An ending, and a beginning

On 30 June 2017 I will be leaving my current employment at Heriot-Watt University. I aim to continue to support the use of technology to enhance learning as an independent consultant. I first joined Heriot-Watt’s Institute for Computer Based Learning in 1996 on a six month secondment. I was impressed that ICBL was part of … Continue reading An ending, and a beginning

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On 30 June 2017 I will be leaving my current employment at Heriot-Watt University. I aim to continue to support the use of technology to enhance learning as an independent consultant.

I first joined Heriot-Watt’s Institute for Computer Based Learning in 1996 on a six month secondment. I was impressed that ICBL was part of a large, well-supported Learning Technology Centre–which was acknowledged at that time as one of the leading centres for the use of technology in teaching and learning. You can get a sense of the scope of the LTC by looking at the staff list from around that time. Working with, and learning from, colleagues with this common interest was hugely appealing to me; so when I had the opportunity I re-joined ICBL in 1997, and this time I stayed.

In my time at Heriot-Watt I have been fortunate beyond belief to collaborate with people in ICBL and through work such as the Engineering Subject Centre (and other subject centres of the LTSN and then HE Academy), EEVL, Cetis and many Jisc projects. But things change. The LTC was dismantled. A reduced ICBL moved to be a part of the Computer part of the School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences (MACS). Funding became difficult, and while I greatly appreciate the huge effort made by several individuals which kept me in continuous employment, like many in similar roles I frequently felt my position was precarious.  I really enjoyed teaching Computer Science and Information Systems students, and I worked with some great people in MACS, but the work became more internally focused, isolated from current developments…not what I had joined ICBL for.

What next?

When Heriot-Watt announced that it planned to offer staff voluntary severance terms, I applied and was happy to be accepted. My professional interests remain the same: supporting the selection and use appropriate learning resources; supporting the management and dissemination of learning resources; open education; sharing and learning. I do this through work on resource description, course description, OER platforms, I use specific technologies like schema.org, LRMI and wordpress. I intend to continue working in these areas, as an independent consultant and with colleagues in Cetis LLP. Contact me if you think I can help you.

Photograph of a person up a flight of stairs into the open. by flickr user Allen, licensed CC:BY.
Exit, by Allen ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/78139009@N03/) Licence CC:BY. Click image for original.

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CMALT – Another open portfolio

I’ve finally made a start on drafting my CMALT Portfolio (and so has Lorna,* we’re writing buddies), and in the interests of open practice I’m going to attempt to write the whole thing as an open Google doc before moving it here on my blog.  I have a shared folder on Google Drive, Phil’s CMALT, where … Continue reading CMALT – Another open portfolio

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I’ve finally made a start on drafting my CMALT Portfolio (and so has Lorna,* we’re writing buddies), and in the interests of open practice I’m going to attempt to write the whole thing as an open Google doc before moving it here on my blog.  I have a shared folder on Google Drive, Phil’s CMALT, where I’ll be building up my portfolio over the coming weeks.  I’ve made a start drafting the first two Core Areas:  Operational Issues and Learning Teaching and Assessment, I’ll be adding more sections shortly, I hope. I’d love to have some feedback on  my portfolio so if you’ve got any thoughts, comments or guidance I’d be very grateful indeed.  I’d also be very interested to know if anyone else has created their portfolio as an exercise in open practice, and if so, how they found the experience.

Wish me luck!

An open door and the word Openness, in ALT branding.
CC BY @BryanMMathers for ALT

*Credit: This post is totally copied from Lorna’s post, with slight adaptation, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License she used.

More importantly, she let me copy her idea as well. That’s open practice which can’t be formally licensed, though I know that she is cool with it.

