I also agree that standards compliance, particularly with Blackboard and WebCT, leaves a lot to be desired, and that the standards themselves tend toward the baroque. (Whoever named IMS Simple Sequencing has a great sense of humor, for example.) We not only need more standards, we need better, more pervasive, and more rigorously enforced standards.

So please do continue whacking away at the mess. You’ll get no argument from me there. I just don’t want us to throw up our hands in despair.

As for needing to understand standards to use the tools; ok, but my experience these days in supporting faculty around many of the issues these specific specifications are supposed to facilitate is that they are FAR from transparent. Just try explaning to a faculty member how to get their course out of WebCT in a way that works for anyone else in the world.

But fair enough for calling me on the tone of the post. I will try to be more specific with my complaints about IMS and some of these specs rather than slagging the whole overbloated endeavor (or crap, there I go again).