I was lucky enough to go to Berlin for the DC2008 Dublin Core Metadata Initiative conference. My reasons for going were two-fold: firstly we were presenting a poster, about which John has written; secondly there were some workshop sessions related to education metadata.
Category Archives: CETIS-Content
Me gusta “Agrega”
I’ve just come across Agrega, a Spanish learning object repository, and my first impressions are that there is a lot about it that I like–for me it has kind of set a benchmark to judge the new Jorum services by when it launches. Continue reading
Repository fringe videos online
Video recordings of presentations from this August’s “repository fringe” in Edinburgh are now available online at http://www.repositoryfringe.org/. From what I’ve heard of the event (I was out of Edinburgh when it happened) the bulk of the event took “repository” to mean “repository of research outputs”, which often seems to be the case, but there’s a recording of Sarah Currier, of Intrallect talking about web services and open access to learning and research materials, and find it’s always interesting to follow what people like Dorthea Salo have to say about their experience of running institutional repositories of research output and think about how it might apply to similar effort to collect teaching and learning materials. It’s also interesting to see the research-output people move into areas like sharing data or alternatives to academic papers as outputs, where I think they might meet some similar cultural issues to those we have when managing and sharing learning materials.
Many thanks to the people who organized this meeting and made the videos available.
Why share?
In a comment to a previous post of mine, Gayle reminded me of the point made by the ACETS project:
“Re-use is not in itself a good or bad thing and it should not be encouraged or discouraged as a matter of dogma. Rather it should be nurtured and supported where it can provide benefits and not where it will not.â€
So the question we should ask is: when will re-use provide benefits? Here are some links to recent and ongoing work relating to the benefits of sharing, reuse and open content.
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Goodbye to Neil
For the last couple of years Neil Fegen has been helping with the Repository and Metadata work for CETIS. Unfortunately he will be leaving us at the end of July. I would like to thank him for all his work, especially on organizing meetings and keeping the web presence up to date, and of course wish him luck in his future employment.
Shareability
I’ve just been talking to colleagues about sharing learning resources and I suggested that we could try to describe what attributes make a resource more easily shared. I’ve been using the set listed below in discussions relating to several projects I’ve been involved with over the last two or three years, but I don’t think I’ve ever put them down clearly on their own rather than embedded in some presentation on a specific project. Mostly they were first suggested by Charles Duncan at the 2005 Eduserv Symposium, but the first two are my own addition (Charles probably thought them to obvious to mention).
So here for clarity and ease of reference (but certainly not novelty) are six attributes of a resource which I suggest will make it more likely to be shared:
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VUE
I’ve been known to make a fair amount of use of computer based concept and mind mapping tools to help me organize information or get my head around a tricky problem (I find linear thinking difficult). So I was pleased to be reminded of VUE, the Visual Understanding Environment from Tufts University, by an email announcing the official release of VUE 2. I remember VUE from a few years back as a way of creating a sort of concept map user interface for repositories. VUE 2 has that, with interfaces to fedora, Flickr, JSTOR, Wikipedia, but the real emphasis is rightly on its potential as an Understanding Environment: “VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.” New in version 2 is support for predefined ontologies, the website says “VUE also provide tools to apply semantic meaning to the maps, by way of ontologies and metadata schemas.” So I guess VUE is also very relevant to the discussions we have been having at CETIS since the semantic technologies for teaching and learning session at last November’s conference.
Update: one of the outcomes of some the discussions I mention above has just been released, a JISC ITT for a study on the potential of semantic technologies for learning and teaching.
EC SIG meeting on open content
I gave a presentation at the recent Educational Content SIG meeting on open content, trying to expand on some ideas about the type content that I think would be most useful and how it might be developed.
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“Preparation is everything”
I came across this article/post more or less at random the other week. I don’t know anything about the author, Kevin Boone, but the sections on “teaching” and “preperation is everything”, while nothing new, got me thinking. They relate something I think is important when we consider what learning materials are worth sharing and/or preserving, that is the quality of resources available to learners and the role of repositories in improving this.
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IEEE LOM Update
Here’s a quick update on current activity by Erik Duval and others on the IEEE Standard for Learning Object Metadata ahead of an IEEE LTSC meeting next week. In summary the LOM has been reaffirmed as an IEEE Standard, will be corrected through a corrigendum, is converging with other metadata approaches and may possibly be renewed in the light of what we have learned about metadata since it was designed. Continue reading