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Flying cars, digital literacy and the zone of possibility

Where’s my flying car? I was promised one in countless SF films from Metropolis through to Fifth Element. Well, they exist.  Thirty seconds on the search engine of your choice will find you a dozen of so working prototypes (here’s a YouTube video with five). They have existed for some time.  Come to think about it, … Continue reading Flying cars, digital literacy and the zone of possibility

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Where’s my flying car? I was promised one in countless SF films from Metropolis through to Fifth Element. Well, they exist.  Thirty seconds on the search engine of your choice will find you a dozen of so working prototypes (here’s a YouTube video with five).

A fine and upright gentle man flying in a small helicopter like vehicle.
Jess Dixon’s flying automobile c. 1940. Public Domain, held by State Library and Archives of Florida, via Flickr.

They have existed for some time.  Come to think about it, the driving around on the road bit isn’t really the point. I mean, why would you drive when you could fly. I guess a small helicopter and somewhere to park would do.

So it’s not lack of technology that’s stopping me from flying to work. What’s more of an issue (apart from cost and environmental damage) is that flying is difficult. The slightest problem like an engine stall or bump with another vehicle tends to be fatal. So the reason I don’t fly to work is largely down to me not having learnt how to fly.

The zone of possibility

In 2010 Kathryn Dirkin studied how three professors taught using the same online learning environment, and found that they were very different. Not something that will surprise many people, but the paper (which unfortunately is still behind a paywall) is worth a read for the details of the analysis. What I liked from her conclusions was that how someone teaches online depends on the intersection of their knowledge of the content, beliefs about how it should be taught and understanding technology. She calls this intersection the zone of possibility. As with the flying car the online learning experience we want may already be technologically possible, we just need to learn how to fly it (and consider the cost and effect on the environment).

I have been thinking about Dirkin’s zone of possibility over the last few weeks. How can it be increased? Should it be increased? On the latter, let’s just say that if technology can enhance education, then yes it should (but let’s also be mindful about the costs and impact on the environment).

So how, as a learning technologist, to increase this intersection of content knowledge, pedagogy and understanding of technology? Teachers’ content knowledge I guess is a given, nothing that a learning technologist can do to change that. Also, I have come to the conclusion that pedagogy is off limits. No technology-as-a-Trojan-horse for improving pedagogy, please, that just doesn’t work. It’s not that pedagogic approaches can’t or don’t need to be improved, but conflating that with technology seems counter productive.  So that’s left me thinking about teachers’ (and learners’) understanding of technology. Certainly, the other week when I was playing with audio & video codecs and packaging formats that would work with HTML5 (keep repeating H264  and AAC in MPEG-4) I was aware of this. There seems to be three viable approaches: increase digital literacy, tools to simplify the technology and use learning technologists as intermediaries between teachers and technology. I leave it at that because it is not a choice of which, but of how much of each can be applied.

Does technology or pedagogy lead?

In terms of defining the”zone of possibility” I think that it is pretty clear that technology leads. Content knowledge and pedagogy change slowly compared to technology. I think that rate of change is reflected in most teachers understanding of those three factors. I would go as far as to say that it is counterfactual to suggest that our use of technology in HE has been led by anything other than technology. Innovation in educational technology usually involves exploration of new possibilities opened up by technological advances, not other factors. But having acknowledged this, it should also be clear that having explored the possibilities, a sensible choice of what to use when teaching will be based on pedagogy (as well as cost and the effect on the environment).

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Shared WordPress archive for different post types

In a WordPress plugin I have custom post types for different types of publication: books, chapters, papers, presentations, reports. I want one single archive of all of these publications. I know that the theme template hierarchy allows templates with the pattern archive-$posttype.php, so  I tried setting the slug for all the custom post types to ‘presentations’. WordPress … Continue reading Shared WordPress archive for different post types

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In a WordPress plugin I have custom post types for different types of publication: books, chapters, papers, presentations, reports. I want one single archive of all of these publications.

