Stuart and Jon and all the other people who are concerned about how we
handle DC in the educational context - where are you all when we need you?


Here's my Sunday am response to what I have read so far.  Look out - it is
long and picky!

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Well, is the 'real' question about the audience or about the resource? We
are using DC to help with resource discovery, I assume.

I am wondering if we have difficulty with the audience because we are
trying to prejudge people and their interests instead of thinking about
what it is in the resource that might be of interest to people who make up
the audience.

I am thinking that resources can have relatively objective statements made
about them but people can't.  I hate the idea of trying to say how
intelligent a person should be to read a resource - it depends on the day
on which the person is making the effort, how they felt about their
breakfast -- all sorts of things that we know make huge changes in all of
us.

I am reminded of the blind colleague who pointed out that how well we cope
with resources depends upon how much we want what's in it or what it will
do for us.  I am reminded of working in years past with severely
handicapped cerebal palsy students who were able to do incredible work when
the demands were high but did really 'mindless' work when offered mindless
actiivities.

As an educator, I want to resist the temptation to fly in the face of what
I have learned from my work in education.  I think that smart students like
to know what teachers are trying to achieve - esp when the 'game' in which
they engaged is somehow one of satisfying the teacher rather than learning
something for oneself.  Such students are smart and do not need to be
penalised - even if the teachers need a bit of professional development!

Seriously, I would like to see us setting a high standard, bringing to the
world of DC what we as educators can offer.  I think that will only happen
if we can make reliable, epistemologically-appropriate statements about
resources and I beginning to think this will only be possible if we
describe the resource and not the audience.  I am not sure that such a
high-minded goal will cost us anything.  I note that when I first made
noises about audience I was told in pretty uncertain terms that I should
have been working in description.  I am not sure this was motivated by deep
philosophic reasoning but rather what experts know works appropriately -
and I think it was good advice!

I think there is room for descriptions that provide what audiences need but
let's try (see below).

For the Victorian ed channel, we have made an audience perspectives we
offer users to choose amongst and according to the choice have populated
the dynamic browse, using the result of a complex search.

In other words, we have a webpage that provides audience perspective but we
have not classified our resources by audience.  I am not sure if this will
work but what I am saying is that there is a customisation potential
without audience classification.  In fact, in my design for the channel, I
allowed for audience perspectives, both through a specially designed
webpage, and what I called 'maps' - these were supposed to be
perspective-specific representations of information in forms that make
structural sense to users.  By this I mean that specific groups develop
discourses and particular ways of thinking about their world and they
should be able to tap into a resource catalogue and represent their worlds
as they see them.  My aim was to keep the catalogue neutral but have
high-level or even client-side approaches to it that are close to the
users' needs.

So, back to the classification problem.

Is DC.audience.administrator (value=manager) really different from
DC.description (value=edManagement); or Is DC.audience.administrator
(value=trainee) really different from DC.description (value=edTraining)?

Is DC.audience.beneficiary.agelevel (value=adolescent) when coupled with
DC.audience.administrator (value=teacher*) really different from
DC.description.agelevel (value=edAdolescent)?

One major difference between the former and latter approach is that one
requires new elements etc and the other fits better into the Dublin Core,
and is more easily generalised.

The other difference is that if we adopt the former system, we are making
statements about the audience members.  If we adopt the latter set of
descriptors, we are avoiding making statements about people we don't know.
The user can then decide on the classification that makes most sense -
perhaps an older person who has an adolescent approach to life ....  I know
this is picky but I am picky about education and think we should aim to
bring only our best understandings into the technology.  Users have
feelings and subtle differences multiplied by a lot of use can start to
make differences apparent.

Enough!  I'd like some responses before I say any more.  My approach
certainly requires work on a set of terms that will make sense as a
controlled vocabulary, and I recognise that is not a small task.

Liddy





* I am pretty surprised that we have walked away from teacher and student
as a relative distinction - even though our work has made huge advances in
terms of granularity when it comes to using these terms, they are surely
the most coarse and often used terms for the people who work together in
the educational context?  What they do distinguishes them but I suggest
that they are the terms that divide the power roles for most people in most
formal educational contexts world wide.





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