Make finding open content easier
when it's available incorporate simple license info into default search results [eg Creative Commons symbols]
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This idea is active.Search Engines »7 comments for Idea: Make finding open content easier
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This idea is active.Search Engines »
Accessibiity and Personalisation of Resources
3 comments for Idea: Accessibiity and Personalisation of ResourcesAddress the accessibility and usability of resources to individuals by supporting searching on simple Accessibility Metadata for resources such as IMS AccessForAll 3.0, the release of which is imminent.
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Create an API
5 comments for Idea: Create an APICreate an API to allow developers to search and access resources. The Sunlight Foundation helps government agencies open up their data and create APIs so developers can use the data in applications. They could be a great partner in your work.
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This idea is active.General suggestions / ideas »
Encourage embedding of license info in educational content
2 comments for Idea: Encourage embedding of license info in educational contentEncourage content creators to embed license info into educational content as well as in metadata - eg through use of MS Research's Creative Commons plugin for Office [category of guidelines for content providers?]
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Search Engines to add "Learning" as search context (just you can with images, videos, etc)
6 comments for Idea: Search Engines to add "Learning" as search context (just you can with images, videos, etc)Search Engines could add "Learning" to their standard home page options of Web, Images, Videos, Maps, News, Shopping and E-mail.
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intelligent metadata extraction and tagging
A web search engine crawler could use the same algorithms found in some commercial metadata generation products to intelligently extract metadata (interpolating such things as seat time for the learning object, intended audience, etc.). This metadata would then be available to search against and display in results through the "advanced search" function. And it could be submitted to a Learning Registry sandbox as a proposed ...more »
1 comment for Idea: intelligent metadata extraction and taggingA web search engine crawler could use the same algorithms found in some commercial metadata generation products to intelligently extract metadata (interpolating such things as seat time for the learning object, intended audience, etc.). This metadata would then be available to search against and display in results through the "advanced search" function. And it could be submitted to a Learning Registry sandbox as a proposed new object for cataloguing.
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Microformats
2 comments for Idea: MicroformatsAdd a microformat to a piece of educational content so a search engine's bot or crawler knows its educational.
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Authoritative, Generative, and Social Search
Something I have personally been thinking about for some time is that there are three distinct modes for organizing and finding resources and answers. Aaron's citation of the Dewey system is that of an authoritative taxonomy. The pros of these are that they are authoritative, relatively stable, and efficient at getting you somewhat near to the resources you want. They also work well as filtering methods if you are familiar ...more »
4 comments for Idea: Authoritative, Generative, and Social SearchSomething I have personally been thinking about for some time is that there are three distinct modes for organizing and finding resources and answers.
Aaron's citation of the Dewey system is that of an authoritative taxonomy. The pros of these are that they are authoritative, relatively stable, and efficient at getting you somewhat near to the resources you want. They also work well as filtering methods if you are familiar with the taxonomies. The cons are (a) they are static and rarely keep up with the modern pace of change (b) expensive if you want professionals to do the classification and questionable in the minds of authorities if you crowd source the classifications and (c) exclusive in the sense that there is a relatively steep educational and learning barrier for their use.
The second organizational method is generative. This is what we experience with standard search engines. Behind the scenes technology is indexing, re-indexing, reclassifying etc. on a more or less continual basis, and as searches are submitted the searches themselves become data that is used to organize the corpus of resources. The pros of this are that it is flexible, fast and generally effective. The cons are that (a) it takes a lot of resources and research to get beyond simple term matching and page ranking (b) many methods fail for collections that are too small (not enough link data) or too big (too many results) and (c) it is not trivial (even today) to learn to use search engines effectively.
The third method is social. This is the modern equivalent of "if you want to know something, ask a friend" but facilitated by social media. To the extent that the results of inquiries can be captured and fed into Generative methods, there are some real possibilities here since people are better than computers at understanding context and recognizing semantic equivalents within their domain of experience. The cons are (a) answers are non-authoritative (b) managing social search at scale is a new field with a host of challenges and (c) I am not sure if we have enough experience to gauge its true effectiveness.
