Category Archives: metadata

OER Programme Technical Requirements

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Following the experimental nature of the HEFCE / Academy / JISC Open Educational Resources call JISC are adopting a somewhat experimental approach to technical infrastructure for this programme. Although the ultimate aim of the OER Programme is to change process and practice at the institutional level the catalyst for making this happen is opening access to educational resources. Or in other words, getting content out onto the open web.

Metadata

Although JISC will provide projects with technical advice and guidelines the OER Programme will not mandate the use of one single platform to disseminate resources and one single metadata application profile to describe content. However projects will need to ensure that content released through the programme can be found, used, analysed, aggregated and tagged. In order to facilitate this, content will have to be accompanied by some form of metadata. In this instance metadata doesn’t necessarily mean de jure standards, application profiles, formal structured records, cataloging rules, subject classifications, controlled vocabularies and web forms. Metadata can also take the form of tags added to resources in applications such as flickr and YouTube, time and date information automatically added by services such as slideshare, and author name, affiliation and other details added from user profiles when resources are uploaded. Consequently the OER Programme will only mandate the following “metadata”:

  • Programme tag ukoer
  • Title
  • Author / owner / contributor (from user profile)
  • Date
  • URL
  • Technical info – file format, name & size

The first two will have to be created manually but projects are strongly encouraged to use platforms and systems that can generate or accommodate the rest.

Projects are also encouraged to think about providing additional information that will help people to find and access resources. For example:

  • Language information
  • Subject classifications
  • Keywords
  • Tags
  • Comments
  • Descriptions

Delivery Platforms

Projects are free to use any system or application as long as it is capable of delivering content freely on the open web. However all projects must also deposit their content in JorumOpen. In addition projects should use platforms that are capable of generating RSS/Atom feeds, particularly for collections of resources e.g. YouTube channels. Although this programme is not about technical development projects are encouraged to make the most of the functionality provided by their chosen delivery platforms.

Content Standards

The OER Programme is expected to generate a wide range of content types so mandating specific content standards is impractical. However Projects should consider using appropriate standards for sharing complex objects e.g. IMS Content Packaging IMS Common Cartridge and IMS QTI for assessment items. OAI ORE may also be of value although I’m not aware of any previous implementations focused specifically on teaching and learning materials, please correct me if I’m wrong however!

What We Hope To Learn

As this is a pilot programme there are many areas where we are seeking to learn more about approaches are likely to be beneficial to the community. These include:

  • Improving institutional and individual workflows for managing content
  • Limitations and benefits of different file formats for OERs
  • Limitations and benefits of different platforms for OER sharing
  • Search engine optimisation and resource discovery mechanisms such as bookmarking and tagging
  • Persistent identifiers and version-handling for OERs. See Phil Barker’s excellent recent post on this particularly thorny topic.
  • How to track usage and impact of OERs

The OER Programme hopes to encourage projects to share their successes, failures, ideas, requirements, opportunities and good practices, and above all to be bold, innovative and experimental!

This post is based on a presentation written and presented by Amber Thomas of JISC and I at the recent HEFCE / Academy / JISC Open Educational Resources Community Briefing day. The original presentation is available from the JISC IE Repository at http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/280/

The dawn of eduprog

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Without a doubt the zenith of the recent CETIS08 conference has to be the evolution of a new concept in educational technology – eduprog.

eduprog
(copyright: it’s Phil’s fault)

Eduprog crystalised from the domains of metadata, repositories, educational technology and unusual puddings and is set to challenge edupunk as the real underground movement of the moment. Seizing the zeitgeist by the scruff of the neck the term was coined by Peter Obee and formalised by andypowe11

suggest we need to get in the habit of writing eduProg as #eduprog if we seriously want the concept to challenge #edupunk

This genre defining movement perfectly reflects a domain that generates questionable “concept” specifcations of baroque complexity (cf. FRBR, IEEE LOM) and application profiles and reports the equivalent of extend guitar solos (cf. DC Description Set profile & UKLOM Core, from the eduprog back catalogue). Phil Barker has recently confirmed that the forthcoming LMAP report will be published with a gatefold sleeve.

