In this blog post I will point you to where to find the activities leading up the next version of MLR Part 5, with a deadline of 18 December for the next Working Draft. I will also give some brief comments on the framework and principles for development, closing with some comments on this current model from WD3.

Work towards WD4 (to be turned into a First Committee Draft right after the Osaka meeting in March 2010)

We will have three online meetings, the first Friday, October 16th. If you want to contribute, please do so by joining the FlashMeeting. A wiki is set up to support the work and provide background information.

In the first meeting we will concentrate on conceptual models, looking at what is happening in projects like ICOPER, European Learner Mobility project, etc.

Where do metadata live – the MLR approach

With the most fierce fights over MLR behind us, we are now pretty sure that MLR will support some sound principles for developing the new parts and application profiles that the communities need. First, we don’t think that metadata are restricted to repositories of well defined and conforming complex metadata records. We think metadata live on the web in the cloud somewhere, and that they come in bits and pieces without some benevolent metadata schema that is so kind to explain to us how all the elements are to be interpreted. In a future semantically enabled web of information and resources we will be able to make sense of the fragments of metadata we come across because they are identified in a way that allows us to search for more linked data.

In this approach the concept of interoperability is not so much on a record level. The emphasis is on a semantic level. We need to make sure that we are talking about the same thing, using the same concepts. And if we don’t understand the detailed concept we have got, we should be able to track back to a higher level concept that we recognise from the international standard at hand. This does not mean that we don’t care about interoperability between repositories. But we think that the value of such interoperability is within well defined communities that agree upon developing their own application profiles. Interoperability on a global scale for learning resources is just a dream that is never come true. Between very different cultures we should be happy if we are able to reuse some of the concepts and definitions, to make the global conversation about learning, education and training a little bit more easy to facilitate.

So, what are the sound principles of MLR? In my opinion it boils down to some very simple guidelines.

• Every resource (and data element specification) shall by identified by a URI.
• We should reuse data elements, especially the generic ones, using Domain and Range to make sure that elements “do their job” in the context they are used.
• All elements should be extendible to allow “graceful degradation”, i.e., where refinements of an element is used, it should be possible for implementations to be able to identify and use their supertypes.
• The different parts of the standard need an Applications Profiles. This is where you where you restrict your model and define structures. The standard itself should be as simple as possible, capturing the elements needed to build applications for a varied group of users.

Implications for development of the Educational part

When building the Educational Part of MLR we should continue our work on trying to come up with some high level conceptual model of educational aspects of the use of learning resources. First we should try to map out the high level concepts, knowing that the finer granularity will be taken care of in the application profiles, given that we are able to create the necessary elements to connect to. Second, when we have a pretty stable conceptual map, we should put it to test to see if it possible to accommodate the different usage scenarios we have identified. (For instance, if we have only the two concepts of Context and Learning Outcome related to a learning resource we will not be able to make a useful inference of the relation between one resource and two contexts and outcomes. To make that happen we would need some kind of usage or activity element, as Pete Johnston demonstrated in an earlier discussion in the MLR Part 5 online meeting series.

What I find particularly interesting is the way Simon reflects on the process of modelling, working towards a deeper understanding of what is expressed in the modelling notations we use. Simon is using CMap tools for his models, a tool that I am glad I have helped to introduce to the standardisation community in CEN WS-LT and ISO SC36.

I am no encouraging colleagues to store their map at the ICOPER CMap server at the ICOPER Discourse Tool. If we succeed to host most of the conceptual maps the standardisation community is working on here, we will have a unique resource for negotiation concepts and re-using definitions. Simon has stored his map in the European Learner Mobility folder at the ICOPER CMap server.

If you want to participate, please vote for date and time for the first workshop

Please inform others in you community that will be interested in contributing to the success of this standard.

You will find more information on the workshops at http://wiki.teria.no/confluence/display/mlr5/Developing+MLR+Part+5+Educational

Technorati Tags: Dublin Core, metadata, MLR

First I would like to introduce the water ring methodology of writing this standard. The innermost ring represents the top level concepts. The rings further out are refinements of these concepts. Where you stop refining – at the third or fourth ring from the centre – is a matter of taste. If you keep going, you will be doing the work of the local communities that should create the application profiles. For the Part 5 of the MLR standards that is a few steps too far. It will be a challenge to get this message across, as every community (or National Body) wishes to have their pet elements represented in the “core” standard.

