One of the issues around eTextBooks is how to describe them, specifically by way of educational metadata in ePub. That’s something that on the face of it shouldn’t be too difficult to address (at least to the extent that we know how to describe any educational resource). One thing that would be useful in demonstrating [...]
Lorna and I recently contributed a study on possible reforms to JACS, a study which is part of a larger piece of work on Redesigning the HE data landscape. JACS, the Joint Academic Coding System, is mainatained by HESA (the Higher Education Statistics Agency) and UCAS (Universities and Colleges Admissions Service) as a means [...]
With great pleasure and more relief I can now announce the availability of Into the wild - technology for open educational resources, a book of our reflections on the technology involved in three years of the UK OER Programmes.
From the blurb:
Between 2009 and 2012 the Higher Education Funding Council funded a series of programmes [...]
As you may know, I have been involved in the development of the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative’s extension of schema.org since about this time last year. Things are shaping up well for the inclusion of the LRMI properties in the main schema.org vocabulary, so this seems like a good time(*) to start explaining and promoting [...]
In the spirit of Godwin’s law, I would propose that
“As any discussion about metadata grows longer the probability of a comparison to Google approaches one.”
Of course the comparison is usually that formal metadata is insignificant for the resource discovery needs of most people when compared to Google.
On one hand this is an over simplification: metadata [...]
CETIS are organising an event “What metadata is really useful” at Brettenham House in London on Mon. 18 October.
This meeting will focus on looking at what data we have (or could acquire) to answer the question of what metadata is really required to support the discovery, selection, use and management of educational resources. The emphasis [...]
Work on the ISO standard Metadata for Learning Resources is reaching a critical point, with bodies such as BSI being asked to vote on whether the current draft text for part 1 (the framework) should be allowed to continue to the next stage of the ISO standardization process. The current draft is the final committee [...]
On Tuesday 11 August, John and I are running an online workshop on metadata in the “second Tuesday” series of support workshops for the HE Academy/JISC UKOER programme. These are my thoughts on what we will cover: I want the session to be as interactive as possible, starting now, so if you’re involved in the [...]
The other day I took part in one of the FlashMeetings that are periodically convened by Erik Duval (chair of the IEEE LTSC LOM working group) concerning maintenance and development of the IEEE LOM standard. There are no entirely new developments since my last LOM update, but since it is over a year since [...]
JISC have funded strand of projects looking at Automatic Metadata Generation (AMG) under the JISC Information Environment Programme. To support this strand there is a project gathering use cases for automatic metadata generation gathering information on scenarios and use cases for why we might want automatically generated metadata. You can see the scenarios gathered [...]