LOM Lies Down on Broadway
(copyright: David’s fault this time)

Eduprog has spread over the twittosphere like a gold lurex cape and has already generated considerable sage discussion and chin stroking.

Some have been inspired, others critical

#eduprog much better reflects the true state of education technology- long-winded, self-indulgent, boring standards-making

“long winded and self-indulgent” or virtuoso boundary pushing redefining forms and developing new techniques?

Recalling last night’s discussion of the potential for a prog concept album based on FRBR, double album, one side per Group 1 entity

the AV equivalent of restringing a 12 string electric lute going on here…

Last word has to go to one who was there at the dawn of eduprog:

I’ll get me cloak….

The Cloak

Sharks, tombstones and timewarps at Dublin Core

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The theme for this year’s Dublin Core Conference, was œMetadata for Semantic and Social Applications. Like previous DC conferences this was a dual track event with working groups running along side peer reviewed presentations. I attended the conference primarily to participate in the working groups and I have to confess that many of the academic presentations were somewhat outwith my domain, however there were a couple that caught my attention.

Jennifer Trant of Archives & Museums Informatics gave a thought provoking keynote Access to art museums on-line: a role for social tagging and folksonomies which presented findings from Steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project. Steve is:

engaged in systematic research into how social tagging can best serve the museum community and its visitors.

Jennifer began by asking if tagging could help museums answer common queries such as:

Im looking for a picture of a well dressed man standing in front of a window. Can you help me find this painting?

Museum catalogue records, or œtombstone data, are not good at answering questions such as these.

To illustrate this point Jennifer showed us a painting by Winslow Homer called œThe Gulf Stream.

The Gulf Stream

Copyright © 2002-2008 www.winslow-homer.com This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.

Now it’s hard to miss the sharks here but nowhere, Jennifer pointed out, does the catalogue record mention the word œshark (Personally I was stunned by the sheer tackiness of this painting but thats another story¦ ;-) The Steve project attempted to address the œmis-match between the vocabulary of the visitor and the museum by inviting the public to tag almost 2000 works in 11 museums. 86% of the tags allocated by the public were œnovel to the resource and the intersection with museum terms was primarily œgenre terms such as photograph, sculpture etc. Clearly the public found these terms useful but the project concluded that the tags also had significant value for searching and broader retrieval purposes. More importantly they were able to incorporate new points of view into museum records. The public had effectively created an alternative scholarly vocabulary.

Im not sure how many parallels we can draw between the museum sector and the teaching and learning domain, however I liked the idea that users can generate living dynamic descriptions of resources which can complement more static œtombstone data. I also whole-heartedly agreed with Jennifers concluding assertion that

we dont know enough about how people search and what they are searching for.

This is certainly something we have been aware of in the education domain for some time. Its difficult to create effective educational metadata profiles if we dont fully understand how teachers and learners search and what they are searching for. Semantic density anyone? We do need to recognise that individual teacher and learners will view and experience educational materials in very different ways and we also need to acknowledge that theres more to metadata than œdefinitive static records. In order to improve access to educational resources we need to create services that can accommodate dynamic resource descriptions from a range of sources rather than mausoleums of tombstone metadata. (Okay Ill stop pushing that metaphor now¦)

The other keynote which caught my attention was by Paul Miller of Tallis. What struck me about this presentation was that, excepting a very interesting potted history of the dotcom era, it was awfully reminiscent of a keynote I heard Tim Berners-Lee present at a World Wide Web conference in Toronto almost 10 years ago called The Challenges of the Second Decade (these slides provide only a bare outline of the presentation I remember) and Im not sure how much has changed in the intervening years. I already know that

the Semantic Web is about facilitating connections between data and unlocking value in all the data we collect and maintain

but has this happened yet? And if not, when will it? Dont get me wrong, Im very interested in the potential of semantic technologies and in particular the affordances they may offer to teaching and learning however I did rather feel like I was stuck in a bit of a time warp. I wonder if we need to wait a third decade before the Semantic Web becomes a reality?

