LET standardisation – framing the activity space using the JITSR special issue

The simple framework of Wand and Weber (2002) (Figure 1) could be used to position standards, methods and contexts; and the special issue on LET standardisation of the International Journal of IT Standards and Standardization Research (to be published 2010) to give us the accounts of the current state of affairs.

Figure 1 Framework for Research on Conceptual Modelling, from Wand and Weber (2002)

The specifications and standards are the “conceptual modelling scripts” this community work towards. However, there is no consensus on how to define these outputs among the authors of the special issue papers. Cooper’s definition is wide: “the word “standards” is used (…) for virtually any multi-laterally agreed set of technical conventions” (Cooper 2010). Pawlowski & Kozlow reuse the 1990 IEEE definition of a standard as “a set of mandatory requirements employed and enforced to prescribe a uniform approach in a specific area” (Pawlowski & Kozlow 2010). This leads to the definition of a reference model as being “a framework that can be used as a blueprint for system development” (ibid.). Between a “convention” and a “(mandatory) blueprint there is space for a range of ontological and epistemological considerations. We would claim that Cooper’s definition opens more up for the discursive and consensus process aspects of standardisation, while the definition of a standard as a technical blueprint is more part of technical engineering tradition looking for a true representational model of the domain.

The choice of conceptual modelling grammar is seldom raised as an issued within the standards community. “Language skills” seems to go with the territory, and information scientists are equipped with a toolbox that make it routine to turn out information and data models in notations universally understood. However, in the European discussion on concepts and standardisation in areas related to competence we have seen more focus on conceptual modelling  as a means of communicating with the stakeholders and to better scope the work in LET standardisation projects.

Conceptual models provide a vital underpinning for information models, helping ensure that the concepts represented in different information models are compatible, and that specifications built on those information models will actually help with interoperability and portability. (Grant & Rowin 2010)

The broader conceptutal modelling method discussion is mostly focussed on the process aspects of standardisation, e.g., if formal standards setting bodies are the appropriate means to come up with the specifications that the LET community needs (Wilson 2010).

Related to conceptual modelling context Wand and Weber (2002) point to individual difference factors, task factors and social agenda factors. Reviewing the JITSR Special Issue related to these factors we see that we deal with a domain where the boundaries are still under negotiation. Some authors seem to presuppose that they work with sub-domains that are well scoped and where more targeted approaches could apply (e.g., approaches that could be subject to automatic conformance testing) (Dahn & Zimmerman 2010; Najjar et al. 2010, Pawlowski & Kozlow 2010). Other authors envisage a domain that is emergent, complex and unruly (Cooper 2010), that is more adapt to a pragmatic and community-driven approach (Wilson 2010), in which collaborative modelling building up common conceptual models is needed (Grant & Young 2010) to explore the new boundaries of learning technologies (Livingstone & Hollins 2010).

This short overview of the LET standardisation domain, based on recently published research, shows that there is no unified view on how we go about to design the building blocks we need to innovate learning technologies. This underline the need for a continued discussion based on models and constructs that will help us to improve both the process and product of this activity.

Wand and Weber’s simple framework is a starting point for building a research agenda. The next step is to come up with an approach for building concepts to deal with the scripts and their development, the methods used and the contexts that frame the activity.

Introduction

How do we represent our ideas, positions, and, for that matter –, our domain models or enterprise architectures? While the cool guys were still mostly talking to themselves, keeping the hang arounds at a certain distance, nobody questioned which representation framework to use. UML was the state of art and few asked whether these diagrams communicated well, or whether we needed a broader view of the domain before we embarked upon the information model. A standard consists of an information model and a binding. It should have a scope, and there should be some good use cases justifying the new work item. That’s it!

Then two things happened. First, the interoperability standards in the LET domain failed miserably. Second, the ICT developed more to the benefit of Learning, Education and Training than anybody could dream of. All of sudden, anybody (well, so we claim) can do almost anything with technology to support what they want in learning, e.g., finding information, expressing views from different perspectives, building communities, etc. Who asks any more for standards? Well, the enduser shouldn’t anyway, but then the ones that should ask for LET standards are not very enthusiastic either!

