So this pushes past my feeble understanding of XML, but Tracy Logan of the Wayne/Finger-Lakes BOCES in NY seems to have some pretty interesting ideas of how to bring state standards into the 21st Century. Here’s a snip of an e-mail I got from him, reprinted with his permission:
There are a lot of very interesting things we can do with the standards once we have methods of directly referencing them — some of the ideas we’ve tossed around are structured folksonomies (where teachers could use something similar to del.icio.us but pre-filled with Standards-based tags) to categorize webpages; use standards-based tagging for their blogs; tie standards from every state to the Dublin Core (and from there, back to other states), and so on.
Anyway, to date, he hasn’t found any other states trying to tie standards and resources together in this fashion. Either have I (which isn’t saying much.) Anyone out there have any ideas?
I wrote about this on ETI: http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/2005/02/000564.php
There’s an international specification that was moving towards becoming an IEEE standard. Most standards in state guides are a “competency” of some form or another. The benefits associated with figuring this out are many, as Tracy Logan states. The launch-point for this is:
http://www.imsglobal.org/competencies/index.html
I’m not sure of the current status, though.