Stòr Cùram

Stor Curam attends HUSITA conference in Hong Kong

It's been a while since the last blog entry mostly because the team have all been so busy progressing the work of the project. I thought I'd use some down time from the HUSITA conference to start updating our avid readers - starting with what we're doing in HK

Reusable Learning Objects the Easy Way

How to make high-quality eLearning content for social work education.

a Stòr Cùram workshop to be held on Thursday 20th May 2004 | 9.30 - 4.00 pm at Strathclyde Graduate Business School, GLASGOW.

Garbage In - Garbage Out: Currier & Downes discuss metadata quality on CETIS site

When I was still working for CETIS I promised Wilbert Kraan I'd write a feature for the CETIS website on metadata quality assurance for digital LO repositories- updating the previous work published in three papers I co-authored last year. It was posted on the CETIS site today- and there is already a lengthy response from Stephen Downes (which I will reply to as soon as I get the chance!). Unfortunately he hasn't said anything I really disagree strongly with or find contentious, so it probably won't turn into an entertaining spat- I just think I need to clarify what I really meant by some of the points he's brought out.

Go to:
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20040402013222

Blogs from other repository projects

Scott Leslie who maintains EdTechPost has very helpfully posted a short list of blogs maintained by project teams working on repository projects - including Stòr Cùram.

codogblog and the Maricopa Learning Exchange

There are many blogs on the theme of e-learning and I’ve listed just a few of them to the left of this post. One blog I keep visiting again and again is cogdogblog kept by Alan Levine of the Maricopa Centre for Learning and Instruction.

Alan’s provocative and iconoclastic style might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you like your bloggers to cut to the heart of the matter then cogdogblog is well worth a read. This is a blog written by a man who thinks his left big toe is a learning object, and I dread to think what Sarah will make of his views on metadata.

What makes Alan’s blog particularly interesting for the Stòr Cùram project is that he’s deeply involved with the Maricopa Learning Exchange (MLX) – described on its website as a “warehouse for learning” . The MLX has very similar aims to our own project though for a whole college system rather than a single subject aea. The MLX is a repository for learning resources that are uploaded and shared by staff members of the Maricopa College system. At the time of writing it contained over 800 learning resources “…ranging from as small as a spreadsheet activity designed for a chemistry lab exercise to a complete faculty development program.” Each learning package is described by a packing slip – a brilliant metaphor for learning resource metadata.

Alan describes the MLX in detail in a 53 minute macromedia Breeze presentation – yes it’s long but well worth the effort (and you can always skip over the techie bits about RSS if you’re not interested – though you really ought to be!). The presentation has the added value of demonstrating just what can be achieved by macromedia Breeze – a presentation technology that brings PowerPoint to multimedia life in a very accessible file size.

Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange

Questions arising from the presentation for the Stòr Cùram project:

Staff uploading to the MLX don’t have to jump through any quality assurance hoops – though users can comment on the resources and trackback can, potentially, monitor how they're being used. Does Stòr Cùram want or need any more QA than this?

Alan and the MLX don’t tie themsleves up in knots with a narrow definition of what counts as a learning object. A learning resource is anything that an educator perceives might be educationally useful - is this a good enough definition for our project?

Add your own questions - and answers - in the comments.

Digital Rights Management and Stòr Cùram

The delightful task of ensuring Stòr Cùram manages digital rights appropriately, legally, etc. etc., has fallen to me. Luckily for us the company we have purchased our digital repository software from, Intrallect, are soon to become renowned experts in digital rights management for learning object repositories (not that they aren't already pretty clued up). This is because they have recently won a JISC contract to carry out a six-month study into digital rights management for UK HE & FE. Their methodology will include gathering use cases (or narrative scenarios that we envisage coming up within Stòr Cùram involving digital rights- we'll post some here later) and getting folk like us to fill in a detailed questionnaire. The benefit for Stòr Cùram will be utilising their expertise in developing a use case format to tease out our own issues, and to talk with them about solutions, which they wuill be researching. I feel truly blessed (well, relieved, mainly).

Here's a brief overview to start with. You'll see I have plagiarised heavily from other people's research- the JISC-funded JORUM digital repository project has done a lot of good work researching this area, as have James Dalziel from Macquarie University and the IEEE LTSC.

Why Digital Rights Management?

“As with other industries that rely on the digital content, a major obstacle facing e-learning is the vulnerability of intellectual property to improper and undesired use. Motives for ensuring proper use include avoiding adverse legal actions, ensuring payment, ensuring proper attribution, and ensuring the intellectual fidelity of content.” (Friesen et al, 2002).

For Stòr Cùram, this matter is not simply about legal requirements. It is important, in terms of the success of the project and its impact on social work education in Scotland, that users creating, depositing and delivering the materials are happy from the outset that their rights, and those of their institutions, are being protected. It is also important that they are confident that they are using materials from the repository legally and in accordance with the rights of the other parties involved.