Having said all that, my suggestion is that a fundamental principle for any search system or knowledge management system is that all three methods should be used and that each one should be used and combined when and where appropriate. Hope that makes some sense!
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Free primary source materials online
More free educational content from the states. Here at the Illinois State Library we developed the Illinois Digital Archives (IDA) to provide access to primary source materials in Illinois libraries, archives, museums, historical societies and other cultural institutions. It was designed to be a searchable repository for the Illinois State Library's digital collections as well as collections in other libraries and cultural ...more »
1 comment for Idea: Free primary source materials onlineMore free educational content from the states. Here at the Illinois State Library we developed the Illinois Digital Archives (IDA) to provide access to primary source materials in Illinois libraries, archives, museums, historical societies and other cultural institutions. It was designed to be a searchable repository for the Illinois State Library's digital collections as well as collections in other libraries and cultural institutions in Illinois. I would be glad to talk to you about what we have to share as you develop the content for the Learning Registry.
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XML Site Maps
Add your comment for Idea: XML Site MapsExtend XML Site Maps so one can specify that a resource is "educational."
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FREE educational content from states
2 comments for Idea: FREE educational content from statesI would welcome the opportunity to discuss with you the efforts around a very similar collaborative project lead by several State Technology Directors. In Ohio alone, we have gathered, disseminated, published over 4500 FREE digital media education assets. If you would like to learn more please contact me beth.cortolillo@etech.ohio.gov
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Index compressed or packaged files
Add your comment for Idea: Index compressed or packaged filesGiven how much educational content is put online in Zip format (or similar): encourage search engines to support selective indexing of the contents of Zip archives, for example through an extension to the Robots Exclusion Protocol [posted on behalf of Scott Wilson - CETIS]
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Tune search engines better for learning not just discovery
Understand better the nature of learning and reflection. Search Engines have a role, a range of roles, but learning involves much more than discovering "learning content" through the use of keywords, tags, & other forms of metadata. Discovery needs to align better with query & sense-making. Support for well-formed questions would help -- "natural language search" only goes part of the way. Other scaffolding is necessary ...more »
Add your comment for Idea: Tune search engines better for learning not just discoveryUnderstand better the nature of learning and reflection. Search Engines have a role, a range of roles, but learning involves much more than discovering "learning content" through the use of keywords, tags, & other forms of metadata. Discovery needs to align better with query & sense-making. Support for well-formed questions would help -- "natural language search" only goes part of the way. Other scaffolding is necessary
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Make the Search Engine the Registry
I've tried to reflect on "how a search engine would be integrated with the Learning Registry?" - but since I don't know what the "Learning Registry" is yet, it's a difficult question to ponder. My first reaction is that registries don't "learn" - people "learn". So, perhaps it should be called an "educational content" registry so that it's clear that this is a place to find educational content (if in fact that is what ...more »
1 comment for Idea: Make the Search Engine the RegistryI've tried to reflect on "how a search engine would be integrated with the Learning Registry?" - but since I don't know what the "Learning Registry" is yet, it's a difficult question to ponder. My first reaction is that registries don't "learn" - people "learn". So, perhaps it should be called an "educational content" registry so that it's clear that this is a place to find educational content (if in fact that is what it is). Then my second comment would be that, well, registries don't appear to be very popular on the web (question to ask ourselves - why do we keep shooting ourselves in the foot by trying to do things in the educational community that the rest of the world dislikes? need a shrink to answer that one). But seriously, I don't personally use "registries" for anything. So, this leads me to think that search engines should be able to find the educational content where ever it may be - even if it is not in the registry. That is, the search engine builds the registry. So, instead of Google Ad Words, we set up a ranking algorithm for educational content and build an open source search engine to implement it. We publish the ranking algorithm as an open "standard" (ouch - sorry to have to use that word). And, we then invite the various educational content providers to expose the right metadata and other stuff to our bot and others that may get built. We ask Google to license their code to us for free because it is for educational purposes and because they are not evil. Ha ha. Just teaching you guys how to brainstorm!