The technology has changed. However, the need to communicate about our understanding of the domain has not changed. Consequently, modelling and enterprise architecture are put on the agenda. An emerging understanding of the need for good tools for modelling and modelling frameworks resulted in a number of actions within the standards community. The modelling workshops at the last JISC-CETIS conferences was only one sign of a new interest in different more or less formal ways to keep the conversation going about how we understand and support our domain with ICT services. Even some standards bodies have been looking for new tools and representation techniques. ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 decided last year to use Cmap Tools for conceptual modelling (and the committee secretariat announced they were going to host a Cmap server). We see now that concepts maps start to be published in work group drafts for new standards. Also in CEN WS-LT there is an active use of conceptual modelling, many of the maps hosted at the Cmap server of the European ICOPER project (www.icoper.org:8080).

Not surprisingly, the move towards new languages shakes up the old power structure and is met with counter measures. We will look at some instances when this new interest for alternative representation frameworks and techniques, to see if we could better understand the actions taken, and also to better be able to recommend appropriate steps concerning the governance and support of the process.

The DC-ED case

During one week in December 2009 the Dublin Core Educational process building an “Application Profile Domain Model” was kick-started with a flurry of mails to the list server and a Flashmeeting to discuss the draft model. The draft was made in Microsoft Visio, an all purpose drawing tool that does not restrict what models you can draw.

(The author of the map was nearly talked into using Cmap Tools and store the map versions at the European ICOPER project Cmap server together with maps from a number of other related projects. However, a tweet informed “given up on Cmap to do new version of DC-Ed AP Domain Model. Back to Visio. Sorry @tore just couldn’t get it to do what I wanted!”.)

In the Flashmeeting several of the participants said they were pleased with the opportunity to have a “walk through” of the model. At the end of the meeting one of the co-editors of the map wanted to have a clarification of what was being represented by the cloud and the purple boxes.

“So I think what I am asking one of the things we need to clarify with this is what is being represented where i terms of what is a class of entities and what is a property of the entity in that class.”

The main author of the map gave an excuse for not being better to use the Microsoft tool, being “useless at graphic modelling”, with a promise to do better:

“So, yes, you’re quite right, we need to clarify what are classes of things, and what are properties of things that are in that class. And we need to do it visually so things are very clear in different visual appearance, and have a key somewhere so it is clear.“

This reply is followed up by a supportive remark from the co-moderator of the DC-Ed Community. Drawing on ethnomethodology and research on “talk at work” we see there is more actions going on in this 5:30 minutes long conversation at the end of a virtual meeting than “what meets the eye”. Skipping the tedious analysis of the turns, we may observe the following:

• There is a conspicuous uneasiness about the use of software tools and how master their use
• This false (?) modesty may be covering up what is really difficult: to draw diagrams with more formal representation techniques, e.g., UML
• The talk reflects strongly power or authority relations: The ones that master UML (and are not pray to vagueness) should be in control, and the ones that find the clouds and pink boxes OK should learn to draw with proper tools
• The “true representation” in this talk is from a top down perspective (truth as in God knows what is correct). The down up perspective (the model might communicate well with the stakeholders) were not represented in the talk, even if both the modeller and the participant raising the questions had been drawing the “vague model”.

Other cases

We have other case stories demonstrating that the choice of representational framework has the potential to shudder the peaceful struggle for new standards. In ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 we have seen that moving away from spreadsheet tables to more figurative representation techniques may alter the discourse order dramatically. All of a sudden new experts have the floor, and the theme of the discussion is on a different level than presence types and linguistic indicators.

In the European work on competency modelling (in the ICOPER project and the European Learner Mobility project of CEN WS-LT) we have seen that the use of concept modelling has been instrumental in the process of negotiating a common understanding of the domain. However, we observe that this community is struggling to find ways to use the conceptual models to build consensus. Simon Grant writes

So I proposed in the meeting what I have not actually proposed in a meeting before, that we schedule as many one-to-one conceptual encounters as are needed to facilitate that mutual growth of models at least towards the mutual understanding that could allow a meaningful composite to be assembled, if not a fully constituted isomorphism. I don’t know if people will be bold enough to do this, but I’ll keep on suggesting it in different forums until someone does, because I want to know if it is really an effective strategy .

