David Davies' Weblog

In the digital domain there is no shelf, no physical constraints, and indeed with hyperlinks there’s the possibility of expressing a rich level of interconnectedness, or intertwingularity that would not have been impossible with pre-digital semi-manual classification systems. Clay goes on to discuss how tagging hyperlinks creates a “market logic” dynamic classification system that frees the content creator attempting to grapple with descriptive metadata from having to decide which pre-defined category box his/her object fits in. This richly dynamic informal classification based upon every individual’s unique perspective (and therefore context) is at the same time its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The impermanence, fluidity and highly contextualized nature of folksonomies can create new links or routes of inquiry for the seeker of information yet it can also shield from view the exact object being searched for as a result of nobody using the same tags that you would have used because their context is different (though of course there’s always the brute force method of resource discovery by just searching unclassified data using Google)…. What I’ve been increasingly thinking of attempting to implement in our learning content management system is a resource discovery mechanism that uses formal classification for each object as part of its metadata but also allowing learners to tag resources for their own purposes.

Here’s list of the range of types of learning resources can can be defined in IEEE LOM 5.2:Educational.LearningResourceType (and presumably if you’re using Dublin Core, DC.Type).Now on one level this is a good thing. Knowing how other people describe what type of learning resource theirs is helps me to decide whether or not to call my similar learning resource the same kind of thing. For example, if you upload a learning resource to a repository and declare that it’s of type ‘video’ by adding ‘video’ to the object’s 5.2:Educational.LearningResourceType metadata, then if everyone else used video rather than ‘movie’ to declare their similar objects, pretty soon we’d get a lot of consistency and it’d be easy to search for all the videos in a learning resource repository. That’s the benefit of controlled vocabulary metadata, we all use the same words to describe our resources.Where it gets tricky however is with resources whose type is not obvious.

I’ll be heading on over to Online Educa 2005 on Wednesday. I’m speaking in the E-Learning in the Medical Sector session about some of our experiences with developing standard-based (e.g SCORM) content using the Learn eXact platform. If you’re in Berlin for the same conference stop by and say hi.

Much will already have been written about the new Google Base service, and doubtless many will have also used a variant of the “All your base are belong to us” [sic] tagline, but this new service has got me thinking about the nature of repositories. You know how it is, you spend years arguing over repository interoperability specifications and metadata application profiles then along comes Google and with a mix of simplicity and a massively scalable application to create the Interweb’s biggest repository of content…. Simple user edit form, metadata – even trendy tags, easy resource discovery – well it is Google after all, and even content syndication.I thought I’d give it a try so I uploaded a simple QTI assessment item, not least because some QTI XML is about the least likely type of object that the Google Base team had in mind when they created the service…. There’s a nice little trick to encourage social learning by humanizing the geographic location of learning materials.I think it’d be too easy to dismiss Google Base as a serious learning object repository, though I have no doubt many will, as from this first offering there’s a lot of potential.