Education.au has been engaged by the Australian Government’s Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) to provide advice on emerging technologies and the use of ICT in education. The first report of this service was Collaboration in Teaching and Learning and the latest, focusing on Web 2.0 and site blocking in schools, has just been released. The report looks at identifying and overcoming barriers associated with site blocking with regards to Web 2.0 services. Important components of the report are the key findings and recommendations.
Key findings include:
- Web 2.0 provides rich opportunities for teaching and learning
- Site blocking is a necessary and key component of every school’s overall cyber-safety strategy
- Cyber-safety concerns head the list of barriers to the adoption of Web 2.0 in Schools
- Current Site blocking methods are blunt instruments when applied to Web 2.0 sites
- Unblocking Web 2.0 sites must be done within a clear policy framework
- Teachers need professional learning support in order to effectively use Web 2.0 in teaching and learning.
Recommendations:
- Establish a national collaboration to identify, promote and share best practice in the development and implementation of Web 2.0-style collaborative online learning policies within schools
- Establish a national collaboration to showcase and share tools and techniques in Web 2.0-aware content filtering, tools and safe access to rich media content.
November 4, 2008 – 10:11 am
The Metadata for Learning Opportunities (MLO) work attempts to harmonise different metadata specifications around Europe for describing and exchanging information about courses, e-learning offerings, and learning opportunities.
This project was initiated by Norway and had its basis in the Norwegian CDM (Course Description Metadata) work. The CDM specification has been adopted by French universities with some modifications in a project co-ordinated by the French Ministry of Education. In Sweden they used EMIL (Education Information Markup Language), in Germany DIN published (December 2006) the specification PAS 1068 developed in consensus by its DIN-workshop, and the UK had developed XCRI (eXchanging Course-Related Information) into a much used service. In 2004 a project was proposed by the CEN/ISSS WS-LT for harmonisation of the existing specifications and to identify needs and use cases by other countries. As a number of experts and national interests found this a serious market demand, a group of experts in the field set out to do this work on a voluntary unpaid basis.
MLO-Advertising (MLO-AD) is essentially a standard capturing metadata that is needed for advertising learning opportunities. It is about providing information about courses, and learning opportunities in most cases these would be courses offered by universities. In is anticipated that in future the MLO set of standards will be further developed to describe Metadata for Learning Opportunities related to the Europass system used throughout Europe.
What are the benefits?
For the European community – there are many – there is a more effective way for course providers to advertise their course and for the learner to pick and choose from a range of available courses, it’s easy to locate information of similar courses and could be the impetus for the emergence of specialised brokering services.
The application of a similar metadata schema to describe Australian university and VET courses would provide many benefits. For example one would be able to compare search results for particular courses based on location, duration and other institutional benefits. VET providers could benefit from being able to advertise their courses more widely and in a more effective manner.
August 28, 2008 – 12:09 pm
There are a number of metadata application profiles around and some more widely used than others. For example the edna metadata standard (considered an application profile) has been in existence for over ten years now and is still used, or parts of it, by educational projects to describe and organise resources. What I find an essential part of any metadata application profile is the accompanying guidelines that instruct in the best possible way of applying the metadata elements or as some people refer to them as fields or descriptors.
My point here is that just as important, if not more, are the guidelines that accompany application profiles. Two metadata profiles that have developed good sets or instructions with real examples of how metadata is applied to a range of resources are Vetadata and ANZ-LOM.
Vetadata is the metadata application profile developed to describe manage and discover primarily VET learning resources. This application profile has developed two sets of guidelines, one for the developers of metadata systems and one for the practitioners engaged in applying metadata to learning resources. These guidelines are available from the Australian Flexible Framework site.
More recently, guidelines along similar lines have also been released for ANZ-LOM, the metadata profile used to describe The Learning Federation school curriculum resources.
August 19, 2008 – 10:17 am
SCOT stands for Social Semantic Cloud of Tags. The development of this work has been supported by the Science Foundation Ireland and is based on RDF technology and open web standards.
‘The SCOT ontology provides a model for expressing the main concepts and properties required to describe information for tagging activities (e.g., users, tags, resources, etc.) on the Semantic Web’.
Many software applications provide tagging as the means for organising and managing content for individual and group purposes. Tagging is really the informal way of categorising and indexing resources that is not dependent on a standard or knowledge on how to apply that standard.
Although tagging has long been viewed as an individual act of managing ones resources, it is now gaining support as a tool that enables users to interact with each other using their tags.
Web 2.0 and interactive services are driving the push for easier and less formal ways of organising community learning. This specification hopefully will provide the means to share and reuse tagging data amongst users and communities.
Well over a decade ago we started using metadata to enable us to manage online resources. In a sense we were transferring our organisational skills and know- how from the physical environment to the online environment. And in so doing instead of saying we are cataloguing or creating records about online resources we chose terminology appropriate for the online world and said we are creating metadata or are using metadata to manage web resources.