I know that the theme template hierarchy allows templates with the pattern archive-$posttype.php, so  I tried setting the slug for all the custom post types to ‘presentations’. WordPress doesn’t like that.  So what I did was set the slug for one of the publication custom post types to ‘presentations’, that gives me a /presentations/ archive for that custom post type(1). I then edited the archive.php file to use a different  template parts for custom post types(2):

<?php $cpargs = array('_builtin' => False,
				  'exclude_from_search' => False);
	$custom_post_types = get_post_types( $cpargs, 'names', 'and' );
	if ( is_post_type_archive( $custom_post_types ) ) {
		get_template_part( 'archive-publication' );
	} else {
		get_template_part( 'archive-default' );
	}  
?>

See anything wrong with this approach? Any comments on how better to do this would be welcome.

Notes:
  1. 1 could edit the .htaccess file to redirect the /books/, /chapters/ …etc archives to /publications/, which would be neater in some ways but would make setting up the theme a bit of a faff.
  2. Yes, the code gives all the custom post types with an archive the same archive. That’s fixable if you make the array of post types for which you want a shared archive manually.

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Shared WordPress archive for different post types

In a WordPress plugin I have custom post types for different types of publication: books, chapters, papers, presentations, reports. I want one single archive of all of these publications. I know that the theme template hierarchy allows templates with the pattern archive-$posttype.php, so  I tried setting the slug for all the custom post types to ‘presentations’. WordPress … Continue reading Shared WordPress archive for different post types

The post Shared WordPress archive for different post types appeared first on Sharing and learning.

In a WordPress plugin I have custom post types for different types of publication: books, chapters, papers, presentations, reports. I want one single archive of all of these publications.

I know that the theme template hierarchy allows templates with the pattern archive-$posttype.php, so  I tried setting the slug for all the custom post types to ‘presentations’. WordPress doesn’t like that.  So what I did was set the slug for one of the publication custom post types to ‘presentations’, that gives me a /presentations/ archive for that custom post type(1). I then edited the archive.php file to use a different  template parts for custom post types(2):

<?php $cpargs = array('_builtin' => False,
				  'exclude_from_search' => False);
	$custom_post_types = get_post_types( $cpargs, 'names', 'and' );
	if ( is_post_type_archive( $custom_post_types ) ) {
		get_template_part( 'archive-publication' );
	} else {
		get_template_part( 'archive-default' );
	}  
?>

See anything wrong with this approach? Any comments on how better to do this would be welcome.

Notes:
  1. 1 could edit the .htaccess file to redirect the /books/, /chapters/ …etc archives to /publications/, which would be neater in some ways but would make setting up the theme a bit of a faff.
  2. Yes, the code gives all the custom post types with an archive the same archive. That’s fixable if you make the array of post types for which you want a shared archive manually.

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Requirements for online exam system

Some time back we started looking for an online exam system for some of our computer science exams. Part of the process was to list a set of “acceptance criteria,” i.e. conditions that any system we looked at had to meet. One of my aims in writing these was to  avoid chasing after some mythical … Continue reading Requirements for online exam system

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Some time back we started looking for an online exam system for some of our computer science exams. Part of the process was to list a set of “acceptance criteria,” i.e. conditions that any system we looked at had to meet. One of my aims in writing these was to  avoid chasing after some mythical ‘perfect’ system, and focus on finding one that would meet our needs. Although the headings below differ, as a system for high stakes assessment the overarching requirements were security, reliability, scalability, which are reflected below.

Having these criteria were useful in reaching a consensus decision when there was no ‘perfect’ system.

Security:

  • Only authorised staff (+ external examiners) to have access before exam time.
  • Only authorised staff and students to have access during exams.
  • Only authorised staff (+ external examiners) to have access to results.
  • Authorised staff and external examiners  to have only the level of access they need, no more.
  • Software must be kept up-to-date and patched in a timely fashion
  • Must track and report all access attempts
  • Must not rely on security by obscurity.
  • Secure access must not depend on location.