We have also seen in the WG3 of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 (the working group that deals with competency) that there are challenges in understanding what a more conceptual model is, compared to the information models that the standardisation community has been used to.

Conclusions

• We need a better understanding of the different phases of standardisation work and the different stakeholders and types of expertise involved. There is a time for fuzzy models with weak formalism. And there is a time for UML diagrams. When we move from one phase to the other should be subject to open negotiations, bearing in mind that we need to communicate with different groups of stakeholders and experts in today’s standardisation of LET.
• We should recognise that communication, community engagement and openness are key factors in development of LET standards. Therefore sharing of models is of great importance. Open maps stores like the one hosted by the ICOPER project might serve as hubs for co-ordinating the efforts of the different communities and organisations.
• We should acknowledge the affordances and trade-offs of the different modelling tools. A simple concept mapping tool like Cmaps Tools invites the user to come up with concepts and to type relations between concepts. The standards community should engage in a discussion on what set of types we should use to create the best models for our purpose. (Simon Grant has proposed to use “process”, “material or social thing” and “information” as key for high level concept maps.)
• We should explore “best practices” on how to use models in consensus building activities.
• We should develop training opportunities for new experts who want to take part in LET standardisation, giving modelling techniques a prominent place in this activity. There are other ways to do standardisation than sitting in formal meetings in standards bodies.

The latest LETSI May 2009 Newsletter gives an interesting account of “LETSI, ADL, and the future of SCORM”. It is a piece of story telling that is touching, because so much is not said, and still enough to know that this has been a major conflict about the future development of learning technologies, at least in the US.

What is even more interesting, is to see where this fatherly rejection will lead LETSI. It is now launching a LETSI Open Platform approach, going in a direction that may be would not be possible with SCORM as the basis?

Open source, open process, shared software libraries, community-specific customization, rapid innovation, not restricted to big companies and institutions. These are all buzz words that now form the LETSI policy.

It seems that the new LETSI is now in direct competition with IMS Global. The upcoming IMS conference in Barcelona next week will show how IMS now want to position themselves in this new landscape of specification making bodies.

Technorati Tags: LETSI, SCORM

The chance to address some of these issues was given both Bruce and myself in a resolution from last Wellington meeting in SC36. A Ad Hoc group is formed on JTC1 Training Coordination. In the terms of reference it is stated:

• The Ad Hoc group will identify existing training modules used by ISO, IEC and NBs of ISO/IEC. It is noted ISO/IEC JTC1 has requested inputs from ISO, IEC and NBs of ISO/IEC.
• The Ad Hoc group will identify system requirements for ISO/IEC JTC1 including but not limited to training and performance support systems for Delegates, Project Editors, Conveners, and ISO/IEC JTC1 process.
• The Ad Hoc will consider making recommendations based on identified requirements and training modules available to fulfill those requirements.

I am appointed co-rapporteur together with Bruce Peoples and Tae In Han. Hopefully, this will give us an opportunity to discuss some of the ideas Paul Hollins and I had in a paper to the ICALT 2008 conference, with the title Learning technology standards adoption – how to improve process and product legitimacy

Technorati Tags: IEC JTC1 SC36 , Standard Governance

This is not a review of the paper, just some comments to help my own reflection on the role of Learning, Education and Training standards. Erik & Katrien want to promote “appropriate standards development”, and they want to address misunderstandings regarding the relationship between standards and research, i.e., they discuss the development life cycle of standards. So, what concept of standards do E&K have?

The reason I ask this question is a nagging feeling that we talk about different things all the time we talk about standards being good for this or that, being different from specifications and brought to market with vanilla or chocolate tastes, dependent upon their origin in formal standards fora or just communities of interest. Paul Hollins and I have pointed to the need for a domain theory for learning technology standardisation. What kinds of standards, from which standard setting bodies (SSB), addressing what part of the LET domain – often this is too muddled to have a good conversations, and we see that the discourse get divided along some tragically old axis, West against Central; North against South and so on.

