Wilbert Kraan of CETIS has a nice overview of some recent meetings surrounding the IMS Melbourne meeting. Discussion about service-oriented-architectures, repositories, metadata and all the usual suspects.
Having said all of that, John’s main argument is that the e-learning is in the middle of a second wave. The first was about the spread of VLEs, which was necessary and useful, but VLEs are often “delibarately restricted in their ability to share and re-use”. The second wave are about the spread of repositorires, or, in John’s admirably self-deprecating phrase a “Content bridge over a river of uncertainty [of VLE vendor viability and choice]”. [CETIS-Interoperability state of play at IMS Melbourne meeting]
(A virtual learning environment is a learning management system or course management system.)