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Meta-Answer

Since I barked about needing an Idiot's Guide to Meta-Data, I have had some productive on and off blog posts with some folks that are a step above me in meta-awareness. Thanks to Sarah, who sent a link to the CETIS Draft Guide to Meta Data which shines some light on what some of the acronym soup organizations are up to.

I still find documents like these laden with technical jargon- it stars out right away with schema, elements, and standards... all I am looking for is something that would also provide a sidebar with a written scenario of how some of this stuff might be used. Tell me a Metadata story, even if the ending is not happy. But seriously, the CETIS document is a nice read.

Also Scott's comments on my Yeti-Data sighting post and a later phone conversation has me understanding the playing field a bit more. Organizations like CETIS and Edu-Source in Canada are way ahead of us in the states because they are going at the learning objects grail as a collaborative (at least it appears so) as opposed to the individual fiefdom efforts of us down here in the lower province of USA.

Bottom line seems to be: Adding Dublin Core meta-data to the MLX does not really do much, there needs to be more of a structured interface to allow access by systems that will us other standards, IMS, LOM, etc-- and OAI is pretty specialized into publications and MLX items may be lost in the wash there.

I think I will sit on the sidelines a bit longer to see what develops more so on the end of tools and systems that will construct things out of so-called learning objects (is that APOLLO?) and then figure out how to tie MLX "we have metadata we just do not call it metadata" to a format that can be leveraged.