Apologies for cross postings

Dear All
The question of secondary metadata (tutor notes, suggestions, design ideas,
reviews etc) has been a vexed one and has thrown up some interesting debate,
including the question of whether anyone wants it or not. That debate, for
me, leads to some very interesting places but I don't what to explore them
just yet....Instead I want ask a simple question and get your opinions.

Secondary Metadata: The project I am working on and the teachers I am
working with want to use secondary metadata in the context of learning
objects as an extension of their current practice (in fact they already use
it in their normal 'real world' non-digital work). But we have some
problems. The annotations field is not much good for it and a restricted or
shared vocabulary looks unlikely (or even desirable given the multiplicity
of pedagogic models out there - from the ever-present transmission model to
some of the more 'far-out' models, if you are interested in the models this
link is very handy http://tip.psychology.org/).

So, instead of trying to bend the LOM (Learning Object Metadata) into to
doing something it was not really designed to do what about this simple, and
crude, suggestion?

For those that want secondary metadata then they create it in a rich text
file and place it in an agreed  place within the object. If that is a
workable way forward then it would be good if the file had a common name
like say 'notes'. This way all we would be specifying would be where the
secondary metadata is located in an object and where people should look if
they wanted to find it. Of course many objects would not have any secondary
metadata - i.e. it would not be mandatory. But if there was any then it
would be useful if there was a convention to place it somewhere and give it
a common name.

What goes inside the secondary metadata file would be totally up to the
authors / creators etc and if you were interested in what they had to say
you would have to engage with that on their terms, at least initially, -
rather like we do in the real world.

So, this secondary metadata file would be just a 'common space' where
secondary metadata could be placed and read - by people, not machines. If
this was so then we could say in the annotations field of the LOM "see the
'notes' file for more information' - some such. If we agreed on a set name
for the secondary metadata file the presence of that secondary metadata
information (yes /no) could even be denoted in some way in the LOM - and be
machine readable.

They way I see it metadata and learning objects exist on a spectrum which at
the 'sophisticated' end have detailed 'well formed' metadata and may have
SCORM and Learning Design attributes and characteristics - and very exciting
and full of potential all that is.

[But the development of these technologies and things like the  integration
of runtime systems, learning objects, student records and enterprise systems
and so on is also throwing up (as they do) lots of unforeseen questions
about the our professional cultures and institutions. See this article for
interesting ESRC research on this relatively neglected 'systems' aspect of
our kind of work: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/virtual-universities/] I
digress....


As we go back down through the spectrum of learning objects we move towards
the 'primitive' end where people are using repositories as very simple
digital libraries - and getting very immediate benefits, that's where I am
coming from.

What do you think?

Thanks
John






> John Casey
> Project Officer
> Learning to Learn  - an X4L Project
> DAICE
> Airthrey Castle
> University of Stirling
> Stirling
> FK9 4LA
> Tel: +44 (0)1786 467943
> email: [log in to unmask]
        web: http://www.stir.ac.uk/departments/daice/l2l/


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