http://knowledgewranglers.typepad.com/cognitivecocktail/2005/07/repositories_r_.html
Three years ago at an IMS Global Consortium event held in Vancouver, BC, I was asked to take a position on the learning object repository phenomenon that was driving much of the IMS development effort worldwide.
As a huge fan of what was happening with peer-to-peer (P2P) technology and the Napster era, I called my talk Repositories R Us. Nobody paid much notice to the talk, and the examples I posed were ignored as the rantings of a techno-lunatic. A PDF of the preso I used for that talk is here.
At the time, the cognoscenti were into heavy metadata, centralized thinking about repositories, and who could build the most esoteric repository tools. BIG repository think was in.
What was needed to loosen up thinking on the issues was probably some kind of mental suppository for the repository metadata crew. :-)
All around us, kids were amassing personal digital collections of music, images, and movies - just what we in the tech-ed realm were trying to stimulate on the part of teachers and university instructors - and were largely unsuccessful in accomplishing.
The key point missed by the repository crew was to view the problem from the perspective of the end user. Instead, designers and developers were asking what they could do for instructors.
At the same time, some of us were thinking that instructors should be asking what they could do for themselves. University students understood the notion, their "betters" apparently didn't.
In an article in D-Lib Magazine (June 2005), I see I have been vindicated. In an excellent article titled Plenty of Room at the Bottom? Personal Digital Libraries and Collections, Neal Beagrie takes on the notion of personal collections and updates it to includes blogs, wikis, and shared services. He carries through with the notion of personal collections and tools to demonstrate the power in this kind of thinking.
Beagrie's article is right on - repositories r us! Read it.
Keywords: Porter opinion
