RE: Proposed W3C priorities for education

Thanks for this summary.  I have two fairly fundamental questions:


1.       What is missing in the Web Platform that prevents it from being a “viable standards platform for education”?  You mention

a.       A simple but consistent method of publishing metadata …

b.      A data model description language …

c.       A new specification for the adaptive sequencing of learning content.

d.      A specification for the machine-readable description of learning objectives and curricula.

e.      A machine-readable data handling description language, …
I kept wondering what was missing in HTML5/CSS/Web APIs, RDFa,  XML, etc. that prevents them from being used separately or in combination to achieve these goals?  I suspect the answer is more about a lack of skills or tool support, not the lack of standards.  W3C is a good venue for getting people together who want to work on usability and interoperability issues, but it can’t solve them top down.  I would suggest as a first step creating one or more Community Groups to discuss problems, sketch out possible solutions, and THEN make the to take some concrete proposals emerging from this incubation work to standardization.

2.       From the summary, the previous efforts foundered partly because of intellectual property disputes.  While W3C has a great track record for producing royalty-free standards, the patent policy only works if IP owners are willing to make royalty-free commitments on a proposed standard.  How can we get the relevant IP owners to do so?  Again, starting with Community Groups would give us a sense of who is willing to contribute their own IP on RF terms to the community, and that would give the W3C Team data on whether there is a critical mass for standards with broader patent commitments.

From: Crispin Weston [mailto:crispin.weston@saltis.org]
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2015 1:40 PM
To: public-most-important-priorities@w3.org
Subject: Proposed W3C priorities for education

Dear All,

Following my presentation on the last Education Task Force call, I worked with Pierre Danet to summarize our position in a short paper, which I attach.

I look forward to our further discussions.

Kind regards,
Crispin.