17 July 2007

Standards: a lot of useful information from JISC!

The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), based in the UK, has a great Standards Catalogue. The information has been collated by UKOLN (Brian Kelly). This kind of resource is, for me, very valuable. Otherwise I would have been surfing the net endlessly.
The information is not restricted to purely 'open' standards, which (at this moment in time, that is) is understandable. The information is also not restricted to e-learning standards, but also standards in the field of text editing or images. Sometimes you need to be a little pragmatic. All standards are documented in the same way (based on a template). What is very nice that there are headings like "Risk Asessment" and "Take-up Elsewhere" for every entry. The approach of JISC with regard to standards is also explained.
I found a wiki, which is the working area, where 'everyone' can edit. And there is a website, that holds more permanent (and pertinent?) information. Go find out for yourself what you think!
Some standards that you will find explained:
  1. Binary text documents, such as DOC, RTF, ODF, or PDF
  2. Image standards: for example SVG, TIFF or PNG
  3. Examples of multimedia standards: ACC, MP3, ASF
  4. Metadata: DIDL, RDF, RSS
  5. E-learning standards: Learning Design, Content Packaging, IMS Enterprise, QTI

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