RE: linking? RE: Proposal for 3.4 Success Criteria

Joel,

         Yes, coming up with all the content you need to teach a course 
online well, is expensive. It isn't any less expensive because it's going 
on the web. Yes, your clients can link to existing content on the web, and 
they certainly should do so, but it cannot and should not take the place of 
developing their own content as well. Remember that all the existing 
content was created by SOMEONE, and they are entitled to some return on 
their time if the content is being used by an e-Learning institution 
charging for the course.

         Joel, new schools cropping up online cannot ignore their 
responsibility to contribute to content, but I'd put money on the fact that 
although they may be happy to link up "free" content to their courses, they 
will not make their courses available for "free", but will lock it up 
behind a customer password .... shame, shame!

                                         Anne

At 10:26 PM 8/5/01 -0600, Joel Sanda wrote:
>Would that mean dropping the linking criteria from  3.4 as it's now written?
>That's tough, I think, for a number of reasons:
>
>1. "Coming up" with text content is expensive. Adding additional non-text
>content elements will mean a steep increase in production costs - from
>product development through testing and maintenance.
>2. Why create content if good examples already exist? For example: I'm not
>going to create a visual map to my place of business if I can have one done
>my mapquest and add that to my site.
>
>I don't mean "only" linking - but giving designers and writers the
>opportunity to use appropriate and available existing content, linked in to
>their site, 3.4 becomes much more realistic.
>
>In the eLearning industry supplying content for instructors is gaining
>acceptance rapidly. Providing content from the publishers who have
>traditionally supplied only text books, but now supply interactive tutorials
>and the normally expected graphics in textbooks means such content is
>available - if at a cost. For the non-corporate environment there are
>several "knowledge sites" on the Internet that provide a lot of freely
>available content fitting 3.4's current requirements. While copyrighted, the
>content can be linked to from a site and in some cases included in the site
>with appropriate copyright mechanisms.
>
>Joel
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Charles McCathieNevile
>To: Joel Sanda
>Cc: 'David Woolley '; 'w3c-wai-ig@w3.org '
>Sent: 8/5/2001 8:33 AM
>Subject: linking? RE: Proposal for 3.4 Success Criteria
>
>The problem with only linking to the content is that fails to achieve
>the
>purpose of having the content there in the first place - to enable
>someone
>who cannot easily understand a plain text page to have an idea of the
>main
>topics of that page.
>
>I recognise that there are concerns such as copyright and trademarking,
>and
>in some areas (like where I live) of bandwidth. There are emerging
>technologies in the area of the semantic Web that we should expect to
>use in
>the medium term (several years before I imagine it being deployed in
>browsers
>that have been spread into schools for example) which will provide much
>easier techniques for doing this.
>
>In the meantime, we are still struggling to get the principles in an
>agreed
>explanation, so we may find the technology overtakes us in development
>pace.
>Without agreed principles, or even well-expressed ones that are there as
>straw-man proposals, we are several steps away from being ready to
>address
>concerns of whether implementation details are so important as to negate
>the
>principle.
>
>(But I think we are making some progress, which is encouraging <grin/>)
>
>cheers
>
>Charles

Anne Pemberton
apembert@erols.com

http://www.erols.com/stevepem
http://www.geocities.com/apembert45

Received on Monday, 6 August 2001 06:45:00 UTC