ELF Developers Meeting

Yesterday I went to the ELF (ELearning Framework) developers meeting that was being help here in Oxford. It was an interesting morning with discussion about how the various projects are comming along. Not knowing much about ELF before I found it quite interesting. From a developer point of view I do have some concerns. At the moment they seem to be discussing how the framework should be described and leaving the contents of it till later. At the moment there is little in the way of suggested standards which doesn't sit very well with me, when I am looking at a project that is trying to build a plugable framework for elearning I would hope that the interfaces would be of primary concern. Instead the ELF leaders seem to have the aproach of letting people do projects and then trying to pull standards, interfaces and tools out of them. To me this is a bit like saying to a writer please write something for us in this language that hasn't yet been defined, but it will probably have verbs and nouns, but we'll decide what they are after you've used them. And your actually writing chapter 3 of this book and someone else is going to be writing chapter 2 and 4. I reaslise that creating standards is a very difficult process but I like being about to look at something and say "it doesn't do X, can we add it". At the moment you say "will X do Y?" and you get "probably". I'm probably being a bit critical here (bad habit), ELF is trying to pull together people who are thinking about developing products for elearning and getting them talking about standards and how things might work together.