Use of repositories to manage scholarly works and teaching and learning materials: Differences and similarities

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While commenting on the forthcoming JISC briefing paper œManagement of e-learning resources: why repositories can help, authored by Andrew Rothery of University of Worcester, we got drawn into a slightly tangential discussion about issues relating to different types of resources, primarily scholarly works and teaching and learning materials, which may be accommodated by institutional repositories. At the time I volunteered to collate our comments so here, rather belatedly, is a synthesis of the points raised in that discussion by Neil Jacobs (JISC), Phil Barker (CETIS), Andrew Rothery (Worcester) and I.

I should add that Im not an expert in issues relating to scholarly works so Im sure Ive oversimplified some very complex points. In addition I know next to nothing about significant issues relating to research data. I suspect research data may be more akin to teaching materials than scholarly works but I could be quite wrong. If anyone from the eresearch domain could comment Id be very grateful.

I should also add that this is just a starting point for further discussion rather than a definitive list of issues.

Format
Scholarly works generally are generally documents designed for reading and printing. Learning materials and research data are likely to encompass multiple formats and may facilitate wide range of interactions.

Version
Scholarly works tend to be discrete entities and may have a clear version history (preprint, publication, postprint). Many different versions of an individual learning resource may exist, particularly if that resource is stored in a VLE. Different versions may be used for different courses, resources may be updated from year to year.

Audience
The audience for scholarly works is generally other academic staff and researchers. The audience for teaching and learning materials is students in addition to other academic staff.

Reuse and Citation
Reuse of scholarly works is common within agreed parameters. Papers may be referenced, quoted and cited. Reuse of learning materials is much more haphazard and there is no agreed framework for reuse. Practitioners are often unsure if they can reuse or repurpose an existing learning resource.

Incentives and Motivation Publication
Authors are usually motivated to publish scholarly works and there are clear incentives for them to do so e.g. the RAE, academic reputation, peer standing. There are few if any incentives for academics to publish their teaching materials and many may be extremely reticent to do so.

(Note: What does publish really mean in this context?)

Peer Review
Scholarly works are subject to peer review or some other form of quality assessment. Teaching materials are not usually peer reviewed although some learning objects repositories such as merlot do provide a peer review facility. There is some debate as to the validity of peer reviewing discrete chunks of learning materials that may be used in many different contexts. Teachers are generally more interested in knowing how a resource has been used and by whom rather than whether it has been peer reviewed.

Open Access
There are clear arguments and considerable advocacy for open access to scholarly publications, however the case for open access to teaching and learning materials (and research data ?) is less well developed.

Uptake and Engagement
It seems to be easier to encourage academic staff to contribute to and use repositories of scholarly works rather than teaching and learning materials.

Retention, Preservation and Archiving
There is little awareness of issues relating to the retention, preservation and archiving of teaching and learning materials. An extreme example of this lack of awareness is the argument that there is no valid reason for retaining any teaching and learning materials. There is much greater awareness and understanding of the need to preserve and archive scholarly works.

Workflow
There are quite different workflows associated with the creation, publication and deposit of scholarly works and teaching and learning materials. Repositories must address and accommodate these different workflows.

Metadata
Although it may be possible to identify some common metadata elements the characteristics of teaching and learning materials requiring description to facilitate resource discovery and selection are different from those of scholarly works. Different metadata schemes or strategies must be developed accordingly.

IPR and Copyright
Academic staff tend to have greater awareness of IPR and copyright restrictions relating to scholarly works than teaching and learning materials.

Resource Management
All institutional resources, including scholarly works, research data and teaching and learning materials require appropriate management policies and strategies.

“The Semantic Web hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t succeeded enough”

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– A summary of position papers for the Semantic Technologies for Teaching and Learning Session of the JISC CETIS Conference 2007.

