Erik Duval’s keynote at the LORnet conference in Montreal this week reflected that not much had changed since he talked about ’share and reuse’ two years ago at the same conference. Perhaps some sharing, but certainly not reuse? Why? Erik says there are a number of key barriers : rights associated with use, static use of metadata applied to learning objects, and re-engineering teaching practice.
Erik contends that with initiatives like the Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (globe-info.org), where 5 organisations in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and Japan have released a global federated search, access to content won’t be the problem. The problem will be finding/selecting the right resource. Erik indicated that initiatives such as ‘attention metadata’ would enable predictive technologies to prompt users with ‘others like you, chose this learning object’ The usual (and rightly so) questions about privacy and misuse of such personal data need to be addressed. The Attention Trust initiative (attentiontrust.org) is developing a framework to protect personal interests. This data belongs to the individual and therefore should be controlled by the individual and rules need to be developed to manage this.
One aspect I thought Erik missed from his talk was the social networkin/tagging phenomena. The possibilities to share and reuse content (Flickr, Youtube) that has been produced in the era of the read/write culture may (will) be far more powerful than many of the learning object initiatives over the past 10 years. Education is slowly adopting these technologies from the grassroots up (see 20 Ideas for using Educational Technology : Geotagging Doug Belshaw )
I agree with Erik that we need to advocate that everyone who publishes material on the web, needs to make explicit the rights associated with its use, and preferably make these rights open. The Creative Commons (CC) rights licence is the most commonly used approach and the GLOBE initiative has agreed to promote the use of rights using CC. More details will be released prior to Xmas about GLOBE’s position on CC.
2 Comments
Yo Garry,
This ‘Interactive repositories’ as opposed to ‘Learning Objects exchange’ is likely to “not change much” for another two years if we focus only on who owns it, and how much i’ts worth. It’s important no doubt, but doesn’t seem to take note of the primary fact that one document, regardless of its format, is of not much use, if we doesn’t recognize the use to which it is put, and/or how often it’s demanded.
Let me give you one illustration. You know groups.edna.edu.au is a ‘resource’ of interactive objects, in which members trade ideas. We’ve just had a discussion about open vs. closed doors. When a group is set up on the domain they’re allocated a room (directory) into which, due to their training, they rarely come out of. So we measure the number of groups on the site, and never the number of times a thread is demanded. So each is (treated) as important as one another.
It’s a bit like globe-info’s approach to its own objects = let’s just create a huge global library in the sky, and some way to plough through them. It’s concern is only and always about the information, never about it’s communication to and from, its learning communities.
It’s a great approach if, like Dewey might say if “learners were to be fed a steady diet of stale sandwiches instead of fresh fish”, or “inert ideas” as Whitehead would call them. Like Plato’s Temple of Ideas, ‘the database in the sky’ approach is an interesting one but never made for a sustainable Doctrine of Education.
You might like to consider that the IP network hubs can include communications and not just aggregations of info., and educationau and its peers have never spent the time to study them. As they start to notice their technologies increasingly important rise in the media mix, (IM, VoIP, Grids, etc) its members might notice a new kind of Virtual Organisation; one built around (objective) pull rather than (subjective) push.
Until then, we’ll just have to believe that one tag line means the same as another.
Hey Garry,
Thanks for the link. I completely agree about sharing via an explicit Creative Commons license - it’s what I’ve done at historyshareforum.com, which is a collaborative collection of resources for the teaching of History. I release all the stuff I do on my blog under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Nice blog by the way - have added it to my Bloglines account!
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