eBlog by Tore Hoel

It was the eBusiness references included in the committee draft of the upcoming Metadata For Learning Resources standard that made me really start thinking of the general “soundness” of the metadata work being done in the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 Workgroup 4. Every element should be qualified as to “lexical space”, an attribute specifying the set of admissible strings for the content value, e.g. is “1000″ representing the integer 1000 or the real number 1000.00?

I bet the integer versus the real number problem is important when your doing eBusiness big time (even I don’t really see the point here either), but searching for learning resources? No way! It seems like the project is being hijacked by the eBusiness community and the learners and educators sidetracked. We should look more to the library community; ebusiness has very little to do with it! At least the library community is grappling with the same problems of going from the second order of things to the third, where everything is miscellaneous and what matters is not what fits on a library record card any more.

To me, the current MLR thinking has not yet reached the digital age. We are still thinking from the perspective of the content owner, who wants to control her resources, to allow the users to search, evaluate, retrieve and re-use the learning objects. But it is not about control. It is not about filtering what the users should be allowed to see. Filtering on the way out, not on the way in, is a new strategic principle of the third order of things, according to David Weinberger in his Everything is miscellaneous (p. 102). He has three more principles, one already mentioned: Give up control!

The two other principles, Put each leaf on as many branches as possible; and Everything is metadata and everything can be a label, addressed the very model of the MLR. We should not create a huge, complicated structure bound to a XML tree, trying to capture the essence of the physical learning resource itself. Instead we should be very aware of identifiers, and then try to capture as many small bits of characteristics as possible, storing them in as many places and ways a possible. Living with learning resources is not a question of exactness (in the eBusiness manner), but in finding the just right level of fuzziness (in the learning for life manner of using resources). We then need a system that identifies what we are talking about, and leaves the other aspects up to the users to negotiate. If a community wants to be very specific in their negotiation, they should be allowed to do so. However, if others are coming by, the conversation should be digitally captured in a way that degrades gracefully. If my system cannot make sense of the value of the element “semantic density”, it should at least let the user know that the discussion is about Educational Context. The choice of tags should be left to the user communities. The constraining technology should be as general as possible; however, based on principles that allow computers to reason and suggest combinations and results to the users.

It is time for the MLR work to realize that computers are great for finding and combining, if they have anything to work on. Providing metadata is just about this: Spreading leaves of information around, to give the computers stuff to work on. Not exact to the 10th decimal; it is enough that it is about something, and is identifiable.

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