Friday, June 15, 2007

Meta data for education

Wikipedia has proven itself to be really valuable for educational purposes. This is best illustrated by the support the Wikimedia Foundation gets from Kennisnet. When other countries would follow the example of the Netherlands, the WMF would not have a cash crunch.

Given that Wikipedia is particularly used by students, it makes sense to provide a better service to the educational process. The IEEE-LOM is a standard way of describing learning object meta data. Meta data can be associated with many of the resources that exists in the many projects of the WMF. There are two issues to consider; the data is relational in nature and the data has to be made available.

At the Holland Open Software Conference I met Erik Duval who is a professor from Leuven and who has a wealth of expertise on the IEEE LOM. He astounded me when he said that people should not enter the IEEE LOM data, automated processes should. Given that Erik is in the organisation behind the IEEE LOM standard, it means that for some of the dialects of this standard such processes must exist.

The data is relational. With the functionality that we created for OmegaWiki, we can have relational data natively in a MediaWiki environment. It is just a matter of associating this data with the articles that need tagging. This is not rocket science but the application of parts that already exist.

For the Wikimedia Foundation supporting educational meta data is a great method of making its content more relevant. The use that it will generate in education will provide a powerful argument why providing sustainability and investment in its organisation is in the interest of the national educational systems.

I invite the Wikimedia Foundation to consider this, not only as a method of raising funds, but first and foremost as a way to make good on its aim; to provide information to the world.

Thanks,
GerardM

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some details of what we do on automated metadata generation can be found on http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/amg. Will be SO much fun to collaborate on this...

MovGP0 said...

I don't think that introducing special code for such special relational data is a good idea.

Instead it would be much easier to create a LOM-Ontology and use existing Techniques to use the data: Ontoworld.org

Beside of this, I don't think that the wikipedians will corporate to use LOM. Many wikipedians (not including me) don't see wikipedia a something educational, but as a reference.

Maybe its possible to use something like LOM on the wikiversity project, which is dedicated too this purpose.

Beside of this there are great wikis with are specially done for the needs of students and written from students.
A noteable example is the german ZUM-Wiki.

GerardM said...

The special relational code already exists as an extension to MediaWiki. The ontoworld.org system does not support the complexity needed for IEEE-LOM. It is not for the existing Wikipedians to use and, reference material is by its nature educational.

The proposal does state that it would work for MediaWiki, so it would enable this functionality for Wikibooks and Wikiversity as well.

The fact that other wikis specialise in being educational does not negate the value that for instance Wikipedia has for the educational system.

Appartantly we are far apart in our outlook.
Thanks,
GerardM

MovGP0 said...

"The special relational code already exists"
Maybe I'm wrong, but the interface is missing.

"the complexity needed for IEEE-LOM"
For wikipedians to use it, LOM should be as simple as possible. Otherwise wikipedia could get written in xhtml-code rather than wikicode.

btw: each kind of relational data can also get expressed in the ontoworld system. They are lacking N-ary relations, but you don't really need them.

"it would work for MediaWiki"
The real problem I see is not a technical one. The real challenge is, that you need to bring the community on your side.

You need to view it from the user perspective. If there is no common sense about how LOM works--which I guess--then it won't work.

Its similar to the problem of omegawiki: how can you teach the wiktionary folks to use omegawiki and redo much--if not most--of the work which is already done.

GerardM said...

MediaWiki based relational data is the essence of OmegaWiki. With the ontoworld data, you cannot have multi lingual functionality, something that is essential to what needs doing in the IEEE-LOM data.

Read what Erik Duval writes, you want a process to generate the data, the consequence is that we should not need users editing this stuff.

As to Wiktionary, when some work is done, it is only done for one language. Why would you work on Wiktionary if all you do needs to be repeated again and again? Why not do it once, do it well and contribute to OmegaWiki ??

Thanks,
GerardM