Stephen Downes

'ASPECT' stands for "Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content". It is funded under the European Framework, involves 22 partners from 15 countries, including 9 Ministries of Education (MoE), four commercial content developers and leading technology providers, and has just published its first newsletter, here. "Experts from all international standardisation bodies and consortia active in e-learning (CEN/ISSS, IEEE, ISO, IMS, ADL) will work together in order to improve the adoption of learning technology standards and specifications." The newsletter links to ASPECT metadata application profile, here, which combines IEEE LOM and the Information for Learning Object eXchange (ILOX) specification. ASPECT has also developed a vocabulary bank for education. ASPECT's RSS feed is a bit hard to find, but it is here.