You can enter a discussion on standards through definitions or examples. E&K talk about “accredited standards”, and “accredited standards bodies [as the ones that] define actual standards”. The defining characteristic of this very interesting concept of an actual standard is according to E&K that they “carry substantial legal weight”. To me, it seems that the authors enter the discussion on standards governance without really trying to define their concepts, relying on that the pure weight of The Mothers of All Learning Technology Standards, the IEEE LOM and ADL SCORM, will do the trick of explaining what it is all about.

True, E&K mention a number of other standards being developed through the last decade, but there is no doubt that LOM and SCORM is their index terms to use for thinking about LET standards. To me, two annoying experiences spring to mind. First, the years of long opposition to create a standard on Metadata for Learning Opportunities that was not an application profile of LOM. (Yes, from a nail’s perspective the only tool you need is a hammer.) Second, during the launch of LETSI as the steward of SCORM, the military men i civil suits had the guts to sell SCORM in any current and future version as the ultimate solution to all learning needs in a way that made all teachers look like tank soldiers training to meet Iraqi road bombs.

And my point? being that we have to be aware of the context of the standards we are discussing. And I am not so concerned any longer about formal and ritual contexts of standards, e.g., which SSB accredited the standard. I am more concerned about how a standard enables “an open global learning infrastructure”, as E&K put up as their vision.

I share their vision. However, I will again question the theoretical foundation the vision builds on. E&K’s basic building blocks in such an infrastructure resort to their two mother standards perspective with an add-on of attention metadata (SCORM 2.0?): What it is all about is finding and deploying learning resources. And “in the periphery” we should find some value adding experiencing using mash-up technologies…

Misguided
Erik Duval and Katrien Verbert find the ongoing TEL standardisation “somewhat misguided”. At Erik’s blog he summarizes their main points as follows:
1. The main issue is no longer that we do not have sufficient standards. Rather, we have maybe too many and, more importantly, we don’t make use of them in very advanced ways… Tools are lacking or too much let the standard shine through, rather than focusing on the user experience.
2. We should avoid continuing the ‘not invented here’ approach that has made us develop learning specific standards when there may be quite appropriate standards already out there or being developed.
3. Standards should not be research oriented but rely on proven practice. Of course, standards enable deployment at large scale, and therefor make it possible to do research on global infrastructures.
4. Standards enable openness, and that enables innovation - that is another way for standards to be relevant to research.

Let’s take one point at a time. E&K have a very good point in warning against “preemptive” standardisation, not building on proper needs and analysis of the needs of the end-users. It is true that standardisation take a long time, and there is a danger that projects may “run out of steam”. The order of things should not be, first a standard, then the tools. Quite opposite, we should have a solid practice to build our standards on, and yes, preferably with more than two actual working implementations before we freeze the technology in the form of a standard.

We have a consensus then? Well, the problem with this kind of high level positions is that we don’t really know what E&K mean by a standard. We know what they mean by an accredited standard, but when they talk about standardisation the beast is somewhat hairy. For instance, what do exactly the authors mean when saying “in our experience, rather than developing an alternative specification like Common Cartridge or SCORM2.0, the most urgent and relevant work with respect to learning content is the development of more useful and usable authoring tools, delivery platforms, management systems, etc”?

Alternative to what? E&K don’t tell, but we could guess. Instead of new standards they prefer application profiles and reference models, as “nice vehicles” to build standards on existing ones. However, In the case of Common Cartridge it is a reference model that IMS has built. Concerning SCORM2.0 nobody knows what this will be, as LETSI is still in the process of gathering use cases.

I don’t get the point why it was wrong to develop Common Cartridge (because we already have SCORM or because we don’t yet have any tools using CC?). So let’s see what the authors mean my avoiding “not invented here”. One very interesting example they use is the Simple Query Interface (SQI), developed within CEN/ISSS WS-LT. “In retrospect, we believe that SQI could probably have built on SRU/SRW more directly.” Well, the question was raised many times during the development of SQI, so it is a well founded self-criticism Erik does here.

