[Oer-community] A reflection

[Fred M Beshears]

Susan,

I believe the project you have in mind is a geographic map that shows
the headquarters of organizations that have formal ORE development
initiatives.

Is this definition correct?


Also, it seems as if there is a fair amount of interest in a far more
ambitious undertaking: giving would be users of OER a way to search
for useful resources. This, of course, is very different from what
you're proposing (I think), and much more labor intensive.

Of course, there is at least one OER meta data initiatives underway already:

   Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI)
   see: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/FAQ

And there may be other OER metadata initiatives that I'm unaware of.

In any event, OER meta data could in theory be used to produce a
geographic map showing the headquarters of the organizations who
produced the resources.  Of course, to do so it would certainly be
useful to have a list of the organizations along with some sort of
institutional code for each so developers and meta data librarians
could tag OERs with that institutional code.

Also, some people may be aware of older metadata and learning
technology initiatives such as:

IMS Global (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMS_Global)
IEEE   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_object_metadata)
ISO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_JTC1/SC36

The IEEE/LOM standard could, I believe, work for Educational Resources
whether they are open or not. So, I need to do some research to
understand why there's a need for a separate LRMI metadata spec
initiative.

For now, here's what the LRMI FAQ says about these older initiatives.

------------------------------
"LRMI aims to establish a common metadata schema to identify learning
resources that will complement learning standards, for example those
encoded in the Achievement Standards Network, including Common Core
State Standards for K12 (US), as well as all other online learning
vehicles. Interoperability is a key precept of LRMI. While simplicity
is necessary for mass adoption and search engine implementation,
mixing with and mapping to other vocabularies will be possible -- for
example by mirroring the semantics of existing education matadata
vocabularies (e.g., Learning Object Metadata) to the extent possible,
so that explicit equivalences and refinements may be established,
protecting existing investments in educational metadata made by
publishers and curators of learning resources and by institutions to
date.

Additionally, LRMI will begin by examining lessons from previous
initiatives and real online descriptions of educational resources,
whether machine-readable or not. In this, we aim to utilize the
technology-agnostic aspects of the microformats process, described at
http://microformats.org/wiki/process."
--------------------------


In the spirit of full disclosure, I was UC Berkeley's rep to IMS
Global for many years, so my views are probably biased.

Best,
Fred




On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Susan D'Antoni <susandantoni at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Mark and Helen,
>
> Yourcomments are exactly why we started this discussion with an exploration
> of what use a map of the global OER landscape would be?  The points in my
> previous message were of course trying to find threads from the messages
> over the past days.
>
> The main problem that was the premise for organizing this discussion was
> simple.  How do you know which institutions have OER activities around the
> world?  It has become a large number.  But do we need to know where OER
> institutional initiatives are?  And if we do, can we find that information
> somewhere already?
>
> Best,
>
> Susan
>
>