We must also be aware of privacy issues. Due to the nature of reusable learning objects and the possible requirement for the use and storage of personal details (to determine and record who has rights to do what), it is important that it be flagged as part of this discussion.

What are Digital Rights?

“Digital rights determine who can do what under which conditions”, with regard to digital resources. They are “governed by intellectual property law and contract law. They can be licensed, sold, or assigned to others with conditions attached.”
(Friesen et al, 2002)

What is Digital Rights Management (DRM)?

This term generally refers to technological means of managing digital rights.
DRM “is the process of recording, transmitting, interpreting and enforcing digital rights. The goal is to prevent unauthorized use and to preserve the integrity of digital information. Achieving this requires standardized ways of communicating digital rights as well as systems that can be trusted and are capable of abiding by the rights expressed.” (Friesen et al, 2002).

Digital Rights Expression Languages (DRELs)

DRELs are ways of expressing digital rights information so that computer systems can record, understand and process them, as well as share them with other systems. This last idea requires the creation and adoption of standardised DRELs across e-learning. This process is indeed under way, with such languages as ODRL (Open Digital Rights Expression Language).

Digital Rights Management Solutions

DRM solutions can be roughly divided into two categories: supportive and restrictive (Halliday, 2003).

Supportive:
• Usually manage access by user registration.
• Rights expression and so forth by means of a licence (as with when you buy new software).
• Compliance is not enforced. Use can be restricted to those with an ac.uk email address.
• Examples: SeSDL, and the current JORUM.
• There is also the US-based Creative Commons model, which allows creators to specify what they will allow rather than restrict by what they won’t. There is some doubt about the applicability of Creative Commons licences under UK/European intellectual property law. The JISC is investigating instituting a similar licencing initiative for UK HE & FE, provisionally called Share-Alike - see also the above-mentioned study by Intrallect.

Restrictive:
• Controls access to materials and use of materials after accessed.
• Involves not just expression and communication of rights information, but also enforcement.
• May be achieved by encryption, watermarking, fingerprinting, or, as with the COLIS demonstrator project, a system which both enables or disallows access and/or particular kinds of use according to a users’ rights, and records a ‘chain of evidence’ for each object as to what use has been made, should a rights holder later require it. (Dalziel, 2002).
• Generally very expensive, and probably unsuitable in the UK HE context.

Stòr Cùram Context

We will be dealing with two broad categories of learning objects: those which the project commissions itself, and those which are deposited in the repository, but were created elsewhere. In the latter case, we are beginning by sourcing objects ourselves for inclusion in the repository, but there is also the possibility that in the future users will be able to deposit materials themselves. Further down the line is the issue of repurposing of objects from Stòr Cùram, in either category, and possible re-depositing of the new objects.

References

Dalziel, J. (2002) Reflections on the COLIS (Collaborative Online Learning and Information Systems) Demonstrator Project and the ‘Learning Object Lifecycle’. In A. Williamson, C. Gunn, A. Young & T. Clear (Eds), Winds of Change in the Sea of Learning: Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education. Auckland, New Zealand: UNITEC Institute of Technology. Also online at: http://www.colis.mq.edu.au/projects/demo/docs/dalziel.doc

Friesen, N., Mourad, M., Robson, R. et al. (2002) Towards a Digital Rights Expression Language Standard for Learning Technology. A Report of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee Digital Rights Expression Language Study Group, Presented at the Meeting of the IEEE LTSC, Copenhagen, 9—11 December 02, http://ltsc.ieee.org/meeting/200212/doc/DREL_White_paper.doc

Halliday, L. (2003) The JISC Learning Materials Repository Service JORUM Scoping and Technical Appraisal Study. Volume VII, Digital Rights Management. http://www.jorum.ac.uk/vol7_fin.pdf

Demystifying Taxonomies and Thesauri for the Stòr Cùram Repository

Taxonomy – or classification scheme?
In biology, a taxonomy is defined as the “practice of classifying plants and animals according to their presumed natural relationships” . A taxonomy is the resulting classification. The key word here is “presumed”- even within science, taxonomies are not fixed entities; rather they are subject to changing discourses and new knowledge within that particular community. For this reason, the structure and usage of taxonomies and classifications schemes tend to be more or less contested.

The term taxonomy is also used more generically to refer to any hierarchical classification showing presumed natural relationships between terms or concepts, e.g. Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, which is well known within education.

The term was, at some point, picked up within computer science and programming; from there it migrated into the e-learning world. The definition given on the CETIS website states that a taxonomy is a:

“subject scheme which organises knowledge into a hierarchy. Term used mainly in computer science and software development, but now increasingly in information science, where a taxonomy looks much like a classification scheme for the web, usually without the notation.” -- From Currier, S and Wake, S "Negotiating Subject Access: Resources Discovery on the Web" in Library and Information Briefings, Issue 97, May 2001. Quoted in CETIS Reference Section

What this means to my mind is that taxonomy in this context is just new jargon for classification scheme. One classification scheme you may be familiar with is the Dewey Decimal Classification- the most widely used scheme in the world, and perhaps the most widely criticised. Subject specific schemes also exist in abundance. In libraries the point of these schemes was originally the organisation of books on shelves in subject order to make browsing easy. They were (and are) also used for organising catalogues and bibliographies. However, they continue to be useful in the networked world where resources can be classified at more than one location. Before Google, search services like Yahoo provided browse access to the Web via hierarchical schemes. Quality controlled services for education still use a combination of search boxes and browse hierarchies .

