Metadata, Standards and Repurposing Content

Tag the Open Education 2006 conference "reuse, remix, burn". If tags could be tagged, tag [reuse, remix, burn] with "metadata, semantics, structure". Meaning: educational technology needs a toolbox of authoring agents and repositories that allow content to be found, parsed, edited, and combined with other content, the result of which is presented for learners. Metadata, semantics and structure are key to enabling technologies for authoring, discovery and distribution of educational content. The problem to this point is that currently available tools don't help authors add metadata, know little or nothing of semantics, and produce awful, non-standard code.

If a web page author posts a content-filled page using the (alas) usual methods of unstructured tag soup, you might as well write the content on paper, fold it in a bottle and toss it on the ocean. Unless that page becomes a Web classic, you will have about the same chance of finding that bottle while lost at sea (not a bad metaphor for the Web) as I would searching the net. For tools to effectively find content must use metadata. Tools to parse and remix content need structure; and it would be helpful if the structure had useful semantics.

Eric Duval , Professor of Computer Science at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, president of the ARIADNE Foundation and the Friday keynote at Open Education 2006 knows a lot about opening content to search and remixing. His research group has contributed metadata schemas (Learning Object Metadata , or LOM), frameworks for modeling learning objects (ALOCoM), and has generally written a great deal on these subjects (publications and blog). His current passion is making learning content open. Openness has several aspects: findability, copyright restrictions, and the ability to repurpose (or, remix) content. "Even if you make all your material available for free, under a CC license, and in a way that makes it easy to find, it may be of little value to me if you make it difficult to change.That is where the value of content models and SCORM plays out, as they make scalable repurposing possible."

Even in a restrictive copyright system such as Penn State, the institutional benefits associated with finding and repurposing learning content can be huge. Adopting a purely technical practice can provide the foundation for eventual development and integration of applications that will open (internally) our content: get serious about metadata and standards.