I actually do believe the part about having to find the content where it is and build the registry - while at the same time enabling others to do similar things.
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Professional Development
1 comment for Idea: Professional DevelopmentCreate professional development opportunities around the Registry to help teachers best integrate digital resources into their teaching
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LODE
I took a pretty deep look at LODE (an IMS working group) recently. It has a lot of features that we are going to need. I think it's potentially a huge step forward in the concept of registries for learning. I also saw it as maybe missing a few pieces, such as non-centralized augmented metadata: the ability for anyone to post defining/categorical information about anyone else's resources. So if NASA publishes a photo ...more »
Add your comment for Idea: LODEI took a pretty deep look at LODE (an IMS working group) recently. It has a lot of features that we are going to need. I think it's potentially a huge step forward in the concept of registries for learning.
I also saw it as maybe missing a few pieces, such as non-centralized augmented metadata: the ability for anyone to post defining/categorical information about anyone else's resources. So if NASA publishes a photo about something, we don't want users to have to ask NASA's permission to categorize that photo or align it with other educational resources. The network should let them do that on their own (and let others find those categorizations right alongside of the original resource).
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Paradata formats and storage
Are there any good/popular formats for structuring "paradata?" Also, how should paradata be stored? Is the publishing agent responsible for storing and sending it to anyone who asks for a period of time? Could we use a bittorrent concept to help make paradata available to all but without having to be stored by everyone? (Share the storage?) Paradata is any kind of usage data (whether raw weblogs, ratings, reviews, ...more »
1 comment for Idea: Paradata formats and storageAre there any good/popular formats for structuring "paradata?" Also, how should paradata be stored? Is the publishing agent responsible for storing and sending it to anyone who asks for a period of time?
Could we use a bittorrent concept to help make paradata available to all but without having to be stored by everyone? (Share the storage?)
Paradata is any kind of usage data (whether raw weblogs, ratings, reviews, comments, etc)
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Solution Design
From my perspective the four problems areas that were partly elaborated on the blog and also fed into the discussion topics below are all interrelated. I don't believe you can arrive at independent solutions and expect them to work as a whole (not suggesting that is what you are actually trying to do but has an impact on the discussion). Normally in solution design there needs to be clarification of the "business" requirements, ...more »
2 comments for Idea: Solution DesignFrom my perspective the four problems areas that were partly elaborated on the blog and also fed into the discussion topics below are all interrelated. I don't believe you can arrive at independent solutions and expect them to work as a whole (not suggesting that is what you are actually trying to do but has an impact on the discussion). Normally in solution design there needs to be clarification of the "business" requirements, objectives, related activities, end-user requirements etc to clarify the role of the project and the interrelationships between the parts before you can get into the detail, flexibility requirements and technical requirements. I am worried to see an early suggestion of any technology, standard or specification in advance of clarifying the sorts of requirements that should drive the design and then the development. Perhaps that is just my solution architecture bent, but I often see problems arise when the technology drives the agenda instead of serving the agenda.
The clarification of the end-user requirements and project scope and responsibilities, etc will tell you a lot about scale, community of practice engagement, "plugins" to the NLR, augmentation practices of target communities (and therefore crosswalking/harmonization requirements) etc.
You are all smart people, there is no doubt about that or the kinds of issues raised here would not have been raised already, so I am sure that you will be thinking a lot about the issues I've mentioned. It would certainly help if we had some further insight because it will help us to provide more focused information into your activities.
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Assistive Technology for Any Student Who Needs Extra Support
Please help educators understand the full benefits of using assistive technology to accommodate students who need extra reading and writing support. These tools aren't just for kids with special needs. If administrators clearly recognized the value of these tools, more students would get the help they need earlier in their schooling years and school budgets would enjoy more economies of scale to spread the cost per ...more »
Add your comment for Idea: Assistive Technology for Any Student Who Needs Extra SupportPlease help educators understand the full benefits of using assistive technology to accommodate students who need extra reading and writing support. These tools aren't just for kids with special needs. If administrators clearly recognized the value of these tools, more students would get the help they need earlier in their schooling years and school budgets would enjoy more economies of scale to spread the cost per student. Thanks!
