Sharing vocabularies on the web via SKOS

I’m a little late with this, which came through from Aida Slavic while I was on holiday and then got put into a pile of things needing more time, … but hopefully the information is not stale yet. On 21 July the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) held a meeting in London about Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), vocabularies and the web; the slides and recording for this meeting are now available. And they look like treasure to me.
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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.

“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

Am I an expert?

I heard Allison Littlejohn give the opening keynote at the JISC Using Learning Resources event a couple of days ago. Thank you Allison for such a thought provoking presentation, and especially for allowing time for discussion afterwards. Sheila has written a summary of that meeting, including Allison’s presentation.

One reference that caught my attention was to the book Rethinking Expertise by Harry Collins and Robert Evans, which coincidentally I had just finished reading. The book is centred around a “periodic table of expertise” listing, among other things, a spectrum of levels of expertise from “beer mat” knowledge of disconnected facts up to the level of expertise needed to contribute to research on a topic. The novel idea in the book was that it is possible to have “interactional expertise”, which is the ability to talk sensibly to domain experts about a topic (e.g. gravitational wave physics) without being able to make a contribution. It is implied that this level of expertise would be useful in the management of projects and setting of public policy that have scientific or technical elements (and yes, the idea that “experts” might have more sensible things to say about technical topics is apparently contentious).

I found this interesting because I have always flinched when called an expert on X, but perhaps I can be happier if all that is required is interactional expertise. Certainly, interactional expertise in each others domains is a requirement for making a venture like educational technology truly inter-disciplinary (which it needs to be) rather than a disconnected set of specialisms.

Rethinking Expertise is reviewed more fully in the Times Higher and drafts of the first two chapters are available from Harry Collins’s publications page.