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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ -----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 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%