The use of outside #standards

The notion that we are going to filter images maybe articles from our users makes me feel uncomfortable. The amount of bad faith in the discussion makes me feel nauseous; I have stopped following the multiple threads on the subject. The arguments why a single set of arguments should not be used are in my opinion compelling. The arguments why we do not want to set the values that enable the loss of immediate visibility are equally compelling.

Consequently I would like to steal a page out of the language policy; have an external body with sufficient authority set for us us up with the necessary values THEY need to do their job. We in turn can piggy back and enable the values set and allow our readers to select one of the levels provided they feel comfortable with.

So here is the deal; The IEEE LOM is a standard used by many educational organisations to mark electronic information that can be used on demand by students. The information is tagged in many ways including an age level that corresponds with what a teacher consider to be appropriate for a student.

There are multiple benefits to this scheme. It makes our content discoverable in an automated way from within education. Our content is rated for its usability and this provides us with feedback on our content. I am sure that many of our articles will be rated as "too long did not read" or using a vocabulary that is too demanding and consequently get a high age rating as a consequence.

Given that a lot of money is spend on providing quality educational information by many educational entities, they will be more then happy to do the rating. When you combine this with the use of FlaggedRevisions to store the information it seems a good fit for many reasons.

And yes, we can ask for contributions for hosting the data and providing content on a just in time basis.
Thanks,
        GerardM

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

The day after the Holland Open Software Conference

Anthere gave the keynote speech in Amsterdam at the Holland Open Software Conference. It was a great speech, it was so great because the speech was wholly dedicated to the Wikimedia organisation and its finances. This was possible because there was nobody at the conference that indicated not to know what Wikipedia was. For me there was little that was new, it was however great to hear it put coherently together. Many avenues of funding are closed to the Wikimedia Foundation because of the real or perceived problems that will result from within the community. Many avenues of funding are still very much closed because there is not sufficient staff to deal with acquiring funding. Anthere did a great job, it was a great opener because it put the sustainability of Open/Free projects as an issue very much on the map of the conference.

It was well published on the Dutch Wikimedia projects that the community was invited to attend the conference. It was cool to see Siebrand, Galwaygirl, Effeietsanders, Brabo. It is however a mystery to me where all the others were. This was a high grade conference with many speeches extremely relevant to what we do and there were so few of us.. A missed opportunity..

For me there were several new connections to make. I liked what Erik Duval said about forms to fill in for meta data like IEEE-LOM. He knows that much of this can be done in an automated way. I liked many of the things Massimo Mauro had to say about the European Union; I hope we will be able to cooperate in OmegaWiki. I loved the presentation of Eliane Metni, she connected the spirit of the open and free community with education in a compelling way; it is great that there is so much but it has to be adaptable in order to be useful in the setting of an educational process. A tool may be great but when it does not fit it is useless. There were many more but these are some of the highlights for me.

Next year the Holland Open? I will do my best to be there again :)

Thanks,
GerardM

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