Earlier in August when Phil and I decided to plan a session on Semantic Technologies for Teaching and Learning for this years JISC CETIS Conference we had no real idea how much interest there would be in this topic. Since then weve been pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastic response that this session has generated. We have 35 registered participants and 7 international speakers lined up. In order to make the most of the limited time available to us each speaker will present a short position statement which will summarise the main points of a longer position paper that they have prepared for this event. These position papers are now available from the Conference wiki at:
http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Semantic_Structures_for_Teaching_and_Learning#Position_Papers

Tore Hoel, University College Olso, begins by musing on why we have had a relatively slow uptake of semantic technologies in the domain of learning, education and training and why we have failed to exploit the ability of these technologies to œtake the learning technology project to a new level as predicted by Mikael Nilsson in a report on the CETIS website in 2001. Tore suggests that this is because; a) we lack convincing tools and demonstrators, b) the Trust at the top of Tim Berners Lees Semantic Web Stack is hard to negotiate and c) semantic technologies communicate more effectively with machines than with educators and decision makers. Tore calls for a semantic infrastructure for learning, education and training and, speaking from Norway œthe stronghold of Topic Maps, goes on to present a case study of the uptake of Topic Map technologies in the Norwegian educational sector.

Echoing one of Tores points David Davies, University of Warwick, agrees that while semantic technologies remain exclusively in the hands of technologists, they will have little impact on the world of the online learner. He goes on to suggest that œbetter understanding of the needs of teachers and learners will result in better semantic technologies, more attuned to the needs of non-technical users and those that would rather pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. David also argues that we need greater use of metadata that facilitates the discovery and use of content rather than metadata that œseems a millstone around the neck.

David Millard, University of Southampton, presents an up beat summary of developments in his paper œWhy the Semantic Web hasn’t failed, and how we shouldn’t fix it. In his view œthe Semantic Web hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t succeeded enough. David points out that œwhile the upper layers of the Semantic Web Stack have attracted a lot of academic interest, it is the bottom layers that have seen the most success. Like David D, David M suggests that we should focus on promoting well-formed metadata to increase the inter-relatedness of e-learning standards, encouraging interoperability and enabling reasoning. Interestingly, David also identifies the œrise of a New Web Literacy, a preparedness amongst the new generation of students to share, trust and co-operate online, and to take ownership of their digital identity and environment. He concludes that semantic technologies must demonstrate real advantages without real sacrifices, particularly in respect to the informality of users.

Mikael Nilsson, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, also refers back to his 2001 article mentioned by Tore and acknowledges that œthe educational technology field is still not very mature when it comes to semantic technology applications. He suggests this is due to a lack of semantics in the base standards, dependence on vertical silo-type applications such as LMSs and scepticism and towards anything looks even vaguely like an intelligent tutoring system. Mikaels personal approach has been to focus on the base standards and he presents a œPlan for Semantic Interoperability in Educational Technology Specifications. This 5 step plan begins by ensuring that all Dublin Core specifications are RDF compliant, progresses through the semanticisation of other existing metadata specifications and ends with the question: which other specifications should semantics spread to?

Like Mikael, Alistair Miles, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, is also focuses on standards and specifications, in this case SKOS and RDFa. SKOS is a lightweight language for representing intuitive, semi-formal conceptual structures and RDFa is a language for embedding richly structured data and metadata in Web pages. The particular value of these standards is that they œprovide an interface between the formal underpinnings of the Semantic Web, and the more informal, intuitive ways in which people naturally express and organise knowledge. Alistair concludes by discussing the potentially interesting consequences that these standards have for leveraging the Web as a platform for delivering learning and elearning technology.

In response to the call for more user friendly tools Michael Gardner, University of Essex, and Simon Buckingham Shum, Open University, present a series of case studies of applications and systems that build on these semantic technologies. Michael provides three exemplars:

  • DELTA – a system which allows distributed resources to be submitted, searched and retrieved, based on standardized meta-data.
  • ResourceBrowser “ which integrates the DELTA and eProfile (social networking) toolkits into a single user-interface to allow users to view and search their social-networks.
  • AUTODISCOVER – trawls a users PC automatically constructing meta-data for the documents on that desktop and enables the user to manually review and modify the resulting concept-map and meta-data descriptions.