One major reason why taxonomies have remained popular as tools within learning object repositories is that collections of learning objects include a wide variety of formats. The wonderful technologies available for free-text searching do not entirely compute when the available resources might include a video, a simulation, a slide show containing mainly images with a bit of text, a Word document of lecture notes, and a PDF file. So, structured, good quality metadata, including classification and keyword indexing (see under Thesaurus) is required, rather than only using Google .

Thesaurus
Most people know a thesaurus as a reference work which gives synonyms. In the information world, a thesaurus is “the vocabulary of a controlled indexing language, formally organized so that the a priori relationships between concepts (for example as “broader” and “narrower”) are made explicit”.

So, where the point of a taxonomy or classification scheme is the organisation of resources by subject (or some other criteria) for browsing, the point of a thesaurus is to enable indexing of resources. A thesaurus collects together all the possible terms by which resources in a particular subject area may be described; it states which term, where there are synonyms, is the term to be used (the preferred term); it provides links to broader, narrower and related terms; and it may give usage notes. For example, using the Getty's Art & Architecture Thesaurus, a tutorial about buttons would be indexed using the preferred term buttons (fasteners) (to distinguish it from the button with which you turn your computer on), which has the broader term fasteners; the narrower terms collar buttons, studs (buttons) and toggles; and the related term cuff links.

A thesaurus is primarily organised alphabetically, although there is an increasing tendency to offer some kind of broader classification-style grouping as well, sometimes known as faceted thesauri, blurring the line between the two kinds of vocabulary. Thesauri tend to provide something more like a web of relationships than a hierarchy, and to be more detailed in their subject coverage than taxonomies. This is because subject indexing tends to provide more detailed access to resources- you generally wouldn’t place a resource at twenty different nodes in a browse tree. You might put it in three or four places, and then index it further with twenty detailed terms.

Controlled vocabulary
This is a generic term for a thesaurus, taxonomy, or any other list of terms which is agreed upon within a community or otherwise controlled or maintained. The alternative is natural language indexing, which basically means people adding whatever terms they think of at the time to a resource. This is commonly used when, for instance, authors submit academic papers for publication. Good for speed- bad for accurate searching!

Finally- Stòr Cùram aims to design its taxonomy using a user-centred approach, so that it reflects the Scottish social work community’s conceptualisation of their subject area. I'll post more on this topic soon!

Sarah, Project Librarian, playing with her new mobile phone with digital camera

Hello from the Project Librarian

Hello Stòr Cùram fans,

I'm Sarah Currier, the Stòr Cùram Librarian. I report to Neil Ballantyne, the Project Manager, and am looking forward to welcoming our new Learning Technologist and two e-Learning Advisers soon- we're busy with the recruitment process at present. We're also getting a new clerical assistant to support our Project Administrator, Romana McGlynn- once we have the full complement, no doubt this blog site will become more lively and interesting. At the moment there's three of us doing the work of six (or seven if you count the clerical person).

Just as a background to me: my previous role was CETIS Educational Content SIG Coordinator. I was based at the Centre for Academic Practice at the University of Strathclyde (where I still sit- but my contract is now with the Social Work Dept.!- confused? so is everyone else). So I learned a lot about reusability, interoperability, learning objects and learning design in that role, and was able to contribute a lot to the CETIS Metadata SIG from my background in e-libraries.

Prior to that I worked on a study looking at repurposing JISC-funded teaching & learning content as learning objects (DNER&LO); the INSPIRAL project which looked at linking VLEs and digital libraries; the HILT project which looked at subject vocabularies; the SeSDL project, which was a seminal learning object repository project based in Scotland; and the ADAM subject gateway, a digital resource for HE arts education in the UK.

My role in this project is everything librarianly- or everything to do with the metadata, including our application profile, vocabularies (including developing the Stòr Cùram Taxonomy), metadata creation workflow and quality assurance, digital rights management, usability and searchability of the repository, interoperability with other repositories, portals etc., and user support and training.

I'm going to post some more stuff specifically about different aspects of all of that soon.

What's a learning object?

Some time soon I'm going to get round to drafting a short explanation of learning objects and their value for the social work education community. In the meantime you might want to check out module 2 of this excellent short course on "Structured Course Development, Learning Objects and E-Learning Standards".

Find out all you need to know about 'metadata', the 'reusabilty paradox', and the 'learning object economy' ;-)

http://careo.prn.bc.ca/losc/losccourse.html