Linking research & learning technologies through standards

Last month, ISO released the long-awaited third edition of the ISO 2146 standard for Registry services for libraries and related organisations. ISO 2146 is a standard of great interest to repository communities, and we have already posted on it at some length, including its use as a basis for the Australian National Data Service’s RIF-CS schema, and the IMS LODE registry model. (The latter post includes a UML diagram of the ISO 2146 classes as of its 2008 draft.) Because of this interest, it is worth describing the standard further.
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The U.S. Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL) recently convened a Learning Content Registries and Repositories summit (#ADLRR2010) in Alexandria, Va., which Link Affiliates attended. (We have already posted here our position paper for the meeting.)

ADL have been pioneers in developing and disseminating e-learning content; the ADL-Registry and its underlying model CORDRA have been highly influential since their inception in 2003. However the way information is disseminated and consumed online has changed greatly in the six years since, and the expectations of users have changed along with them. The summit was convened to ask:

• What has happened in the last 6+ years?
• What are the current business drivers and requirements?
• What is the state of practice in registries and repositories for learning content?
• What are the outstanding business and policy issues?
• What are the outstanding technical issues?
• What should we (the broader learning, educational, training, repositories and registries communities) be doing?

The summit was arranged as a sequence of panels, with audience questions. The panels reflected perspectives from US Government agencies, repository initiatives, technical interoperability, Web 2.0 and Semantic Web, and content vendors. The summit also included two breakout sessions, on what the current status and problems are in the learning repository space, and on what future priorities for development should be.

I’ve taken blow by blow notes of the workshop at the Interoppo Research blog; ADL has also provided links to other blog posts and tweets discussing the summit, as well as position papers requested for the summit. The summit ended with a polyphony of opinions on what to do next. Looking back, however, there are some clear realisations running through the summit; these have been picked up by Dan Rehak and Damon Regan in their summaries (Rehak: PPT, Regan: PDF), and are consistent with the findings of the subsequent CETISROW event (see Phil Barker’s summary).

This is my own skewed summary of what the summit found:

• We don’t need more standards.
• We do need a lot to seek out much more feedback from our users: what problems are we trying to solve?
• The users don’t come to us, they go to Google (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr).
• We won’t beat Google (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr) at their own game, and should not try to.
  • They build on Open Web content, we should provide Open Web content.
  • They harness content through Open Web standards (as does the Semantic Web): we should expose content through Open Web standards.
  • They set user expectations on discovery; we should break those expectations only if what we do is visibly better.
• We have unique value as repositories, as authoritative & targeted providers of content. We should promote this—via Open Web channels.
• We have defined contexts for interacting with content, and means of gathering user contextual data. That contributes to our unique value: better targeted search, or content push anticipating search.
• Get metadata from wherever you can (automated, user-provided): users already deal with bad metadata every day, and bad metadata is still better than no metadata.
• Repository federations are growing, but depend on harmonisation and registry metadata (and still coexist with Google).

The following is a more detailed summary.
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We have mentioned in previous posts that our work with IMS LODE, among other goals, sought to profile search across different e-learning repositories, so as to be interoperable. But there is a diversity of schemas for educational metadata which such search needs to traverse (at a minimum, IEEE LOM, Dublin Core for Education, and ISO MLR), and an even greater diversity of profiles for those schemas. If different repositories use different schemas, how can search across multiple different repositories remain interoperable?

The solution we have adopted is to use a search protocol, SRU, which abstracts away from the specific schemas used in a domain, to the search terms of interest across the domain.
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Guest blog post by Lyle Winton, VERSI

I’ve seen quite a few ARDC (Australian Research Data Commons) ideas that will use existing digital records to create a nice metadata-full context around research datasets.  Many of these records will have to be “cleaned up” or involve new processes to ensure more complete metadata.  Having worked as a researcher, I realise institutions collect bits of this stuff already – people, grant, publication info – but there’s still a lot of activities and projects which probably don’t have corporate records.  So I fear the convergence of the metadata-full approach and normal research practice will be more reporting and/or more metadata entry for researchers. 