The Open Universitys Knowledge Media Institutes Hypermedia Discourse research programme aims to œdevelop intellectual tools for structuring information that are usable without having to be an ontology engineer or information scientist. These tools include:

  • Compendium “ a mature platform with a growing community of practice. Compendium supports real time knowledge construction in meetings and can also be used for personal information management and reflection.
  • Cohere – a visual environment for making meaningful connections between ideas, and optionally tagging those ideas with websites.

The ultimate aim of these developments is to facilitate œnew ways of reading and writing ideas: a new literacy.

All these position papers provide significant food for thought and no doubt will provoke lively discussion and debate. Condensing summarising this session into a single slide to present at the Conference Plenary Session will no doubt be a huge challenge!

Images Application Profile Project Meeting

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London, October 2007

Following introductions the meeting began with a presentation by Pete J and Julie on the Dublin Core Abstract Model and the Scholarly works Application Profile.

DCMI Abstract Model and Application Profiles
– Pete Johnston, Eduserv Foundation

The Dublin Core element set published in 1995.

A resource is anything that can be identified by a URI. Resources have property value pairs associated with them

DCAM defines the DC description set and is composed of

  • Resource model
  • Description set model
  • Vocabulary model

DCAM does not describe how to represent description sets in concrete terms and doesn not specify a fixed set of terms.

Descriptions sets are composed or one of more descriptions which may have a resource URI. Each description is composed of one or more statements. Each statement must have a property URI and literal or non literal value surrogates.

The DCMI Description Set Profile is a way of describing structural constraints on a description set “ this is not part of DCAM. Mikael Nilssen is developing a model and XML syntax for DSP and Fredrik Enoksson is developing wiki syntax for DSP.

A DCAM compatible application profile consists of

  • Functional requirements
  • Domain model
  • Description Set Profile
  • Two other components

Methodology for Images Application Profile
– Mick Eadie, AHDS Visual Arts

Have looked at a range of existing application profiles including SWAP and Jorum and have drafted attributes, a model, usecases and functional requirements which are available form the project wiki.

The primary objective of the project is to develop a working application profile along the lines of SWAP (this was prioritised by members of the panel) and the team intend to follow the SWAP development model.

Getting the profile implemented and used will be the most challenging aspect of the project. The project team hope to engage with repository vendors and developers asap and are meeting with the ePrints team to discuss their potential involvement. (ePrints (Tim Brody) and Fedora (Richard Green, Chris Awre) people are represented on the panel.)

Models the project will look at in more detail

May be beneficial for JISC to fund some kind of synthesis or over arching project that could map the relationship between the various application profile creation projects.

Breakout Session

  • Need to be careful if you state you want rich metadata “ why do you want it?
  • Users need to be able to find images about or of a particular thing., the content of the image is crucial
  • Is this about metadata exchange or resource discovery? Its about exchange to support resource discovery.
  • The images and time based media profile projects must work together.
  • The context of use is crucial so provenance needs to be recorded.
  • The national repositories section of the usecases document really refers to aggregator services.
  • Will the profile accommodate 3d models that can be manipulated e.g. molecular models?
  • The draft model scoped by the project is too simple and needs revision.
  • The concept of the master image is problematic and ambiguous. The underlying model must be as neutral as possible and should be based on relationships. œMaster should be regarded as a class of relationship rather than a class of artefact.
  • Many images are composite objects so the whole – part relationship needs to be considered.
  • FRBR is designed with textual resources in mind so the model may not fit visual images. In FRBR the work is always an abstract thing. In the case of images there may be no work e.g. in the case of a photograph of a giraffe, the giraffe can not be considered as œwork

Feedback

  • In order to describe images relationships are key. The profile must make provision for be bi-directional relationships and relationships to identifiers elsewhere.
  • User generated tags can be accommodated by the œhas annotation field.
  • The simplest approach may be to identify metadata that is about the image and its creation and metadata that is about the content of the image. These two will overlap and the relationship between them is crucial. (Grant Young, TASI)
  • Dimensionality of images is very important. Images have other dimensions than x and y.
  • The model should stop short of describing the work.
  • Colour space, coverage and encoding (i.e. what does a pixel encode – colour, temperature, etc) should be included as attributes.
  • The relationship between images and time based media needs to be clarified
  • œWhy not just define a core element set that could have extensions built on to it (!!)

