SREB - Metadata Harvesting Federation of Open Educational Resources

Metadata, Harvesting, and Federation Building the infrastructure of the global education commons Ahrash N Bissell

Ahrash N Bissell Metadata, Harvesting, and Federation Building the infrastructure of the global education commons

Why build sharable repositories of educational content?

What barriers do we face?

Legal

Technical

Social

Discussion…

Overview

The world is changing… Tebndxt by Armel

“ Content is no longer limited to the books, filmstrips, and videos associated with classroom instruction; networked content today provides a rich immersive learning environment incorporating accessible data using colorful visualizations, animated graphics, and interactive applications.” “ Alongside these technology improvements, “ open educational resources ” offer learning content and software tools that support search, organization, interaction, and distribution of materials.” “ Increasingly,… the Web is being recognized as an enabler for collaborative creation of significant information resources that aggregate contributions from hundreds or thousands of individuals.” What is the future of education…?

“ Adopt programs and policies to promote open educational resources . Materials funded by NSF should be made readily available on the web with permission for unrestricted reuse and recombination .”

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08204/nsf08204.pdf

Text What are Open Edu c ational Resour c es? Michael Reschke cba Digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research.* *UNESCO. 2002. Forum on the impact of Open Courseware for higher education in developing countries. Final report. Paris: UNESCO.

http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/

available for anyone to use, share, and adapt to suit their educational needs. Michael Reschke cba Open education depends on a high-quality pool of freely licensed resources. OER give learners access to a broad array of knowledge materials...

What is different about OER? Most digital media = “stuff you can see online for free” fair-use and educational exceptions OER = “stuff you can adapt and then share for others to build on” license to innovate

When IP restricts access, adaptation, and sharing, Tebaxt Simon music http://flickr.com/photos/fruey/1368008974/ protecting the right to education. OER help open doors

Mutual Learning Sharing & Most students begin their education highly motivated to learn ; Most teachers are highly motivated to share knowledge , not only with their students but with anyone who can benefit. CC BY-NC-ND by Lara Eller http://www.flickr.com/photos/99079793@N00/24786113/

And of course there are regional repositories….

Note that there are significant advantages to building an OER landscape with distinct silos of content….

Authorship and quality control

Dedicated focus on core users

More robust “ecosystem”

Easier to manage and sustain

So the question becomes: How do we tie these systems together, with an emphasis on findability, usability, and interoperability, to achieve a functional global educational commons… … and yet maintain the distinctiveness of the component parts?

Text First, a look at the Legal Barriers. Nan c y cbn http://flickr.com/photos/pugno_muliebriter/1384247192/

CC offers an easy way to share materials, versus the murky interpretations of fair use in c opyright law. openDemo c ra c y cba http://flickr.com/photos/opendemocracy/542303769/

CC BY ... Text • Allows the most freedoms without giving up attribution, which is important for credibility in education • Is compatible with every other CC license, allowing the most room for innovation via collaboration b • Does not encroach on the freedom of potential users by enforcing a specified use: i.e. CC BY-SA requires you to share alike, even if the new work is best suited for another license ba

Text But what about Te c hni c al Barriers? http://flickr.com/photos/tantek/85610375/ Tantek Çelik cbn

CC over c omes Te c hni c al Barriers Text CC Licenses are also clear to search engines

• CC Licenses specify licensing permissions

on works in metadata (RDFa)

The metadata are also available for other applications, such as search engines, Flickr, and…

… our soon-to-be deployed Universal Education Search .

Principles for Publishing ccREL (RDFa) in HTML

Visual Correspondence

Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY)

Remix Friendliness

Extensibility & Modularity

There is a significant gap between what computers “see” and what humans see. This is one of the fundamental barriers to the infrastructure of the semantic web, but is also easily solved.

distributed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"> Creative Commons License </a> A Link with Flavor

distributed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"> Creative Commons License </a> A Link with Flavor

<h2>The Trouble with Bob</h2> <h3>Alice</h3> Text with Flavor

<h2 property="dc:title" >The Trouble with Bob</h2> <h3 property="dc:creator" >Alice</h3>

Why dc:title , why not just title ?

Which meaning of "title" ? Article title, job title, real estate title?

License is a reserved HTML keyword, but title is not.

We must "import" this concept from somewhere.

The Dublin Core vocabulary: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ concepts including: title , creator , copyright , etc.

Note that it doesn’t actually matter which vocabulary is used, as long as the machine can interpret the intent.

Text with Flavor

<span xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"> <span rel= " dc:type " href=" http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text " property= "dc:title" > My Book </span> by <a rel= "cc:attributionURL" property= "cc:attributionName" href= "http://bissell.org/my_book" > Ahrash Bissell </a> is licensed under a <a rel= "license" href= "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" >Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License</a>. <span rel= "dc:source" href= "http://books.org/his_book" /> Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at <a rel= "cc:morePermissions" href= "http://somecompany.com/revenue_sharing_agreement" >somecompany.com</a>. </span>

Content plus metadata (ontologies and specs) Permissions and semantic architecture

And finally, the So c ial Barriers to Open Edu c ation Judy Baxter cbna http://flickr.com/photos/judybaxter/501511984/

Text Social Barriers Standardized Curricula Tenure Standards n Developed World Developing World Mine vs Commons vs Noncommercial Term Resources Teacher Education Socioeconomic Factors Time Management Teacher Salary (Bissell and Boyle) Technical Unfamiliarity Workload Organizational Pressures Agency Cultural Awareness, Misconceptions

learn.creativecommons.org Send comments to: ahrash@creativecommons.org