Audit:

  • Provide suitable access to internal checkers and external examiners.
  • Logging of changes to questions and exams would  be desirable.
  • It must be possible to set a point after which exams cannot be changed (e.g. once they are passed by checkers)
  • Must be able to check marking (either exam setter or other individual), i.e. provide clear reports on how each question was answered by each candidate.
  • Must be possible to adjust marking/remark if an error is found after the exam (e.g. if a mistake was made in setting the correct option for mcq, or if question was found to be ambiguous or too hard)

Pedagogy:

  • Must should be possible to reproduce content of previous CS electronic exams in similar or better format [this one turned out not to be  important]
  • Must be able to decide how many points to assign to each question
  • Desirable to have provision for alternate answers or insignificant difference in answers (e.g.  y=a*b, y=b*a)
  • Desirable to reproduce style of standard HW CS exam papers, i.e. four potentially multipart questions, with student able to choose which 3 to answer
  • Desirable to be possible to provide access to past papers on formative basis
  • Desirable to support formative assessment with feedback to students
  • Must be able to remove access to past papers if necessary.
  • Students should be able to practice with same (or very similar) system prior to exam
  • Desirable to be able to open up access to a controlled list of websites and tools (c.f. open book exams)
  • Should be able to use mathematical symbols in questions and answers, including student entered text answers.

Operational

  • Desirable to have programmatic transfer of staff information to assessment system (i.e. to know who has what role for each exam)
  • Must be able to transfer student information from student information system to assessment system (who sits which exam and at which campus).
  • Desirable to be able to transfer study requirements from student information system to assessment system (e.g. who gets extra time in exams)
  • Programmatic transfer student results from assessment system to student record systems or VLE (one is required)
  • Desirable to support import/export of tests via QTI.
  • Integration with VLE for access to past papers, mock exams, formative assessment in general (e.g. IMS LTI)
  • Hardware & software requirements for test taking must be compatible with PCs we have (at all campuses and distance learning partners).
  • Set up requirements for labs in which assessments are taken must be within capabilities of available technical staff at relevant centre (at all campuses and distance learning partners).
  • Lab infrastructure* and servers must be able to operate under load of full class logging in simultaneously (* at all campuses and distance learning partners)
  • Must have adequate paper back up at all stages, at all locations
  • Must be provision for study support exam provision (e.g. extra time for some students)
  • Need to know whether there is secure API access to responses.
  • API documentation must be open and response formats open and flexible.
  • Require support helpline / forum / community.
  • Timing of release of encryption key

Other

  • Costs. Clarify how many students would be involved, what this would cost.

 

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Three resources for custom metadata in WordPress

When developing WordPress for use as a CMS one approach I have used is to create a custom post type for each type of resource and custom metadata boxes for relevant properties of those types.  I’ve used that approach when exploring the possibility of using WordPress as a semantic web platform to edit schema.org metadata, when building course … Continue reading Three resources for custom metadata in WordPress

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When developing WordPress for use as a CMS one approach I have used is to create a custom post type for each type of resource and custom metadata boxes for relevant properties of those types.  I’ve used that approach when exploring the possibility of using WordPress as a semantic web platform to edit schema.org metadata, when building course information pages for students and am doing so again in updating some work I did on WordPress as a lightweight repository.  Registering a custom post type is pretty straightforward, follow the example in the codex page, I found handling custom metadata boxes a little more difficult. Here are three resources that helped.

Doing it long hand

It’s a few years old, but I found Justin Tadlock’s Smashing Magazine article How To Create Custom Post Meta Boxes In WordPress really useful as a clear and informative tutorial. It was invaluable in understanding how metaboxes work. If I had only wanted one or two simple text custom metadata fields then coding them myself would be an option, but I found a couple of problems. Firstly, I was repeating the same code too many times. Secondly when I thought about wanting to store dates or urls or links to other posts, with suitable user interface elements and data validation, I could see the amount of code needed was only going to increase. So I looked to see whether any better programmers than I had created anything I could use.

Using a helper plugin

I found two plugins that promised to provide a framework to simplify the creation of metaboxes. These are not plugins that provide anything that the end user can see directly, rather they provide functions that can be used in theme an plugin development. They both reduce the work of creating a metabox down to creating an array with the properties you want the metabox to have. They both introduce a dependency on code I cannot maintain, which is something I am always cautious about in using third-party plugins, but it’s much more viable than the alternative of creating such code from scratch and maintaining it myself.

