Weller’s (2020) chapter on 1998 contains the detail I did not expect in a book about universities: SPLOT, the family of minimal publishing tools built to strip account creation and technical overhead out of open web publishing (p. 38). Those tools run on WordPress. A wiki-era argument about lowering the cost of participation ended up in my own stack, and I had never traced the lineage back this far.

The chapter on e-learning standards is where the reading became uncomfortable. Weller describes IMS, SCORM, and the UK LOM Core collapsing under their own metadata weight, defeated by return on investment: developer time spent implementing a specification is time not spent on features or bug fixes (Feldstein, 2017, as cited in Weller, 2020, p. 60). I would like to report that open source solved this. It did not. Sensei and LearnDash both launched in January 2013 onto the same CMS, the same database, the same custom post type API, and course content still will not move between them. SCORM and xAPI remain paid add-ons. We reproduced the interoperability failure of 2001 inside a single open-source platform, and WordPress’s own export format was good enough that almost nobody objected.

Watters (2020) argues that ed tech forgets not only the 1950s but the previous decade, and this is the version I recognize in my own field. The 2013 plugin generation rebuilt drip content, prerequisites, and quiz banks without reference to the standards work that had already named them, and shipped pre-married to a shopping cart, delivering Weller’s “broadcast, commercial publisher model” (p. 42) as a default install.

Can an ecosystem with no interchange format be said to have a memory at all?

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## References

Watters, A. (2020, November 11). *What happens when ed-tech forgets? Some thoughts on rehabilitating reputations*. Hack Education. https://hackeducation.com/2020/11/11/forgetting

Weller, M. (2020). *25 years of ed tech*. Athabasca University Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01