On 26 Jan 2009, at 17:24, Fred Riley wrote:
> <shrug> Theory's one thing, practice is another.
Absolutely. I'm with you right there.
But rhetoric is a third thing, and the two communities are pretty much
divided by their rhetoric.
> At a high level of
> abstraction I'm sure you're right, but on a practical level I wouldn't
> use DSpace, or any other repository designed specifically for
> scholarly
> materials, to store, catalogue and serve e-learning resources, and I
> wouldn't use Intralibrary, for example, for scholarly works.
How could you convince me? What could you show me or tell me that
would help me understand?
> And I'm
> afraid that this techie operates very much at the mundane, practical
> level, which is why I'd like to see a forum where practical learning
> materials repository issues can be thrashed out.
Like copyright, sharing, packaging, versioning, metadata?
> I'm a database developer, amongst other things, and I wouldn't
> describe
> a completely different database schema as "just customisation",
I'm a systemn developer and I would! That's rather the point of a
database - it';s a generic data handler and it doesn't need to be
different just because you're using a different schema.
> and for
> sure the database design I'd come up with for publications would be
> very
> different from that for e-learning materials.
But some of it would be in common. After all, learning objects have
bibliographic properties. And some repository software packages make
great store of being able to store and manage whatever metadata you
throw at them.
> Again, at a high level of abstraction all
> repositories are but instances of the same ideal meta-repository, an
> 'abstract class' perhaps, but then at a high level of abstraction we
> might be just programs running in a universe-wide quantum computer ;-)
I don't think we need to scale quite such extreme levels of
abstraction to find some system commonality and identify
specialisations.
--
Les
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