Basically, this activity has given us the means to create some order and structure in storing information to enable us to retrieve it when we want it. Metadata has worked well in managing digital collections and online web services. That is, metadata has enabled the description and collocation of similar resources. Some of the disadvantages of metadata have been that the application of controlled vocabularies and classification systems that are meaningful to information professionals and librarians hold little relevance to the typical online user (this online user can be a student, a mum, an administrator, etc).
The emergence of services line flickr and del.ic.ous brought into prominence social tagging – in other words, as an end user I could organise my online collection of resources according to tags or key words that provided meaning to me. So the practice of tagging is currently thriving — but my question is how effective is tagging in terms or organising and managing resources for educational purposes? Are we likely to use the same terms to tag the same resources? I would say no.
So the question is – Is there a place for tagging? As I see it there is a place for tagging but I see tagging as an individual activity that meets the information management needs of an individual. We contextualise resources differently and as such apply different tags. The purpose of large collections is to organise them in a manner that provides consistency. I’m not against tagging but I feel it has its place. The current practice of tagging has resulted in unmanageable tag clouds on some websites.
One way of confining the usage of tags is by collaboratively agreeing on terms to be used. The following URL circulated by a colleague is a good example of how tags can be controlled http://www.classroom20.com/page/page/show?id=649749%3APage%3A52065
A recent report, Metadata for digital libraries: state of the art and the future directions, by JISC Tech Watch looks at the importance of metadata in a networked environment. A suggested barrier to the emergence of a single standard is the complex metadata requirements of digital objects. For example there is need for descriptive metadata, administrative metadata, structural metadata and right management metadata. The author suggests the integration of the relevant standards, all based on XML architectures, can be combined to provide a coherent metadata strategy. Some of us have already been adopting such strategies to meet metadata requirements of project needs.
For a long time now we have been using metadata to describe and classify resources so that others looking for then could find them. Our objective has been to create rich databases of quality resources, describe them well and provide both browse and search mechanisms for the end user to browse and search for resources around their interests. This model has served us well for over a decade now but as we know nothing stays static, technologies are improving and new tools and applications pop up daily.
The internet has enabled us to keep in touch with colleagues and friends all over the world – our connections are not purely social — we find that we can effectively communicate via the internet for professional purposes. As online beings we build online profiles and identities – people get to know us based on what we write, what we read, who we know and the networks we belong to. Although we rarely associate metadata with individuals this is exactly what is happening when we engage in online activities. We, human beings, are just as important as resources in the online environment. There is inferred value on the resources we tag, bookmarks we collect and expose to our online networks.
Networks and communities of practice provide us with the means to develop quality online collections of resources – they provide the resources, the subject expertise and the peer review capabilities. What we have to do is streamline who creates what metadata and for what purpose!
A recently published article, Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008, by Sarah Currier provides a snapshot of the current landscape of metadata application and development. The focus is on key international initiatives and what has been taking place over recent years in regards to harmonization, application and developments.Sections covered include:
- IEEE LOM: Recent History and Future
- Where to for a Next-generation IEEE LOM?
- DC-Education AP Vocabularies
- DC-Education AP: Singapore Framework
- Next Steps for the UK: The JISC LMAP Scoping Study
- ISO Metadata for Learning Resources: A Third Standard?
Sarah also informs us of the existence of a separate group, under the auspices of the International Standards Organisation (ISO), interested in improving on the LOM standard. The question is, do we need yet another standard? – it would appear processes are already in place to address community concerns and new approaches to metadata such as web 2.0 and social tagging.
October 18, 2007 – 3:15 pm
JISC investigate the creation of a new application profile for learning materials.
A metadata scoping study is proposed by Phil Barker, JISC CETIS, that will draw on all relevant domains to identify domain specific issues that could inform managers of learning materials repositories. We can all appreciate that learning materials include a variety of resources including audio files, guides, tutorials, assessment material, web pages, etc. And as Phil alludes the online space is not getting any easier in accommodating all information needs in managing repository content. Rights management along with accessibility issues are the current challenges facing us. The following is the starting list of domains that will be analysed.
• general resource discovery (DC, MARC)
• Education (LOM, context descriptions)
• Accessibility (Access4All)
• Curation / preservation (premis, METS)
• Complex object management (IMS CP, METS, DIDL, OAI-ORE)
• Technical (technical metadata)
• Digital rights (ODRM, XrML)
• Repository management (admin metadata)
• Assessment (IMS QTI metadata)
• Scholarly publishing / citations (OpenURL, SWAP, PRISM?)
• Images (MIX)
• Videos
• Geo-spatial
For more details see Phil’s JSC CETIS blog.
A survey has been developed asking users for their feedback on the Dublin Core website. The survey seeks to find out how the DCMI site is used by users new to Dublin Core and those who are familiar with Dublin Core and its community.
I encourage you to take a minute and complete the survey so we can all assist in determining how the DCMI site can be improved. The questionnaire will be available till 5 September.
The survey is available at the following URL:
http://www.priority-research.com/survey.php?sid=9492697A75255BD58561B5AAE1827094