Community Acceptance

  • The team will start drafting an Ariadne article as it was generally agreed that this was highly beneficial to the SWAP project.
  • Project should consider presenting at Open Repositories Conference in Southampton in April 2008 as the SWAP profile was presented at the 2007 conference.
  • Project needs to work very closely with Intute and the time based media application profile project. It will also be important to work with the cultural heritage sector.
  • Acceptance should be at an international level.
  • Acceptance takes a long time as software is developed in long cycles.
  • Need an exemplar that demonstrates key benefits to the community.
  • Need to be aware that many people are simply storing their images in Flickr. This is the world the profile must work in.
  • Need to demonstrate advantages from depositor and repository point of view.

A few thoughts¦

Julie and co have made the creation of SWAP look awfully easy :-}

It was notable, and a little worrying, that that there was very little discussion of tagging (raised once by Pete), use of sites like Flickr (raised once by me) or Web 2.0 technologies and approaches in general. However there was significant discussion of semantic web technologies and approaches.

It also became clear that its debatable how far the FRBR model can be stretched before it breaks. FRBR worked well for SWAP, but will it work equally well for images, learning materials etc?

It was also painfully clear that metadata creation is still a serious problem and that it is not always easy to distinguish between issues that relate to a profile and issues that relate to implementations of that profile.

As Father Jack would say œThat would be an implementation issue¦.

Semantic technologies for teaching and learning?

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As part of this years forthcoming JISC CETIS conference Phil and I are proposing to run a half day “brainstorm session on semantic technologies and their use, or not, in the teaching and learning space. I should add that I know very little about semantic technology developments and this is one reason Im keen for the session to go ahead. I have a persistent lurking suspicion that theres lots of really interesting work going on out there somewhere but I dont know what, I dont know where and I dont know whether its likely to be of use to teachers and learners. Im inclined to think that the answer to the last of these questions is a resounding yes.

In the course of fleshing out a brief description of the planned session I couldnt help noticing that most of the references to semantic technologies, including those turned up by Google and Wikipedia, date from 2003 and 2004. Clearly the semantic web has been supplanted by Web 2.0.

So whats been going on in the meantime? Have semantic technologies failed to deliver? Are they now restricted to interesting but niche research projects? Or have they been quietly successful to the extent that they are now so ubiquitous that we no longer notice them? RSS anyone?

I was still wondering if there were lots of really interesting educational applications of semantic teachnologies out there but a rather cursory search didnt turn up anything new. I did get very excited when I discovered the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group. However I was a bit disappointed to discover that rather than reaching out to the educational community the group aims to:

œincrease awareness among the Web community of the need and benefit for the Semantic Web, and educate the Web community regarding related solutions and technologies.

Still, its a noble aim and the group does provide a lot of very interesting and relevant information.

Another interesting resources I came across on more than a few blogs is the Semantic Technology Primer. This includes a run down of those sectors implementing semantic technologies: government, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, transport and communications, energy, health and life sciences, media, and business services. No education. The Primer also includes a detailed schematic of œApplications Today, again no education.

I know that there are semantic technologies that are widely use on the domain of education such as FOAF, RSS, Atom, etc but its arguable whether they have made a significant impact in the teaching and learning space, as opposed to the enterprise and identity management end of things. Its possible that there are piles of semantic technology developers out there who would say that this is all rubbish and that these technologies are already happening. If so thats great, you can come along to the conference and tell us all about it!

