DITA Learning in the new Adobe Technical Communications Suite!

Adobe just announced a new Technical Communications Suite, and has included support for DITA Learning!

Full support for DITA standards

Take advantage of DITA 1.1, including support for Bookmap, Indexing, and Glossary specifications, and use the DITA 1.2 Learning and Training Content Specialization (beta) to develop compelling training content.

I'll definitely have to give this a try. The DITA Learning Content subcommittee is in the process of putting together more real-world examples using this standard that we've developed over the past several years. Maybe I'll try to put that together using the demo!

DITA Learning Content accepted for DITA 1.2

More big news in the standards world today! The DITA 1.2 feature proposal #12058, "Design and language specification for DITA learning and training content," submitted by the DITA Learning and Training Content sub-committee was approved at today's DITA TC meeting.

Congratulations to John Hunt and all the members of the DITA Learning Content SC! The specification and sample plugins are all publicly available. Next steps for us is to work on our Best Practices for Implementation and create some sample processing for the DITA OT. This effort will continue into the first quarter of 2008.

DITA Learning Content specialization open for review!

The OASIS DITA Learning and Training Content Specialization Subcommittee is proud to announce the availability of our specification for DITA Learning Content for public review.

The design and language specification for the DITA learning and training content is available here, and the DITA Open Toolkit plugin with working DTD, XSD, DITA content samples, and documentation is available here.

The goal of the subcommittee is to develop a general top-level design for structured, intent-based authoring of learning content with good learning architecture, following DITA principles and best practices.

This specification was formally submitted to the full OASIS DITA Technical Committee today, after we completed the designs, samples, and language specifications for the learning topic types, the learning map domain, the learning interaction domain, and IEEE LOM learning metadata. The intention is to have this specification approved by the TC for inclusion in DITA 1.2, though most of this work is built on the existing DITA 1.1 infrastructure.

Please send any review comments via the public comment facility.

Curriki and open eLearning

I ran across an interesting article in the February '07 issue of Popular Science about Curriki, a new website/organization set up by Scott McNealy to promote Open Source eLearning.

The site is: http://www.curriki.org

In March 2004, McNealy helped create the Global Education & Learning Community (GELC) to leverage open source to provide learning materials for everyone, anywhere. GELC was spun off in 2006 as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit now known as Curriki - the Global Education & Learning Community.

The content is in a Wiki format, but interestingly enough:

it can take a Texbook Wiki document and convert it to a DocBook XML format suitable as a portable eBook, or a PDF file suitable for printing. It can also package assets into portable learning objects in the form of IMS/SCORM compliant content packages. It includes tools for configuring the transformation of assets (Form to form, like XML to PDF or ODF) and packaging of assets (For specific LMSs, or with specific metadata).

We've been working to address eLearning content structure as part of the OASIS DITA Learning Content subcommittee. We will definitely need to make sure these two efforts are compatible!