPG etc. being open), but with anti-competitive bundling of the *application*. If any flipchart application can be used on any hardware, you encourage innovation *and* better compatibility. If the board distributers are deliberately nobbling their software to work only with proprietary boards, what is the chance that they will adopt open file formats even if they are available? (I guess everyone will import, but will be very reluctant to export, if that means their own proprietary libraries can be used on competitors’ products). I agree you can't stop people getting locked in by proprietary formats (though you can make people aware of the danger) - but you *can* prevent lock-in by anti-competitive linkages between different types of product - that is what competition law does. And I don't agree that legislation and markets are necessarily antithetical - free markets need policemen if they are to remain free. For those who do not frequent the VLE board, there is a thread there in which I introduced SALTIS (see http://www.saltis.org ). Content packaging / SCORM is an area we have been doing a lot of work on - these are standards which are still not sufficiently tightly defined and could do with better compliance testing and kite-marking. This will support a market for content which may be versioned for whiteboard, individual assignment and home use and integrated with the VLE. So I agree that there is a huge and largely untapped potential for a type of this kind of third-party, structured content (and it should be possible to develop it virtually any language/medium you choose) but the interoperability issues around this run along a different content packaging / SCORM track. Which still leaves the fact that there will continue to be a need for flipchart software (and benefits to be gained from supporting a competitive market). So the questions I still have about flipchart issue are: 1. What percentage of third-party content distributed for flipcharts requires features not supported by other open formats (because if this is a very small figure, the common file format may turn out to be largely irrelevant)? 2. What carrots and sticks are to be used to ensure that anyone pays any attention to the format once it has been developed? 3. Is there a completely different (and possibly more significant) problem around open interoperability between flipchart programmes and IWB hardware; and if there is, does this indicate a breach of existing competition law? Crispin.

I'm not a whiteboard expert but am interested in this issue from the interoperability and SALTIS perspective - discussion of SALTIS is in a seperate thread. I understand from Margaret Allen on the NAACE list that Promethean Flipchart will now work on anyone's board - but I understand from steve that this does not apply to ActivStudio (presumably this is a larger toolbox than Flipchart alone?) There are concerns around this issue, particularly in the light of Becta's common file format initiative and whether this will address the issues of whiteboard interoperability - if issues there are. It seems to me, prima facie, to be anti-competitive that any software should insist on any hardware being present, or vice-versa (freely available drivers excepted). I think there are particular concerns if, having a particular software program is driving you down the route of installing a particular voting system as well as a particular whiteboard. Do people generally see this as a problem and would they agree that whiteboards, voting systems and software should be completely decoupled, so that any will work with any other? Crispin.

Product "B", which may compete with OS product "A" may not like it. But product "C", which works with "A" or "B" will certainly want to work with "A" as well as "B". Moodle has been mentioned several times in SALTIS meetings by commercial companies (mainly publishers, I think) as a product which needs to be involved and which they want to work with. Commercial companies still want to sell into schools even if some or a significant part of their systems are open source. As for the operating system, all of the specifications we are looking at at the moment are XML or web-services based: i.e. entirely operating system neutral. Crispin.

It can't work that way round. There has to be a tightly defined, agreed specification (while Open Source communities are by nature diverse - that is their strength). Also, no product or application can *be* the standard - the standard must be something that is product/application-neutral. But I think that SALTIS can certainly be flexible in the way it defines an "organisation", as it has been with EduGeek.

Open Source members would be very welcome. Membership is free and all you have to do is register your interest with Mark Rosser at BESA ([email protected]). Formal acceptance procedures require your application to be discussed at the next meeting - but I am trying to fast-track this procedure by giving members a few days to object to any application on-line: any objection means the application is put back to the meeting, otherwise you can be accepted inside a week. The criterion for membership (with voting rights) is that you must have a business supplying education-specific technology to compulsory education; partnership is for any other organisation which is considered by members to have a contribution to make - so there is more discretion on the admission of partners than of members. As for business models, SALTIS is entirely neutral on how the product is structured or sold or owned or whether it is any good: it is purely interested in how products talk to each other. Crispin.