Speaking of which, I wonder how we should get consensus about postponing the Part on Core elements till we have a clearer picture of how the other parts will look like, e.g., the Educational, Technical, Rights, etc. Looking at the proposed top level concepts of the Educational part, there are some of these that would be common for several of the other parts. These concepts will have different refinements in the other parts, but they are still the same concepts, e.g. the Subject and the Agent, may be also the Audience.

In the diagram I have added some green boxes for the second (or third) ring of concepts. I am still not quite sure about how the relationship between the Audience and Educational Context will play out. Will it be crystal clear in which of these boxes you will be putting the refinements you come up with? As of now, it seems that Audience has a more “stable” characteristic, being nearer to what we could call authoritative metadata, i.e., metadata from the content creator’s perspective. The Context is more fluent, more context dependent (sic!), more susceptible to change – of contexts of use… Well, given these different characteristics of Audience and Educational Context, you might end up with the same refinements being part of both classes then?

Anyway, I have indicated that many of the LOM Educational elements, like Interactivity level and Typical Learning Time are part of the Educational Context class. If some of these are part of Instructional Model, I have not thought through. This way of reasoning shows how I think we should have discuss these matters in the month ahead - before we settle on the second working draft of the MLR Part 5 editorial group.

And lastly, the definitions. It goes without saying that we should reuse definitions from existing standards, i.e., the Dublin Core for Audience and Subject; IEEE LOM for some of the concepts inspired from that standard, and so on…

Technorati Tags: metadata, MLR, SC36

At the present stage a study of JISC-CETIS’s Phil Baker has been of great help. The Learning Material Application Profile Scoping Study is available in draft from Phil’s blog. My proposal for the next editors meeting is to use the model Phil comes up with a starting point to discuss the top level concepts of MLR Educational.

First, some insights found in Phil’s report. He points out that metadata for education is one of the domains where the issues are least well articulated and where solutions are least developed. His study shows that where resource descriptions were seen as “difficult” there seems to be suggestions to move away from structured metadata towards the approach of providing semi-structured free text descriptions. This should be seen as a warning signal to SC36 colleagues who want to be too explicit in modelling educational metadata. We are making an international standard that should cover the needs of all educational levels in all regions and cultures throughout the world, a truly daunting task!

Phil is of the opinion that any future work should recognise that metadata may be valuable in supporting resource management, discovery/retrieval and use. And he reminds us that the application profile to support resource discovery might be quite different from an application profile to support resource management or use.

Therefore, we should come up with use cases that show a number of scenarios:

• The Provider role
• The Management role
• The Consumer role

The last role should not just cover the users of repositories in a strict sense, but also reflect the emergent use of learning resources through participation in different Communities of Practice, in digital living and serendipitous learning, i.e., the discovery use case.

Furthermore, Phil has a concept of the Primary Resource, the Learning Material; and the Secondary Entities that are related to the learning material and which have properties that need to be specified in order to provide full description of the primary resource. This is similar to my concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic properties of a learning resource. However, Phil uses the FRBR model to unpack the intrinsic qualities of the learning resource.

I have copied the model Phil Baker has made to illustrate what is described by metadata for learning materials. Whether we in MLR Part 5 should bring into play the full Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) entity model is to be discussed. I would think that this will vary according to the needs of different communities, and that in some application profiles you will find the full model, and in others a reduced set.

What we should discuss, is this simple model, defining a learning resource by Subject, Audience, Agent and Educational Context.

We should list the metadata elements that the different National Bodies have launched as candidates for the new standard, and see if we are able to place them as refinements of these top level concepts, e.g., audience language, educational level, accessibility preferences, pedagogical modality, competency or learning outcome, etc.

The tricky bit will be to tackle the redundancies in this model, e.g., is educational level a property of Audience or Educational Context. Or is Audience in fact a property of Educational Context? I bet this discussion will show that this depends on the use scenarios, and that we will not be able to come up with a model that is completely streamlined at this stage of learning technology development.

Technorati Tags: metadata, MLR, SC36