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 [EdTechPost]
10:49:10 AM  Google It!.
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