Standard

Definition

• The goal of standardization is to improve efficiency of actions and interactions.

There are various degrees of technical standards:

1. "Real standards" of very high formal quality adopted by bodies such as ISO, IEE, IEC, ITU, etc.
2. Standards like the W3C "Recommendations" or the IETF "Requests for Comments" (RFCs) or the OASIS document standards.
3. De facto standards (usually no formalization at all) like Microsoft products.

• Standards can be open or propriety. Open means publicly available, not necessarily free.

Standards in educational technology

Pedagogical standards

• There are no real general standards, but the closet things are Instructional design methods or data standards like IMS Learning Design or even IMS Content Packaging if one considers that "shovelware" or "page turners" are a standard pedagogical design ;)

• In some countries there are quite precise curricula standards, e.g.
  • American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS, 1993) Benchmarks for Science Literacy
  • National Research Council’s (NRC, 1996) National Science Education Standards,

Data standards

• SCORM
• IMS Content Packaging
• IEEE Learning Object Metadata Standard (LOM)

Systems standards

• The SCORM specifications define some java-script bindings to insure interroperability of simple interactive contents (that is BTW one of the areas where a lot of systems are not Scorm compatible, even if they claim so ...)
• IMS General Web Services to allow for interoperability of various systems. This is a fairly new standard (Jan 2006) and is an interesting initiative.

Some technical standards of interest

There are various standardization bodies and procedures:

• For the moment, see the Wikipedia:Internet standard entry for details

Links

• Resource-Base - Standards, Architectures and Open Source in Education. Large index (backended with delious so get nice tag clouds).