Big data science is taking purchase in higher education, and our diverse institutions provide an exceptionally fertile ground for impactful data-driven decision-making. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: Working Draft for ISO/IEC 19788-2 Metadata for Learning Resources, ISO [Edit][Delete] February 1, 2006

[link: Hits] The International Standards Organization (ISO) is rewriting learning Object Metadata; this link (to a PDF file) is a draft of the new standard. The draft has been circulating for a few days among the standerati and has received, well, a bit of a rough ride. The standard doesn't resemble what I would do, but there are some good bits - for example, the rights section now allows the document to point to a URL of a rights statement. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning Resource Metadata is Go for Schema
Phil Barker, Phil’s JISC CETIS blog, April 24, 2013
Phil Barker writes, "The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative aimed to help people discover useful learning resources by adding to the schema.org ontology properties to describe educational characteristics of creative works. Well, as of the release of schema draft version 1.0a a couple of weeks ago, the LRMI properties are in the official schema.org ontology." To see how LRMI metadata is used, take a look at this resource, first without the metadata, then with the metadata (you'll have to view soruce to see the metadata embedded in the resource). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Data Is Never Raw
Nick Barrowman, The New Atlantis, 2019/01/18
There's so much emphasis on things like evidence-based decision-making, or data-driven learning, as though the proponents had never read Kuhn, Lakatos and Laudan. It bears repeating, especially in these days of big data, that "data is never simply given, nor should it be accepted on faith. How data are construed, recorded, and collected is the result of human decisions — decisions about what exactly to measure, when and where to do so, and by what methods". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors: Joint DCMI/IEEE LTSC Taskforce, DCMI November 2, 2005

I got this by email today and then from Albert Ip and CogDogBlog: "At the most recent LOM (Learning Object Metadata) WG meeting in Orlando, it was decided that the work on the LOM RDF binding will be discontinued. The reason quoted is the formation of a new taskforce between IEEE LOM and Dublin Core Metadata Initiative". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Norm Friesen: Metadata for Learning Resources (MLR): As a simplified Kernel and a Complex Schema, Ipseity October 28, 2005

Norm Friesen rethinks learning object metadata and comes up with a 'core' schema with optional extended elements. "The model presents 6 core elements. All are top-level, mandatory or required: Identification, Description, Creation, Contextualization, Access, and Record". More...