Jon, thanks for making the draft document available. It complements
nicely the early exploration of six projects looking for commonalities.
The five categories of elements/qualifiers found by looking at those
projects included: (1) users, (2) duration, (3) learning processes &
characteristics, (4) standards, and (5) quality. I'd like to see us here
on the listserv have a brainstorming session regarding these
general classes. As noted in the text of the minutes from DC-
Education at DC7, category 3 is very large. I'll try below to flesh
out my sense of the definitions of the categories as a starter.
--USERS: All six of the projects (including IEEE 1484 LOM) have
metadata elements that focus on the general idea of the "audience"
for the resource being described. Research done in the early stages
of GEM on the archives of the AskERIC system demonstrated that
teacher inquiries almost always frame resource needs in terms of
some form of audience. Those forms seem to me to be of two
fundamental sorts--who is going to use the resource and for whose
benefit will it be used. The "who is going to use the resource" can
be, for example, an educator/trainer or a parent intent on using the
resource with some kind of educant/trainee with the educant/trainee
being the second sort for whose "benefit it will be used." In some
instances, both "audiences" might be the same--e.g., when the resource
is intended to be placed in the hands of the student or trainee for
their own education/training or where the resource is intended to be
placed in the hands of the trainer/educator for his or her own edification
(e.g., educational research materials designed to improve teacher
performance--witness the ERIC database of resources). Now, beyond
these two general categories of audience, projects express considerable
variation; e.g., student age, student academic level, student
characteristics
(e.g., students with attention deficit disorder, etc.), types of
educational/training
professionals, etc.
--DURATION: A number of the projects (including IEEE 1484 LOM) have
metadata elements/qualfiers that capture the typical "use" time of an
educational/training resource. This "duration" is conceptually different
from that of "running time" and is associated directly with process
time. For example, how many minutes, days, weeks will a given lesson
plan take in actual use; what will be the typical use time for a particular
software tool, etc.
--LEARNING PROCESSES & CHARACTERISTICS: This category
contains a number of different attributes that focus on pedogogy (a
loaded terms with as many different meanings as there are people
who use it!). Quoting from the DC7 minutes, this category contains
"[s]tudent groupings, teaching methods, mechanisms of assessment,
learning prerequisites, interactivity type and level, material type from
a didactic viewpoint, type of use in a scholastic milieu, 'difficulty',
'semantic density,' etc." Obviously, this category needs to be broken
down into more discrete, managable sub-categories! Hopefully, we
can tackle that here in our discussions.
--STANDARDS: With increasing frequency, resources are either
being created to meet specific education/training content/process
standards or are being "mapped" to such standards. Being able to
search (or filter) on such standards is a high priority in some venues
(e.g., it is an extremely high priority with the U.S. Department of
Education). The use of the term "standards" here does _NOT_ carry
any connotations regarding the quality of the object being described
(that's the function of the next category--"quality").
--QUALITY: Relates to an assessment of the quality of the object
for educational/training purposes. We see two sorts of such
assessments: (1) unstructured assessments (e.g., third-party
reviews/annotations), and (2) structured assessments based
on established evaluative criteria.
Well, that's my stab at definitions. Do people see either additional
categories or more refined definitions?
Stuart
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Stuart A. Sutton (206) 685-6618 (V)
University of Washington (206) 543-1794 (F)
School of Library and Information Science
Box 352930
Seattle, WA 98195-2930 [log in to unmask]
GEM http://geminfo.org (Project)
http://www.TheGateway.org
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Mason [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 1999 9:18 PM
To: 'DC-Education'
Subject: some comparative analysis
As promised at the DC7 workshop in Frankfurt I have now posted up some
analysis that was completed about a month ago for the EdNA Metadata Group as
a draft document that could be used to assist in taking forward our work.
(Sorry for the delay on this, but I have just returned from some leave &
feel like I've been hit by a train with the catch up on email.)
http://www.edna.edu.au/metadata
--> Under the 'Links to references', follow the first link to: "Analysis of
10 Metadata Projects with Particular Reference to Educational/Pedagogical
Elements" (I'm not pasting the URL because it is a long database string)
The Schools sector within EdNA are currently taking this work further in the
light of the five broad areas we identified at DC7 that describe uniquely
educational information (users; duration; learning processes &
characteristics; standards; & quality). As a result of this work we are
expecting to be able to provide further input into the DC-Education
deliberations sometime in December.
regards,
Jon
==================
Jon Mason
education.au limited
178 Fullarton Road
Dulwich SA 5065
Australia
tel: +61 8 8334 3207
fax: +61 8 8334 3211
mob: 0412 570 578
email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.educationau.edu.au
EdNA Online -- Education Network Australia
http://www.edna.edu.au
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