This leads me to an idea (still half baked) and it’s based on 2 premises: ARDC is essentially about good discovery, not necessarily good metadata; and heavy reliance on manual entry of metadata is either expensive or patchy.  (Feel free to disagree with my premises.) 

Somewhat following the Google approach of “linking text” being more important than metadata: at the time of dataset registration you could “link” (essentially attach) as much unstructured text around the dataset as possible.

A scenario: Joanne Bloggs registers a numerical dataset from a research survey.  In the process she attaches an email thread between herself and the data collectors, a grant application that’s in progress, and several loosely related papers in PDF and Word formats.  Provided these “attachments” are private and only used for text based searches (eg. free text search, semantic network analysis) the files you upload, how many, the structure, and possibly even exact relevance all wouldn’t matter so much.  Let your (Google-like) search engine figure it out.

I think this addresses the issue of the time-poor researcher who doesn’t want to enter metadata, with a dataset that isn’t self descriptive, who doesn’t mind dumping a few files they have lying around their desktop into a private area.  So I could foresee two types of records in the ARDC, one is a curated record with structured metadata around valuable research datasets (the usual thinking), and the other is essentially a title plus a link or “contact Joanne Bloggs” message that can still be easily and effectively discovered through an associated (but hidden) text cloud.  Would people use that?

We have already discussed our development activities around the IMS LODE activity for discovery of learning objects. However, what we have described so far presupposes that learning object descriptions are already available to a user, because the user can access those descriptions in their local repository, or through a repository federation they have access to.

But there will not in the foreseeable future be a Super-Federation of all education repositories in the world, nor indeed does there need to be. Rather than unleashing users on all e-learning repositories in the world, it makes more sense for users to discover learning object collections that they don’t already have access to—but which are of direct interest to them. So users should be able to target their searches for content to the collections which will pay off, instead of doing an inefficient, iterative blanket search across Everything.
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Over the last few months, the Australian Digital Futures Institute has been working with Link Affiliates to test the specifications coming out of the IMS Learning Object Discovery and Exchange activity. We have already posted about our testing work; now that our work is wrapping up, this is a summary of what we have done. This post goes into the work done on discovery of individual learning objects.

DEEWR has funded Link Affiliates to participate in the IMS activity on behalf of the Australian schools sector, with the aim to facilitate discovery and retrieval of learning content from repositories, by profiling standards for searching and harvesting learning content, and learning content repositories. That leads to better use and reuse of available resources in the domain, and is one of the areas prioritised by the Digital Education Revolution. Our main partners in the activity have been European Schoolnet, which is pursuing large-scale exchange of objects between repositories through the ASPECT project (see more details), and TÉLUQ, the distance education arm of the Université de Québec à Montréal.

The issues IMS LODE is seeking to address involve both search queries and search results.
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The IMS Global quarterly meeting for mid-2009 was held at TELUQ, the distance education arm of the Université du Québec à Montréal, and a leader in e-learning research. This meeting incorporated workshops on Common Cartridge; Learning Tools Interoperability; and Curriculum Standards. (See the programme for the meeting.)

Many of the areas being addressed by the Digital Education Revolution were key concerns of the meeting:

• Lesson Plans (as they are being integrated into Common Cartridge)
• The interaction of web 2.0 technologies, and widgets in particular, with learning design tools
• Curriculum Description (as it is being integrated into Common Cartridge)
• Learning Content Discovery and Exchange (the IMS LODE project)
• Trials of Learning Tools Interoperability
• Future directions of IMS Learning Design.

One of the key focuses of the workshop was Common Cartridge as a way of packaging and distributing learning content. Common Cartridge is now up to version 1.1, and it has become important for IMS as an anchor for other activities enabling more effective learning. The meeting dedicated a day each to workshops exploring how Common Cartridge will interact with two major new initiatives, Curriculum Description and Learning Tools Interoperability.
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