elearning2.0

Preamble:

I have been trying to concentrate on two site-development tasks over the past few days, leveraging knotes to support some particular activities in the NGRF and SIGOSSEE sites.

The NGRF activity was intriguing. Alan Brown, from the Institute for Employment Research at Warwick, is a key person in the NGRF development and a longtime colleague and collaborator. He recently became part of a TLRP project to assemble resources towards a big report on Work-Related leearning.

One of their first goals was to design a categorical structure to describe these resources and/or to delineate the conceptual territory (sorry, I've never been entirely certain which). He was eager to use an old systems-integration trick of ours, the Team Task, to provide online support for that activity. We recently made a first pass at upgrading the Team Task concept to embed a group weblog and a resource aggregator which would give a clean interface into resources however mesily they might have been thrown into the weblog.

I spent the past two days struggling to understand the activity they were engaged in, and how to make a framework in which to carry on discussions supporting their activity. The rest of this post consists of an unedited email I sent to Alan this morning when I finally got the point.

And the point is: knotes can quickly be adapted to make all categories inherently (cross)-discussable, and to provide an interface for the social negotiation of a categorical structure.

Further background to understanding the stream of text which follows is that I was also planning the upgrade of the SIGOSSEE site so it too begins to make good use of knotes for collaborative work. As part of that, I was working out which kinds of existing SIGOSSEE content should be imported into which new knotes weblogs, and wondering about how to set up the initial categories for these blogs... and more interestingly how to support a process in which the members of the site develop their own categorising conventions.

I hope the text of that email to Alan might give a flavour of what we're about to try to do with knotes and categories:

Graham has just written a little note on Google Scholar:

More important from my point of view is that it shows the potential power of distributed and associated metadata. We need something like this for e-learning materials - able to aggregate data on materials use in practice.

This would overcome the present problem when to be standards compliant materials developers are required to fill in endless metadata fields.

We've both been thinking about the implications of Google Scholar for the academic and research communities we support. I've been meaning to post a quick summary of some of the possibilities from a technical/architectural point of view:

In brief, we've been planning to design and implement a resource-repository system, taking over the kinds of functionalities currently exposed (badly) through things like adding Annotated-Reference objects inside site or document content. We've even made some progress on the system: for the group-weblogging/team-tasks work in the smelearning site, we have an abstract resource-pointer type so that discussions can collect resources multiple, but with all commentary and trackbacks attaching to the original 'real' copy of the resource. We'll be working on making resource-management 'placeless' once we finish the present binge of knotes work. We've also implemented blogging categories in such a way as to be ready for generic structured metadata (and knotes' blog categories already allow categorical structures like 'development/knotes/weblogging/features') In my previoue work for the REM and Resource Locator projects and the IMS, I spent a lot of effort designing abstract repository systems, so we're not without ideas or motivation :O)

One of the most vivid and accesible use-cases for this kind of resource-repository approach is citation and schorarly referencing. For the NGRF site, we implemented a quick little content type called Annotated Reference in order to try to abstract referencing into independent objects (out of the html content of the documents which 'contain' the citations), and to allow special discursive content to be associated with bibliographic records. There are upwards of 1800 Annotated References in the NGRF site at present, but some number of these are duplicates, since the abstraction is one-level: the references are not in the body content of the documents, but they do live directly within its folder-wise content. Thus a list of references will contain duplicates. We would like to replace this with an extra abstraction, so that the record-details for a bibliographic record live placelessly in a repository, with citations within doccuments pointing to those. We would probably try to piggyback the trackback machinery to effect the linkage, so that we could have this working across CMS systems.

So where does Google-Scholar come into these plans? One of the attractions of a placeless, resource-centred way of handling citation and reference is that it removes the requirement of repeatedly filling-in record details. We would of course have to provide some kind of user interface for searching the existing reporitory, selecting items there for referencing, and adding new items where required. Google-Scholar may allow us to add an extra layer of search... if a record does not exist in the repository, we could allow users to search google scholar (using their XML-RPC API, and to one-click add to the repository and reference from the search results returned.

We also have hopes of developing a cross-CMS API for sharing repositories once we've implemented and trialed initial work on repositories in Plone. Google-Search could present important constraints on the design of such an API, and in the case of scholarly materials may even make it redundant. Because google will be harvesting its 'records' from real-world publications, it sidesteps the detailed entry of record details which presents such a barrier to getting structured content out of ordinary end-users.

We're great believers in thin, lightweight standards - for instance XML-RPC, trackback, RSS, Really Simple Discoverability, the weblog-management APIs - as opposed to comprehensive, heavyweight standards like the IMS specifications of old. Many small standards interacting with a rich universe of freely-created content can effect a lot more power than large-scale monolithic standards which try to envisage or constrain the way content will evolve. We're hoping that the advent and uptake of Google Scholar will create some new opportunities for leveraging the little standards.