Category: Elearning Standards

BC Commons licence

http://www.bccampus.ca/Page93.aspx

It struck me that while there will be quite a few out there who have seen this before, I haven’t seen it make the rounds of the blogosphere and so maybe it is worthwhile…

The BCcommons Licence is a “open content” licence inspired by Creative Commons but aimed specifically at facilitating sharing of content created within the BC post-secondary system with the rest of that system. It has been developed by my employers (and my boss, Paul Stacey) at BCcampus. It’s a kind of middle ground between “closed” content and the full Creative Commons, a way for our provincial system to promote sharing between institutions but hopefully not pushing people as far out of their comfort zone as the full on Creative Commons might. The first content to be released under this licence should be coming along shortly so we will soon see if this fills the anticipated niche and has the desired effect. And a final note: in a cool twist, the BCcommons licence itself has been released under the creative commons, so if it somehow inspires you and you think it could serve as the basis for your own middle way, dig in! – SWL

International LOM Survey

http://phenom.educ.ualberta.ca/n/papers/
LOM_Survey_Report.doc

As mentioned by Stephen, this is the second year Norm Friesen has produced this important report. The survey focuses on two questions: 1) “Which elements were selected for use or population?”; and 2) “How were these elements used, or what where the types of values assigned to them?” Maybe this makes sense as a starting point, but it misses out an even more important question for the builders of repository systems and other consumers of metadata – how are the elements that are selected for use actually employed to deliver functionality to users (or other systems). Maybe that is a premature question, but the current situation resembles a comment a fellow from Oxford made in the Learning Design working group at the Alt-I-Lab sessions a few weeks back – “It’s like you’ve spent all this time working on the data model before you had an idea what the application it was supposed to support was going to be.” Don’t laugh, that’s exactly what this feels like at times.

Which is why the last paragraphs of the paper are so important, the ones in which Norm engages the position laid out by Erik Duval and Wayne Hodgins in their paper titled ‘Metadata Matters.‘ I am sympathetic with Norm’s concern that

“speculations on future developments in technologies and the social practices that develop with them are notoriously prone to error, and especially subject to ideological and other distortions. While the possibilities of such developments and solutions should certainly not be ignored in standards development, they do not provide a solid foundation for standardization work.”

But maybe what this means is that metadata standards need to be driven from two directions that are in tension; one from the direction of studies like Norm’s that look at what fields are currently being populated, but then also from the perspective of current and future usages of the metadata fields so that the limitations of manual metadata collection practices (one of the points I think Hodgins and Duval are trying to make) don’t end up dictating a standard that ultimately doesn’t enable any new functionality (which I thought was supposed to be the reason for all of this to begin with.) – SWL

Practical Interoperability from the Reload folks

http://www.reload.ac.uk/interop.html

Recognizing that saying one complies with a standard and implementing a system that does so (especially when some of the standards seem to change nightly) are two different things, the good folks at Reload have built this page that reports on various real world users’ attempts to import content packages built with Reload into a number of “VLEs” or course management systems, including WebCT and a few of the open source options. One hopes that some of the ‘hiccups’ described here are simply a sign of the relative immaturity of the systems and standards that will dissipate with time (right?….) – SWL

Wiki for Retreat on Mellon Open Source Projects

http://rit.mellon.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

Who knows if this was meant to be public, but as the link isn’t password protected and I stumbled across it on the web, I’m assuming it’s open for viewing. This wiki was built in support of meetings held this past February concerning higher ed open source projects funded by the Mellon Foundation. The notes are worth perusing to glean some insight into what some of the biggest minds in educational institutional computing in the States are thinking about, but maybe most interesting is simply to ponder the list of projects that Mellon funds in this area – Sakai, Chandler, OCW, DSpace, uPortal … the list goes on. Without a doubt, a number of these projects have already changed the landscape in post-secondary educational computing, and have the potential to change it even more dramatically in the years to come. – SWL

Learning resource discovery based on the LOM and the OAI-PMH’

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/powell/

From the latest issue of ARIADNE, comes this article by Andy Powell and Phil Barker detailing the development of a LOM-based application profile and the sharing of these resources using the OAI-PMH. Lots of good references, and I found the sections regarding their vocabularies and the issue of identifiers quite helpful. – SWL

COLIS ODRL METADATA PROFILE

http://www.iprsystems.com/COLIS/COLIS-ODRL-Profile-06.pdf

Out of the Australian-based COLIS project was produced this metadata profile for using ODRL to express the rights for learning objects in IMS Content Packages. This was originally published about 18 months ago, but still seems useful, and as far as I can tell hasn’t been supplanted.

The COLIS Project (renamed and extended as the “Interaction of IT Systems and Repositories” or IIS&R Project) seems to have finished much of its work this past December, and is now engaging in a series of tours around Australia to disseminate its findings. A number of reports and presentations are available on their site – of particular interest to me was a presentation on the “‘Use and Useability of Learning Objects within the COLIS Demonstrator Framework.” It is interesting to see the similarities in the difficulties it outlines (cataloguing time, standard vocabularies, versioning, DRM issues) to other existing projects. SWL

Intellectual Property Rights Issues Facing Self-archiving: Key Findings of the RoMEO Project

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september03/
gadd/09gadd.html#Gadd-2003f

This interesting paper details the efforts of the RoMEO project to land on, amongst other things, a digital rights schema to enable self-archiving of academic research papers in the U.K. What’s interesting is that while they found that either the Creative Commons or ODRL could possibly fit their needs, the problem with the CC solution was that their metadata was expressed in RDF/XML and did not have an associated XML schema—a prerequisite for any metadata disclosed under the OAI-PMH. Their solution was to develop ODRL versions (XML instances) of the CC licences that would conform to the ODRL XML schema, examples of which can be found in the paper. A more detailed accounting of this process can also be found in the related paper, “Rights metadata for open archiving.” – SWL

Open standards and software for bibliographies and cataloging

http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/
bib/openbib.html#haystack

Comprehensive collection of pointers to information on open standards and open source software for managing bibliograpies and library metadata. See also oss4lib, the Open Source software for Libraries listing. – SWL