Darwin rules for intelligent design in education content models

Intrigued by the buzz surrounding the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)? Well, the conversation is not all hype. Indeed real substance appears to be emerging. Given my background and current focus on the development of educational content for blended learning, I like to focus on DITA’s potential application for production of topic-based learning objects. From my perspective, the fit is a natural.

Like other communities within the information industry, publishers of educational content have been debating the “granularity” question for a long time. Having seen many abstract discussions on the subject get transformed into real world applications, a topic-based approach produces the best results in most circumstances. The reason is simple. Options for reuse are limited when the chunks are larger and it is difficult to author content that is cohesive when the chunks are smaller. Further, while the SCORM content packaging standard says nothing about the size, data format, or content structure of learning objects, many Instructional Designers will tell you than the Objective, Content, Practice, and Assessment model works quite well. Interestingly, this model is nearly identical to a specialization design that IBM has developed. Now that’s what I call synchronicity!

Any other takers on DITA for Educational Content out there?

Comments

[Scott Abel]

Great article. Thanks for including something about DITA!

Scott