SQI was clearly a project that set out to develop an alternative to technologies that were already there. It is a question if this should have been done within the context of pre-standardisation, i.e., within CEN/ISSS WS-LT. It depends on what role we give pre-standardisaton, an issue E&K do not discuss as they seem to put all standardisation activities into one big box.

Common Cartridge on the other hand, seems to come out of well defined needs defined by the publishing business, building on existing specifications and standards, e.g., LOM, IMS CP, IMS QTI, IMS Tools Interoperability. To say it was wrong to develop the CC specification seems to overlook the pedagogical, political, and organisational context of this project. In the aftermath of the bitter struggle between IMS and ADL in SC36 and other fora, it is easy to see that CC is developed to break the monopoly of SCORM, at least as a reference point to learning technology standards for schools and higher education. So you have to see the standardisation projects in the context of real life struggle for political influence – for vendors, researchers, institutions, and proponents of specific pedagogical views. Doing so, it seems a bit of wishful thinking to say that certain projects should not be started?

“Standards are not research”
E&K caution against entering the standardisation process prematurely. “The focus of that process is on consensus building, not on developing the best solution.” They therefore propose as a “rule of thumb (…) that a specification is only ready for the standardization process once it has been implemented by at least two independent development teams, and has been evaluated in at least two independent user studies”. These are good rules of thumb, already in use by organisations like IMS and W3C. But again, I wonder about E&K’s concept of standardisation. You have on the one side specification development; on the other you have standardisation, which is purely about consensus building?

Let’s see how they explain the difference between standardisation and research. E&K present a diagram. Research produces specifications that are fed into standardisation. Development on the other hand, implements specifications and produces software. Standardisation learns from software and produces standards. And Use in practice uses standards and feeds into evaluation used by research.

The bottom line of this figure is that specifications and standards are very different things, the former being part of the research sphere, while standards are part of the standardisation sphere. Which brings us back to the question already asked: how do you really define a standard and what makes it different from a specification. E&K use consensus building focus as a defining criterion for a standard, the idea being then that a specification is all about putting “the right stuff” into the design document?

Need for a better standardisation theory
I share Erik Duval and Katrien Verbert’s concern about the need to promote more appropriate standards development. Furthermore, I fully share their views on the need to build standards on real and well documented needs of the end-users. We should ensure that practices are harnessed in working tools before we codify these practices in standards with a long life and serious implications, e.g., for public procurement procedures. However, we need a better understanding of the role specifications and standards play in the development of learning technologies.

In my opinion the ultimate goal of standardisation in our domain is to facilitate good conversations in the design and use of learning technologies, taking place at a number of “conversation layers”. (We could for example, use the European eGovernment Interoperability Framework model and talk about political, legal, organisational, semantic, and technical interoperability levels.) If we stay with this metaphor, every proposal for a change in the way we do things is another way to say: We what to hear your voice stronger, and we want you to be more quiet. In E&K’s case, I gather they want the voice of research to be stronger, the same with software developers; while standards should be “the infrastructures that work behind the scenes”, more quietly. I see no problem with this on a more general level. Less so, if we succeed in applying openness as the driver for innovation, as E&K suggest. However, if we quiet the voice of standardisation, we will on a immediate and practical level be stuck with the standards we have. I agree with E&K that “it is important to make sure that standards enable, and do not prevent pedagogical innovation”, but I do not trust LOM and SCORM to be the prime proponents of such an innovation.

So, what is my proposals towards the aim of appropriateness in standards development? I think we need to rethink the standards development and adoption life cycle within the LET domain and, according to the recommendations of E&K, tie the process better to the needs of the end-users. Therefore, a few points as suggestions to continue the very useful discussion Erik and Katrien have initiated:

