About Crispin Weston

I taught History and Philosophy in the UK from 1990-2006, with an interest in education technology and data interoperability standards. In 1996 I became involved in the British Education Suppliers Association standard for Open Integrated Learning System specification (OILS). In 2002-3 I sat on the UK DfE's Technical Standards Working Group (TSWG) and Learning Platform Stakeholders Group (LPSG) for the Curriculum Online initiative, helping to develop an interoperability framework for learning management systems (LMSs) that referenced the US-based SCORM standard. In 2007 I founded the Suppliers Association for Learning Technology & Interoperability in Schools (SALTIS) as a working group of BESA, referring the government agency BECTA to the European Commission for a breach of public procurement rules in its Learning Platform framework of that year. In 2008, I was hired by BECTA (probably with the encouragement of the Commission as a way of resolving the complaint) to help address the underlying problem with the data interoperability of LMSs. But BECTA was not interested in addressing the real problem of encouraging the development of interactive content, preferring to commit the UK to following an unsatisfactory off-the-shelf solution for expositive content called Common Cartridge, produced by the US-based IMS consortium. This battle was never finished because BECTA was abolished in early 2010 (a move that I strongly supported). SALTIS also closed and I became Chair of IST/043, the British Standards Institute's committee for IT standards in learning, education and training. But the new Conservative government was not interested in edtech, so it was not possible to make any progress with data interoperability. I wrote this blog in order to develop and articulate the theoretical basis for a new approach to edtech. At the same time, I came out of education for my day-job to run oXya UK, the UK-subsidiary of oXya France, a Hitachi Group company providing technical administration services for medium-to-large companies running SAP landscapes. I still look for opportunities to persuade government of the potential for a radical new policy for edtech, but am no longer actively writing this blog.