Metadata and Digital Repositories

SIG Meeting Report: Open University, Milton Keynes, 20 Sept 2005

Report by Phil Barker

This was a joint meeting of the Metadata and Digital Repository SIG with the Pedagogy Forum. A list of attendees is given at the end of this report.

Sharing Learning Designs : the LAMS Community

James Dalziel joined the meeting by telephone from Australia and gave a presentation on LAMS and the LAMS community. LAMS is a "learning design inspired" tool that allows teacher to create a flow of collaborative tasks that can be stored, reused, and modified. Despite the promised advantages of reuse, there is not much evidence of widespread sharing of digital learning resources. James proposed that it was still worth pursuing the dream of reuse, but that a different approach was necessary, the LAMS community is his approach. In order to promote sharing, the LAMS community focuses on activities, not content, a community rather than a repository, simplifying resource description, rating and licensing, and a free platform.

For more details see:  James' powerpoint slides [739 kB] and the LAMS Community website.

Curriculum Document Modelling and Storage

Ben Ryan, of Kainao Limited presented work undertaken as part of a JISC regional pilot lead at the University of Hull with Kainao and eight FE colleges as partners. The aim is to model and manage curriculum documents in a way that facilitates extraction and processing of the information they contain in order to support requirements such as Quality Assurance. A UML information model and XML schema for the curriculum document and software for processing will be piloted. The information model contains features of a calendar, a wide range of information represented as free text (to allow flexibility), and links to resource required by the course. The XML binding reuses elements from  Dublin Core and XHTML. The software will be able to flag whether aims and objectives are present (but won't be able to verify whether they are sensible) and will also be able highlight whether the required resources (teachers, lab equipment etc.) are available.

In discussion after the presentation HE and FE were contrasted with respect to the tendency for FE to work to externally imposed curricula whereas HE Institutions tend to create their own. Thus there is a greater drive towards standardization of curriculum document templates in FE than in HE.

For more details see: Ben's powerpoint presentation [335 kB].

Standards Update

Lorna Campbell of CETIS gave an update on progress with: IMS LEarning Resource Metadata 1.3; BSI standardization of the UK LOM Core; DCMI Education working group and efforts to produce a mapping between the LOM and DC abstract models.

For more details see: Lorna's powerpoint slides, [76 kB]

Making Metadata Work -- a Story in Three Parts

David Davies' presentation drew some generic lessons from practical implementations of learning object repositories in the medical education domain. His first example was the Electronic Curriculum, a portal for medical students created in the late 1990's which used MESH keywords to provide access to knowledge relevant to their courses. He felt the weakness of this approach was that MESH represents knowledge in way that does not relate to the curriculum that students study. As a result the second project David highlighted, the IVIMEDS learning object repository for medical resources , used a curriculum map as a contextualizing framework. The standards used in IVIMEDS include  VDEX and zThes for the curriculum map and controlled vocabularies used in browsing, IMS Content Packaging and SCORM for the objects, with browser locale information to inform choices between alternative words/phrases encoded in XML in the source to allow for internationalization. For future possibilities David looked to examples such as Flickr and Amazon and showed some of the strengths and weaknesses of free keyword tagging and folksonomies; user ratings and recommendations and enhancing browsing with controlled vocabularies.

For more details see David's powerpoint slides [9.5 MB (large file)]

Pedagogic Vocabularies

Sarah Currier gave an overview of a short project she is working on looking into existing  vocabularies for describing pedagogy. This project will compile two reports, one describing vocabularies the second describing the standards and technologies for managing them. It will also issue recommendations to JISC on future work in this area. 

For more details see Sarah's powerpoint slides [94 kb]

Sarah used most the time available to lead a discussion as part of the information gathering for the project. the issues raised included

• Whether the project would look at the possible prescriptive use of vocabularies, especially in FE. This may feature in the report.
• How pedagogic vocabularies might be used (users say they want them but aren't sure what for)
• No single vocabulary will work in all situations, need different vocabularies for different needs.
• Strict taxonomies may not be the best solution: less structured solutions might be useful, as might semantic web solutions.
• A pedagogic vocabulary might not be a viable solution, teachers often don't express what they do in a shareable way. The vocabulary might act as tramlines. It would be better to provide a framework that supported flexible description
• ...however the developer of tools which support teaching and learning require something more like a vocabulary.

Recommendations for further discussion about all these issues may be made by the project, however finding solutions that embrace them is beyond the projects means.

Attendees

The following registered for the meeting

Many thanks to all who attended, especially to those who gave presentations and to those at the Open University who helped with the organization.