CMB2 is “a metabox, custom fields, and forms library for WordPress that will blow your mind.” It is free and open source, with development hosted on GitHub.  It seems quite mature (version 1.0 was in Nov 2013), with a large installation base and decent amount of current activity on github.

Meta Box is “a powerful, professional developer toolkit to create custom meta boxes and custom fields for WordPress.” It too is free and released under GPL2 licence, but there are paid-for extensions (also GPL2 licensed) and I don’t see any open source development (I may not have looked in the right place).  Meta box has been around for a couple of years, is regularly updated and has a very large user base. The paid-for extensions give me some hope that the developers have a sustainable business model, but a worry that maybe ‘free’ doesn’t include the one function that at sometime I will really need. Well, developers cannot live on magic beans so I wouldn’t mind paying.

In the end both plugins worked well, but Meta Box allows the creation of custom fields for a link from one post to another, which I didn’t see in CMB2. That’s what I need for a metadata field to say that the author of the book described in one post is a person described in another.

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Cloning WordPress sites for development

I do just enough theme and plugin development on WordPress to need an alternative to using a live WordPress site for development and testing, but at the same time I want to be testing on site as similar to the live site as possible. So I set up clones of WordPress sites either on my local … Continue reading Cloning WordPress sites for development

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I do just enough theme and plugin development on WordPress to need an alternative to using a live WordPress site for development and testing, but at the same time I want to be testing on site as similar to the live site as possible. So I set up clones of WordPress sites either on my local machine or a server for development and testing. (Normally I have clones on the localhost server of couple of machines I use for development and another clone on a web accessible testing or staging server for other people to look at.) I don’t do this very often, but each time I do it I spend as much time trying to remember what it is I need to do as it actually takes to do it. So here, as much as an aide-memoire for myself as anything, else I’ve gathered it all in one place. What I do is largely based on the Moving WordPress information in the codex, but there are a couple of things that doesn’t cover and a couple of things I find it easier to do differently.

Assuming that the pre-requisites for WordPress are in place (i.e. MySQL, webserver, PHP), there are three stages to creating a clone. A. copy the WordPress files to the development site; B. clone the database; C. fix the links between WordPress and the database for the new site. A and B are basically creating backup copies of your site, but you will want to make sure that whatever routine backups you use are up to date and ready to restore in case something goes wrong. Also, this assumes that you are notwant to clone just one site on a WordPress Multisite installation.

Copying the WordPress files

Simply copy all the files from the folder you have WordPress installed in, and all the sub-folders to where you want the new site to be. This will mean that all the themes, plugins and uploaded media will be the same on both sites. Depending on whether the development site is on the same server as the main site I do this either with file manager or by making a compressed archive and ftp. Make sure the web server can read the files on the dev site (and write to the relevant folders if that is how you upload media, plugins and themes).

Cloning the database

First I create a new, blank database on for the new site, either from the command line or using something like MySQL Database Wizard which my hosting provider has on CPanel. I create a new user with full access to that data base–the username and password for this user will be needed to configure WordPress with access to this database. If you have complete control of over the database name and user name then use the same name username and password as is in the wp-config.php file of the site you are cloning. Otherwise you can change these later.

Second, I use PHP MyAdmin to export the data base from the original site and import it to the one on which you are making a clone.

phpMyAdmin Export screen

Fix all the bits that break

All that remains is to reconnect the PHP files to the database and fix a few other things that break. This is where it get fiddly. Also, from now on be really careful about which site you are working on: they look the same and you really don’t want to set up your public site as a development server. Make all these changes on the new development site.

