Sitting now in the Supporting Education session at JCDL. Carl Lagoze is talking now, & giving some lessons learned from the NSDL experience. They all boil down to:

  1. This was a lot harder than we thought it would be, &
  2. People satisfice.

Carl’s conclusion is that the NSDL was not a successful project. [Apparently I’m mistaken in writing this; see the comments below.] Chris Borgman says: “this is extremely depressing news.” Why not successful? Carl says: Smart people did good work & didn’t do anything wrong. So why? We don’t know. Carl suggests a conference session to discuss. (More study is required; we need more smart people to figure out why the last set of smart people failed. Will that work?)

Mimi Recker up now. She has a tough act to follow; we all want to throw ourselves out a window now. Talking about the Instructional Architect. What are teachers doing, when they are giving assignments & using resources from DLs? “Blogger meets del.icio.us.” Most requested feature: teachers want not to be limited to the NSDL, but want to be able to include materials from anywhere on the web. Most teachers do not fill out the checkbox set to indicate what the topic & grade level of their project, or the applicable core curriculum standards. 37% of resources used came from NSDL search, 43% of resources used are from domains under the NSDL… so a lot of browsing is going on.

I have to ask, does it make sense to build tools for packaging DL materials for teaching, around a perhaps defunct DL? Depends on how married to the DL the tool is, I suppose. So, an argument for modular tool development. I’ll be interested to see how much use the Instructional Architect gets, post-NSDL.