A group funded by the Mellon Foundation is trying to define the bounds of interaction between course management systems (CMS) and repositories. Their report should be available on the DLF web site by the end of May. In today’s presentation to CNI they made three fundamental points: (1) users will be getting to repository content through a broad set of “course management” tools that extend well beyond CMS into PowerPoint, Weblogs, Citation Managers and the like; (2) repositories need to attend to a Checklist of requirements and desirables in order to interoperate with this layer of tools; and (3) the process used to build course content can be expressed as “Gather-Create-Share”.This “Gather-Create-Share” seems like a weak echo of Apple’s “Rip, Mix, and Burn” campaign a few years ago. It is also the process that Lessig warns us is under threat given the intellectual property regime our country is putting into force. The session really didn’t touch on the impediments that copyright puts in the way of the “Gather” step, but I was told that IP issues will be part of the Checklist when the group reports out to the DLF.Another mention of Chandler and its higher-ed alter-ego Westwood, this is something I should pay some attention to. Chandler is an open source personal information management tool under development.
