Learning architecture: issues in indexing Australian education in a Web 2.0 world

Ten years ago, Education Network Australia (edna) was a very early entrant to the web world. It established a robust information architecture to provide what education was asking for at that time: a way to find web content that was useful for educators. In what was a totally new environment, the edna architects (along with architects of similar initiatives) established an information architecture using philosophies and practices translated from their previous experience, namely the world of librarianship and indexing. Some wise person called it metadata (perhaps so that librarians and indexers had an opportunity to reinvent themselves in the IT era), but essentially the highly standardized and centralized systems of cataloguing, indexing and classifying were adapted to describing and organizing online resources, and the edna metadata standard version 1.0 was launched in 1998. This standard has served Australian education reasonably well for ten years with minimal changes, facilitating both usability and findability. However, the world of information architecture in education is changing, and the world of the web has changed dramatically. This paper discusses the impact of this change on information architecture and the indexing of education resources.