1. It does not help the discussion on LET standardisation to try to keep specification from standards; accredited standards from community specifications, and so on. We need to be aware of the potential harmful effects of a inferior specification being turned into for example a European Norm with legal implications. But the main differences between specifications and standards seem to be about branding and marketing, ref. the run for an ISO stamp of the ADL and IMS communities.
2. We should be careful if we want to mandate certain standards for TEL. Standards catalogue initiatives should be challenged to come up with trustworthy systems for revisions and updating before this kind of catalogues are introduced to the LET domain.
3. We should improve the discourse about TEL standards, i.e., we have to build implementors’ communities that have a lively and continuos discussion about the pedagogical and end-user perspectives on the technologies that use standards. Even if standards work behind the scenes, they are not value neutral. Only a good discourse will enable us to choose the right standard for the right task, and to help us see where to look when we have new needs for solutions.
4. We should spend more time on developing good methodologies for standardisation. By methodologies I also mean sort of guidelines for making the right standards. It goes without saying that it is pretty stupid to introduce huge information models to a field that is very much in a flux, ripe with emerging technologies and practices. But that is what we have been doing.
5. We should prioritise pre-standardisation more, and ensure that formal standardisation, e.g., in ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 and CEN TC 353, does not embark on projects that have not a well defined scope and are not founded on documented needs. We have examples at least in SC36 that this is not always the case.
6. We should be more observant of the development of community standards, often coming out of research and development projects, – we, being the standards community. These standards do their work, often without the contributions of the standards community . However, standardisation is also an important and efficient dissemination vehicle for learning technologies. Which means that to limit the scope of standardisation only to consensus building is too narrow.

Technorati Tags: Technology standards

The WG3 in the ISO sub committee 36 has just released a draft for a Conceptual Reference Model for Competencies and Related Objects, which is available at the ISO site as PDF. The model is outlined in the figure below:

Comparing the documents, the draft technical report from ISO and the draft reference model from ICOPER, a number of questions arise:

• The information model in the ISO document is quite understandable. The ICOPER document does not outline any model that allows us to see the relations between the main concepts, at least not in a summarising diagram.

• There is no distinction between competency and competence in the ISO document. The ISO document summarises “competency representations can be found in “Competency Information Islands” under the following labels: 1) “Competency” or “Competence” , 2) “Training goals”, “Learning Objectives”, “Educational Objectives”, “Abilities”, Capabilities”; 3) “Aptitude” “. When I suggest that the distinction between competency and competences is a little difficult to grasp, especially by an international audience, I get a pointed finger saying that this difference was explained to me, and that I should go to a web page “that explains perfectly the two terms”. Well, I have read the web page, and I found a tour de force through history of thought since Plato. So I still ask the question: Are the concepts in the ICOPER draft well considered, given the international context of the proposed work?
• The ISO document will be turned into a technical report, that might or might not be a foundation to build applications. As a conceptual reference model it might be looked upon as first stab at the challenge to steer the discussion that might lead to more implementable standards. However, it is interesting to see how the question of who should be leading who is played out in the two documents. Well, indirectly anyway in the case of the ISO draft: ISO is the top of the standards pyramid, and if they try to create global consensus on the top level concepts, that’s what they try to do… The draft from the European ICOPER project shows a figure that could be interpreted in many ways:

In my first blog posting I read this as message to standards fora like CEN and ISO to lay off, waiting for the joint HR-XML IMS initiative to come up with a proposal. In the reply the HR-XML chair says this i incorrect. On the contrary, input from CEN and ISO is most welcome, “because the last thing we need is 5 different standards (IMS, HR-XML, IEEE, ISO, CEN, …) or separate standards for HigherEd, work, K12, etc…” It seems that I have got the figure on the standards evolution wrong then. Nevertheless, my question of who will be leading who is till open. Is the ISO proposal for a conceptual model a good starting point for the work on competency data management? If not, how should we try to influence the report? If it is good work, how will that influence the ICOPER work, that to my surprise “will develop the IEEE Competency Profle (CP), in a way that enables the representation of competencies (and relations between them) from both academic and workplace competencies” (page 6)?

(Do I need to state that the opinions in this blog post are mine alone, and that no organisation, neither Norwegian nor European, is to blame for my points of view. And that they have nothing to do with my role as project partner in any project. No, but said anyway.)

Technorati Tags: competencies, icoper, IEC JTC1 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

If you are interested in the European work on competency frameworks and standardisation issues concerning competencies I would recommend you go to to the Symposium wiki to find links to the recordings, papers and presentations. Also, I would recommend to have a look at the video clips from the discussions at icoper.blip.tv.