Random Quotes 3: Digital Repositories – Dealing with the Digital Deluge Conference

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Sharing Digital Material for eLearning & Plenary Sessions
Manchester 5th & 6th June 2007

Get the technology right and the culture and policy will change¦were trying to be implementers of the eFramework¦ resistance to abstracting out services¦reticence to depend on other peoples services¦best holistic for implementing a standard is simplicity and an active adoption community¦users want repositories to work like websites¦problems are cultural not technological¦I assume the framework people will provide guidance on which standards to adopt¦ who cares whats lost¦it doesnt matter¦institutional boundaries are blurring¦what should institutions be facilitating¦we think of repositories as only having come along with e-learning…librarians have been grappling with these ideas for thousands of years¦cant simply institutionalise web based paradigms¦need appropriate levels of security¦opening up archives for educational use¦Britains intelligent conversation¦web based services are there, they work and the are appropriate to use¦perceptions of storage and safety were paramount and individual¦tutors are happy to provide personal metadata¦concern over loss of control and misappropriation of resources¦the vast majority of people will give you permission to use stuff for education¦repositories can save us from mish-mash and mess¦why dont learning object repositories facilitate version control¦bring management into the realm of the personal¦lack of innovation in teaching¦support departments are not necessarily supportive¦be flexible and modular about the way you build things¦deliver content to students in the way they want to learn¦the repository of the future is a very smart search¦my repository is Google¦anonymity vs pseudonymity¦student identity is less tied up with the institution¦academics have more allegiance to their subject than their institution¦fluid identity¦the authoritative voice¦whats hot in pigs¦users want it to be legal, or nearly legal¦need formalised metadata and canonical syntax and semantics¦we dont like it to be too informal¦take this forward for wealth creation and improved quality of life¦home brew systems¦DC syntax and semantics are not sufficiently formal¦there are people in the loop¦the easiest way of doing things is not always the best way¦pool them dont type them¦flexible coordinated force¦the more metadata you have the better¦creative vs legal balance¦religious, commercial, professional or labour groups¦how can we make things better?…sensitive to the needs of the community¦transient is a better word than incoherent¦IPR, DRM and all these things were not really interested in on the elearning side of things¦curators see the repository much more in isolation¦curators see single communities, users see multiple communities¦the things that floated to the surface were technical things¦

Worries about academic identity¦nothing fundamentally new about repositories¦we have to be careful about the competitive position of our universities¦whod have thought vles would have become so common¦making things more wanted¦move from model where teaching is dominated by individuals to one dominated by teams¦its all about embedding change¦the web is embedded in day to day practice¦there is change that comes at us¦were the spear head of this¦you cant embed if youre not wanted¦techies with new toys to play with foist them on others as a good thing to use¦user requirements analysis needs to be ongoing¦students are key users¦what should institutions do given the potential for mayhem?¦solve problems at a national not institutional level¦will these services become part of the landscape¦universities give the impression that they dont understand that teaching and learning is their core business¦worse still, you have to involve the senior management¦authority, integrity and quality assurance¦capitalise on complementarity¦its not a personal learning environment, its a personal information environment¦if you teach its very hard to use web 2.0 things, you dont have the time¦things embed instantly if theyre useful¦vles are a solution to a management problem¦you dont want to learn another system¦some new services are a facsimile of an existing paradigm¦what is it the university can do best¦librarians, if only there were more of them¦shift emphasis back to teaching staff¦change the working practices of senior managers¦have to know what we want to achieve and make sure the right people are there to achieve it¦stop using pseudo business models¦value is in process, not in materials…academics thought they knew what the deal was¦hesitate to use the word stagnated¦sack the lot of them¦the roadmap goes to 2010¦open access mandates are not enough¦without licensing there is no open access¦lets just do it¦OAI-ORE¦going from practice into theory¦the end is the wellbeing of the entire academic process¦the tide is with us¦we are incredibly fortunate to have the JISC¦who pays for this way into the future¦the repositories programme is a failure because wheres the content?…lets take more risks¦more responsive mode calls¦relationships of trust¦incentives to share learning materials¦global and institutional services¦metadata vs tagging¦worthy but dull…more risk taking…huge strides made variously…

Iain Wallace, Colin Milligan, Tom Franklin, Caroline Breslin, Howard Noble, David White, Anne Gamble, Keith Jeffries, Drummond Bone, John Casey, Chris Pegler, Sheila Anderson