Learning Resource Metadata is Go for Schema
Phil Barker, Phil’s JISC CETIS blog, April 24, 2013

Phil Barker writes, "The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative aimed to help people discover useful learning resources by adding to the schema.org ontology properties to describe educational characteristics of creative works. Well, as of the release of schema draft version 1.0a a couple of weeks ago, the LRMI properties are in the official schema.org ontology." To see how LRMI metadata is used, take a look at this resource, first without the metadata, then with the metadata (you'll have to view soruce to see the metadata embedded in the resource). Encoding the resource this way makes it much easier to encode and retrieve for later use.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Schemas, Semantic Web, Metadata, Online Learning, Ontologies]

Will MOOC Technology Break the Education Cartel?
Jonathan Nadler, Education Technology Debate, April 24, 2013

Jonathan Nadler writes, "Once flexible and even user-generated learning content embedded in MOOC’s trickles down to a primary school level, and super-capable mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are deployed widely enough to provide ubiquitous access, its really only the process we use to harness them (especially how to keep some strategic face to face time in the mix) that remains to be solved." The "obligatory history lesson" should include a reminder that trickle-down has never worked, and has only ever served to entrench, not unseat, the cartels. If MOOCs are to mean anything more than another generation of Disney cartoons, we need to create the content, to share it freely, and create the learning ourselves.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Schools, Ubiquitous Internet, Online Learning]

Review of Arts Based Research
Melisa (Misha) Cahnmann-Talor, education review, April 24, 2013

The title of Chapter 1 is: "What is and What is Not Arts Based Research?" At the end of this review, I still do not have the answer to that question. As Cahnmann-Talor writes, "The answers to most questions result in further questioning, where even definitions offered remain filled with ambiguity and openness to interpretation." But as she writes, "I am reminded of William Carlos Williams's oft-quoted lines: 'It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die every day/for lack/of what is found/there.'"

[Link] [Comment][Tags: none]