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.
