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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Jan
30
(2006)
Oh, good! More metadata specifications!
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: learningobjects, metadata.
The problems with the adoption and implementation of the previous versions of the LOM are apparently solved by the addition of more definitions of structured taxonomy-driven authoritative metadata systems.
I’m posting this to remind myself to not get sucked into this stuff. It’s good that people are thinking about how to improve on the LOM, and even deprecating the term “learning object” (replaced by “resources”) but for the love of all that is holy and good, please focus on the content, context, and pedagogy and not on the metadata.
Whew.
What would have been useful for these folks to consider (maybe they have?) is actual usage data from existing repositories (and applications) that have used the existing LOM – what fields did people actual complete, and what fields did people actually try to use in creating complex queries. You did track all of this in Careo, right?
If we set aside the issue of gathering the darn stuff in the first place (which is setting aside a whole lot!) one thing that’s always frustrated me about the LOM was how incredibly abstract and arcane some of the fields seemed to be, like it was invented by a bunch of people sitting round wondering “if people could search for these little atomic bits of learning using any field conceivable, what would they use.” Oh wait, that is how it was invented!