Phil (et al),
Thank you for the detailed and helpful input. I wanted to talk over some
points of best practice that go to the issues of the relationship of the
visual presentation and the meta-tagging. What follows is Curriki specific,
but generalizable to many learning resource repositories, and most
particularly to those looking to provide modular reusable content. Please
review the live version of the resource Paul is using here ->
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_sriii2000/MySpaceandDemocracy
I would like to point out a few things about this resource and its
presentation. First the resource itself has a number of different views (In
a semi-restful way). The default view is the primary content view itself
(The Content Tab). If you add a parameter to this URL (or click on the tabs)
you get the other views:
- Information ->
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_sriii2000/MySpaceandDemocracy?bc=
&viewer=info (The one Paul enriched)
- Standards ->
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_sriii2000/MySpaceandDemocracy?bc=
&viewer=standards (More specific information),
- comments ->
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_sriii2000/MySpaceandDemocracy?bc=
&viewer=comments
There are yet other views and modes under this as well such as the history,
the history compare, embeddable students viewers, and a native XML view as
well.
- History ->
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_sriii2000/MySpaceandDemocracy?bc=
&viewer=history
- Student/LMS view ->
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_sriii2000/MySpaceandDemocracy?bc=
&viewer=embed
- Data view ->
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_sriii2000/MySpaceandDemocracy?xpa
ge=xml
Now all of these views are of the same resource and have the common header
section with attribution, and when you hover a mouse over the title, a
summary of the metadata is displayed (Form the info tab, but not all of it).
If we put all the information and content on one page, well no human would
like to look at it all. This brings some questions related to your statement
about the info tab being a descriptive record but not the content itself.
1) Is the resource the base URL and the info and other tabs just a mode of
the same view, or is each tab a separate page that should express only the
metadata displayed within and its reference to the content tab?
2) If there is additional metadata that is hidden until some user action,
should that be tagged with LRMI tags and will the search engines index or
ignore such information because it is not directly visible?
3) Should each of the tabs and modes have the complete resource record
metadata expressed in the meta header as LRMI/Schema tags or just he inline
elements that are displayed? Should nothing be expressed in the meta-header
and only he inline visible elements should be tagged?
Now the next item to observe is that this resource is really a collection of
other resources (As depicted in the Table of Contents). As you click into
this TOC, you will see that each element of this "Unit of instruction" is
itself an independent and independently discoverable resource. Such as this
one ->
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_sriii2000/Mini-LessonsandActiviti
es?bc=;Coll_sriii2000.MySpaceandDemocracy;Coll_sriii2000.MySpaceinDemocracy%
2DPart1 . There is no way in LRMI to indicate such a relationship (e.g.
"This resources belongs to or is a part of this other resource") This leads
to a more problematic issue of common practice: what is the appropriate
granularity to express things as independent resources? This however is a
question that perhaps is out of scope. Many, if not most LMSs or
repositories only express the container (Course) as the resource, not the
elements within. As a practice, the molecules (chapters and units) and atoms
(assets) might be made independently discoverable as they are in Curriki.
LRMI and Schema were devised to classify any form and structure of web
content. The more consistently learning resource sites can both tag,
structure and organize their resources, the more useful the discovery will
be at the item level in constructing personalized learning sequenced or
assembling topical materials collections.
More to come...
Joshua Marks
CTO
Curriki: The Global Education and Learning Community
jma...@curriki.org
www.curriki.org
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