search and find metadata in education

Phelim Bradley, Mark Moriarty

2011-08-05

Search and Find: Metadata in Education

Topics we'll coverWhat we've been doing this year and this summer.

Meta-Data - what is it? Why have standards?

Quick overview to most prominent Meta-Data standards.

Unfortunate lack of sustainability in OER space.  Dried up standards organizations.  Static repositories.

Not education-specific tools being used.

Who are we?

(And what do we know?)

What is metadata?

Describe:

The metadata might look like this.

Artist                Leonardo da Vinci

Year c. 1503–1519

 Type Oil on poplar

Dimensions 77 cm × 53 cm (30 in × 21 in)

 Location  Musée du Louvre, Paris

Creator da Vinci, Leonardo

Title Mona Lisa

Start Date 1503

End Date 1519

Paint Oil

Dimensions Portrait, 4081cm2

Location Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

Or...like this.

Standards

Artist Surname, Firstname

Title Mona Lisa

Start Date DD/MM/YYYY

End Date DD/MM/YYYY

Type Paint type on canvas

Dimensions length x width in centimeters

Location building, city, country.

Meta-Data for Educational Resources

Well, what is an educational resource?

What defines something as a "learning object"?

What "high level data" would one want to know about educational resources?

What metadata NOT! 

Meta-Data for Educational Resources at the moment.

Two prominent standards are:• IEEE LOM = Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers

                             Learning Object Meta-Data• DC = Dublin Core Education

Individual online repositories / institutions have tweaked these general standards to create custom "application profiles".

IEEE LOM (Learning Object Meta-Data)

IEEE LOM (Learning Object Meta-Data)

<classification><taxonpath>   <source><langstring>Topics</langstring></source><taxon>   <id>http://www.research.ibm.com/elearn#webservices</id>  <entry>     <langstring>Web Services</langstring>          </entry></taxon></taxonpath></classification>

IEEE LOM (Learning Object Meta-Data)

DON'T PANIC!!!

Publishing Online Content

People do what's easy.

from Wordpress to Wikis to YouTube. Simplicity is key.

Creative Commons to the rescue!

LRMI"The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative is a project co-led by Creative Commons to build a common metadata vocabulary for educational resources."  

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI

http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html

The problem with standards(is that there's so many of them).One standard to rule them all?

Phelim Bradley, Mark Moriarty

2011-08-05

http://Phel.im  http://MarkMoriarty.com

Meta-Data~Data about data. 

Ex. high-level data about a specific file, in this case, a song:"ID3v1..introduced in 1996: By adding a small chunk of extra data in the end of the file one could get the MP3 file to carry information about the audio and not

just the audio itself. "Song Title 30 characters

Artist 30 characters

Album 30 characters

Year 4 characters

Comment 30 characters

Genre 1 byte

http://www.id3.org/ID3v1

Dublin Core (DC)

There are 15 elements that can be described using DC.

A survey of sites using DC done in 2007 assigned a score of 1 if the field was actually used, and 0 if the field was not used. The average scores for 23 sites are shown.“DC Element usage (Proportion of records with at least one entry)” source: Miles Efron, Texas - Journal of Digital Information ,Vol 8, No 2 (2007)

Dublin Core (DC)

There are 15 elements that can be described using DC.

A survey of sites using DC done in 2007 assigned a score of 1 if the field was actually used, and 0 if the field was not used. The average scores for 23 sites are shown.“DC Element usage (Proportion of records with at least one entry)” source: Miles Efron, Texas - Journal of Digital Information ,Vol 8, No 2 (2007)

IEEE LOM (Learning Object Meta-Data)

<classification><taxonpath>   <source><langstring>Topics</langstring></source><taxon>   <id>http://www.research.ibm.com/elearn#webservices</id>  <entry>     <langstring>Web Services</langstring>          </entry></taxon></taxonpath></classification>

IEEE LOM (Learning Object Meta-Data)<general><title> <langstring xml:lang="en">Introduction to WSDL            </langstring> </title></general>

<typicallearningtime> <datetime>PT69S</datetime> </typicallearningtime>

<classification><taxonpath>   <source><langstring>Topics</langstring></source><taxon>  <id>http://www.research.ibm.com/elearn#webservices</id>  <entry>     <langstring>Web Services</langstring>          </entry></taxon></taxonpath></classification>

IEEE LOM Application ProfilesWho's adopted it?

Capabilities and Weaknesses of Each

Talk

Who/What creates meta-data anyway?

What meta-data do we really need?

Meta-data is expensive.

The meta-data you require depends on your objective... are you searching as a student for notes?  Generally browsing a topic out of interest?  A professor creating a syllabus?

Lessons Learned

What two physicists have begun to conclude...

Questions?

(or jokes?)