The symposium results will be reported to CEN/ISSS WS-LT at the next meeting in Athens 9 January, and I will therefore point to the draft of the proposed reference model as a document that needs to be discussed, both in the ICOPER project and within the standards community.

The document is based on some earlier work by Luk Vervenne, chair of HR-XML, late Claude Ostyne of IEEE LTSC WG20 and now Jehad Najjar, who works in the ICOPER project. It is an early draft, and it is not clear if this could be presented as the consensus of the Berlin symposium or the ICOPER project. Anyway, it is a good starting point for the broad discussions that is needed to harmonise the views of the entreprise world and the HE community on competency issues.

The scope of the reference model is to meet “specific business requirements identified in application areas such as education, personal development and learning content development as well as hiring, performance improvement and training”. In other words, this initiative tries to use the technologies developed in the training and enterprise sector (which already has an established market for competency technologies and services) to embrace higher education and life long learning, encouraged by the EU policies to implement a European Qualification Framework though National Qualification Frameworks. The proposal points to the HR-XML and IMS joint effort to create “Common Semantics for Employability” as the vehicle to achieve this, and indirectly asks other standards fora to lay off, waiting for the process to be finalized in ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36.

In my opinion the draft calls for a broad discussion across the different European projects represented in the Berlin Symposium, and within European standards groups. The reason for this is that I am not at all convinced that we have a consensus on the proposed reference model.

The Concepts
The draft comes up with a number terms and definitions. And it seems that some definitions are lacking, others are presupposing an abstract model that is not outlined in the draft. Competency is said to have three subcomponents, knowledge, skills and abilities. The last concept is not defined in the draft. Knowledge is in fact defined as information processing (”assimilation of information through learning”), which is highly contested. The definition of learning outcomes introduces a concept of attitudes, not defined in the model. The concept of Competency Framework is equivalent to a repository, which differs from the way the term Framework is used in many standards. Furthermore, the model uses the terms competency and competence (the latter being competency in a particular context). The discussions so far in international fora shows that this distinction is very hard to explain to non English communities, and it make translations to other languages very difficult.

It seems that the authors behind the draft have got tired of trying to define their concepts, as they end the section on definitions with the the following: “Nevertheless, in this reference model it is possible to collect and manipulate data relating to competency, regardless of what competency means.” You may fish with this approach, but if you catch a shark and not only fish, you should be OK. Well, maybe?!

A model for management
The draft outlines a model for Competency Data Management. I would ask if this is not a too narrow perspective for a model addressing the needs of a European Competency Framework. Especially, if this is harnessed in a repository only, ref. the definition of a Competency Framework in the draft. Added the large data model and XML “bias” of the draft, I wonder if the approach taken is more adapted to the needs of the 80’s and 90’s than the future knowledge society. I have the feeling that the sheer complexity of the proposed reference model is going to be a major barrier to implementation.

Cultural issues
The last issue I will raise addresses the model’s ability to engage higher education, the prime target group of the ICOPER project. In fact, a reference model should be a “template” for discussion with the communities interested in implementing the standards and specifications that are referenced. My concern is that the scenarios for building for example competency profiles should use Higher Ed use cases, capturing the full range of HE activities, not only training for “high risk professions” (pilots, drivers, medical doctors, etc.) The case of baking bread (often used in discussing these issues) might be illustrative for training, but how relevant is it for what happens in higher education?

Technorati Tags: competencies, icoper, metadata

Now, reading the committee draft outlining the second part on “core elements” I realize that the thinking of the workgroup is too narrow - and the user requirements perhaps not reflecting today’s practice - or should we say, web architecture. The scope is now stated as “directed at maximizing interoperability of learning resource records (MLRR) at the time of federated search and metadata harvesting”. Hey, is not the scope of metadata wider than repository management and institutional interests? It seems that the perspective from the use of metadata for learning and the use of metadata needed to fulfill the promises of the semantic web and web architecture is completely lost!

Technorati Tags: metadata, web standards