A Non-authoritative Educational Metadata Ontology for Filtering and Recommending Learning Objects

Digital libraries populated with learning objects are becoming popular tools in the creation of instructional technologies. Many current efforts to create standard metadata structures that facilitate the discovery and instructional use of learning objects recommend a single, authoritative metadata record per version of the learning object. However, as we argue in this paper, a single metadata record — particularly one with fields that emphasize knowledge management and technology, while evading instructional issues — provides information insufficient to support instructional utilization decisions. To put learning objects to instructional use, users must examine the individual objects, forfeiting the supposed benefits of the metadata system. As a solution, we propose a system that includes multi-record, non-authoritative metadata focussed on the surrounding instructional context of learning objects.

[1]  Erik Duval,et al.  Managing Digital Educational Resources with the ARIADNE Metadata System , 2000 .

[2]  Kate Ehrlich,et al.  Pointing the way: active collaborative filtering , 1995, CHI '95.

[3]  John Seely Brown,et al.  Book Reviews : The Social Life of Information By John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000. 320 pages , 2000 .

[4]  Paul Resnick,et al.  Recommender systems , 1997, CACM.

[5]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Social information filtering: algorithms for automating “word of mouth” , 1995, CHI '95.

[6]  John Riedl,et al.  An algorithmic framework for performing collaborative filtering , 1999, SIGIR '99.

[7]  W. Hodgins,et al.  Into the future: A vision paper , 2000 .

[8]  Mimi Recker,et al.  Predicting document access in large multimedia repositories , 1996, TCHI.

[9]  Mimi Recker,et al.  An interface for collaborative filtering of educational resources , 2000 .

[10]  Lucy Suchman.  Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication , 1987 .

[11]  Allison Woodruff,et al.  Enhancing a digital book with a reading recommender , 2000, CHI.

[12]  Mark Rosenstein,et al.  Recommending and evaluating choices in a virtual community of use , 1995, CHI '95.

[13]  A. Collins,et al.  Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning , 1989 .

[14]  Thomas W. Malone,et al.  Intelligent Information Sharing Systems , 1986 .

[15]  John McCarthy,et al.  What Computers Still Can't Do , 1996, Artif. Intell..

[16]  Hubert L. Dreyfus,et al.  What computers still can't do - a critique of artificial reason , 1992 .

[17]  M. Hutchinson.  The Social Life of Information , 2002 .

[18]  Lucy A. Suchman,et al.  Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Learning in Doing: Social, , 1987 .

[19]  Robert Heinich,et al.  Instructional Media and Technologies for Learning , 1996 .

[20]  Stuart Weibel.  Metadata: the foundations of resource description , 1995, D Lib Mag..