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search phrase code
1 comment for Idea: search phrase codeyou could have a phrase you put in front of your search (e.g. have "learn:" just as you have "define:" and "recipe:", as a complement to the additional information needed on the content tagging side
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NEON - Nat. Ecological Observatory Network
An interesting project that could provide input as learning resources is NEON - http://www.neoninc.org. The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is prototyping an architecture that will collect data across the United States on the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on natural resources and biodiversity. NEON is a project of the U.S. National Science Foundation, with many other U.S. ...more »
1 comment for Idea: NEON - Nat. Ecological Observatory NetworkAn interesting project that could provide input as learning resources is NEON - http://www.neoninc.org. The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is prototyping an architecture that will collect data across the United States on the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on natural resources and biodiversity. NEON is a project of the U.S. National Science Foundation, with many other U.S. agencies and NGOs cooperating.
NEON has a mission of sharing science: "The NEON platform provides extraordinary opportunities for education. The platform will support a wide range of interactions ..."
The primary contact in the DC area is Brian Wee, Cheif of External Affairs bwee@neoninc.org.
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like an iTunes for classroom content
Allow educational publishing companies of all sizes to make their materials available for download, whether fee-based or free. The Learning Registry should function like an iTunes for classroom content, providing a digital bridge between content providers and teachers/students. Flipcharts, eBooks, quizzes, special events that schools can sign up to stream, video modules on any subject for any grade level...all can and ...more »
1 comment for Idea: like an iTunes for classroom contentAllow educational publishing companies of all sizes to make their materials available for download, whether fee-based or free. The Learning Registry should function like an iTunes for classroom content, providing a digital bridge between content providers and teachers/students. Flipcharts, eBooks, quizzes, special events that schools can sign up to stream, video modules on any subject for any grade level...all can and should be included in the database. The possibilities are endless!
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Faceted Search
1 comment for Idea: Faceted SearchKids and Teachers alike are still familiar with sections in their school library classified by the Dewey Decimal system. Librarians and Technology Coordinators in K-12 use it daily. If search engines supported search by explicit classifications (Dewey, Library of Congress, others), it could make use of existing taxonomies.
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Make learning content crawl-able
I don't see this issue as a search engine problem so much as it is a content format problem. The biggest problem with accessing "learning content" right now is that most of what we call learning content (SCORM packages) is closer to being a mini-application than it is to being a pure provider of content. How can a search engine be expected to crawl a site that has its navigation locked away in a proprietary format....especially ...more »
1 comment for Idea: Make learning content crawl-ableI don't see this issue as a search engine problem so much as it is a content format problem. The biggest problem with accessing "learning content" right now is that most of what we call learning content (SCORM packages) is closer to being a mini-application than it is to being a pure provider of content.
How can a search engine be expected to crawl a site that has its navigation locked away in a proprietary format....especially one that intentionally restricts the learner (and thus crawler) from proceeding until mastery is demonstrated. Most SCORM packages right now are monolithic SCOs that have their own proprietary navigation. How can a search engine be expected to crawl what is essentially a proprietary application. We don't expect a search engine to crawl the contents of a video (yet), we only expect it to index the public metadata that is associated with that video. While this model presents problems for search engine discovery, it has merit and utility derived from the educational experience it delivers.
"Crawl-ability" is related to a similar problem of "link-ability". Right now, there typically isn't a way to link to and deliver just a small, but relevant, part of content.
Obvious solutions to these problems include structured content formats or small SCOs tied together with Sequencing and Navigation. Both of these solutions have merit, but impose strict requirements and limitations that discourage broad use.
Increased use of metadata is another option that should be encouraged and explored...again though without imposing undue burden on content creators.
Is the best alternative to continue to allow for black box, "application-like" content, but also let such content provide alternative versions / navigation paths that expose the actual learning content in a crawl-able/link-able manner?
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Social Web