Hi there,

I think this is an important debate and I agree with Helen and Phil's
comments.  Helen is right that it is not necessarily helpful or useful
to assume that "instructional method" is an inherent property of
educational content and she provides considerable justification for
this argument in her original post.  However Phil is also right to
suggest that we need metadata to describe learning designs or units of
learning and that instructional method / educational rationale /
pedagogic approach is one of the characteristics of a learning design
that it would be useful to describe.

Aside from the issues already raised by Helen and Phil I have two main
concerns:

1. What kind of vocabulary(s) would be associated with an element of
this kind?
2. I'm not intimately familiar with DC but I'm guessing that the
standard does not distinguish between the resources that it may be used
to describe (in the same why that LOM defines a learning object as
being "any entity - digital or non digital - blah, blah, blah.") If
this is the case, is it appropriate to include an element that is
appropriate for describing one type of resource (a learning design) but
not another type of resource (educational content)?  Not sure if I'm
making myself very clear here :-}

I think Pete Johnston is going to Shanghai so we could ask us to keep
us posted on how this work develops.

Bye
Lorna

On 25 Aug 2004, at 10:40, Phil Barker wrote:

> Hello Helen, thanks for your comments, I'll make sure that the Dublin
> Core
> community know where to find this discussion in the Jiscmail archives.
>
> I agree with you about the language, I always have difficulty reading
> US
> English and understanding just what they mean by words like
> "instruction".
> After all the example controlled vocabulary used in the examples has
> everything from "programmed learning" through to "Montessori method".
>
> I also agree that for many resources and many users this element won't
> be
> helpful. But I also think that there will be some resources that are
> designed with a particular educational rationale in mind (for example a
> "unit of learning" as defined in the IMS Learning Design information
> model), and some people who want to find resources for a particular
> pedagogic approach. As for where the balance between the two lies,
> well,
> your guess is as good as mine!
>
>
> Helen Beetham wrote:
>> Incidentally, if IMS LD (and simple sequencing)
>> recognise that learning activities and sequences of activities need
>> to be
>> defined quite separately from content, why are IMS LOM and DCM still
>> expanding the contextual elements in their content metadata?
>>
> Well, this is a proposed element from Dublin Core, and IMS don't have
> much
> direct influence on what DCMI do.
>
> I've not been involved in the DC Education working group which proposed
> this element, but see the above comment on "units of learning". Also,
> personally, I think an IMS Learning Design is an educational resource
> that
> people will want to share, and so we need to have the metadata to
> describe it.
> Phil
>
> --
> Phil Barker                            Learning Technology Adviser
>      ICBL, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
>      Mountbatten Building, Heriot-Watt University,
>      Edinburgh, EH14 4AS
>      Tel: 0131 451 3278    Fax: 0131 451 3327
>      Web: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/
>
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--
Lorna M. Campbell
Assistant Director
Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS)
Centre for Academic Practice, University of Strathclyde
+44 (0)141 548 3072
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/