The I&I conference and IEEE LOM

Yesterday and today the 15th I&I conference. There were some 200 educators that deal with integrating computers in the educational process. For Wikipedia the 14th edition was important as it was when teachers told Kennisnet that Wikipedia was important for the Dutch education. This resulted in cooperation between Kennisnet and the Wikimedia Foundation.

This time there was a large group of wikimedians there to inform about what we do. Kennisnet gave a great presentation on how they are experimenting with wikis in education.

I learned from many people that tagging educational content is starting to become important. The IEEE LOM standard adopted in the Netherlands (EDUSTANDAARD) is being implemented into many of the software applications. One problem is that in order for such a standard to make an impact, much data needs to be tagged. This means that everybody is a winner when educational material is shared among schools. In order to do this, some authorisation and authentication is needed. This is needed so that students will not get exams from the schools that do share.. Kennisnet provides just such a service in their Entree. Having this is likely to be a key enabler for successful sharing of content.

One other key enabler is to just share. People will have to get used to the idea that it is like marriage, both parties think they are giving more than the other .. :)

One thing I would really like is to have Mediawiki to include the potential to have IEEE LOM tags. Through our interwiki links we know which articles share the same subject. Consequently these articles can share much of the tags given in one flavour of IEEE LOM. There are several reasons why we should do this:

• it improves the accesability of our information
• it would involve many people in education in our projects
• it would stimulate all implementations of IEEE LOM
• there would be another reason for having Ultimate Wiktionary; it could localise the IEEE LOM tags.

Thanks,
GerardM