In wp-config.html (it’s in the top of the WordPress folder hierarchy) find the following lines and change the values to be those for your new development server and database.

define( 'WP_CONTENT_URL', 'http://example.org/blog' );
define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', 'path/to/wp-content' );

define('DB_NAME', 'databaseName');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'databaseUserName');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password');

You might also need to change the value for DB_HOST

Then you need to change the options that WordPress stores in the database. Normally you do this through the WordPress admin interface, but this is not yet available on your new site. There are various ways you can do this, I change the url directly in the data base with PHPMyAdmin, either by direct editing as described in the codex page or from the command line as described here.

mysql -u root -p

USE databaseName
SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'home';
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value="http://example.org/blog" WHERE option_name = "home";
SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'siteurl';
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value="http://example.org/blog" WHERE option_name = "siteurl";

You should now have access to the new cloned site, though some things will still be misbehaving.

You will probably have the old site’s URL in various posts and GUIDs. I use the better search replace plugin to fix these.

iesiesIf you do any fancy redirects with .htaccess, make sure that these are written in such a way that works for the new URL.

If you are using Jetpack you will need to use it in safe mode if the development server is connected to the web or development mode if running on localhost. (This is a bit of a pain if you want to test Jetpack settings.)

On a development site you’ll probably want to add this to wp-config.php:

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

If you are running a development or testing server on a web accessible site you probably want to restrict who has access to it. I use the My private site plugin so that only site admins have access.

Keeping in sync

While it’s not entirely necessary that a development or testing site be kept completely in sync with the main one, it is worth keeping them close so that you don’t get unexpected issues on the main site. You can manually update the plugins and themes, and use the wordpress export / import plugins to transfer new content from the live site to the clone. Every now and again you might want to re-clone the site afresh. Something I find useful for development and testing of new plugins and themes is to have the plugin or theme directory that I am developing in set up as a git repository linked to github and keep files in sync with git push and git pull.

Anything else?

I think that is it. If I have forgotten anything or if you have tips on making any of this easier please leave a comment.

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LRMI at #DCMI16 Metadata Summit, Copenhagen

I was in Copenhagen last week, at the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative 2016 conference, where I ran a workshop entitled “Building on Schema.org to describe learning resources” (as one of my colleagues pointed out, thinking of the snappy title never quite happened). Here’s a quick overview of it. There were three broad parts to the workshop: presentations … Continue reading LRMI at #DCMI16 Metadata Summit, Copenhagen

I was in Copenhagen last week, at the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative 2016 conference, where I ran a workshop entitled “Building on Schema.org to describe learning resources” (as one of my colleagues pointed out, thinking of the snappy title never quite happened). Here’s a quick overview of it.

There were three broad parts to the workshop: presentations on the background organisations and technology; presentations on how LRMI is being used; and a workshop where attendees got to think about what could be next for LRMI.

Fundamentals of Schema.org and LRMI

An introduction to Schema.org (Richard Wallis)

A brief history of Schema.org, fast becoming a de facto vocabulary for structured web data for sharing with search engines and others to understand interpret and load into their knowledge graphs. Whist addressing the issue of simple structured markup across the web it is also through its extension capabilities facilitating the development of sector specific enhancement that will be widely understood.

An Introduction to LRMI (Phil Barker)

A short introduction to the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, originally a project which developed a common metadata framework for describing learning resources on the web. LRMI metadata terms have been added to Schema.org. The task group currently works to support those terms as a part of Schema.org and as a DCMI community specification.

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Use of LRMI

Overview of LRMI in the wild  (Phil Barker)

The results of a series of case studies looking at initial implementations are summarised, showing that LRMI metadata is used in various ways not all of which are visible to the outside worlds. Estimates of how many organisations are using LRMI properties in publicly available websites and pages, and some examples are shown.

The Learning Registry and LRMI (Steve Midgley)

The learning registry is a new approach to capturing, connecting and sharing data about learning resources available online with the goal of making it easier for educators and students to access the rich content available in our ever-expanding digital universe. This presentation will explain what the Learning Registry is, how it is used and how it used LRMI / Schema.org metadata. This will include what has been learned about structuring, validating and sharing LRMI resources, including expressing alignments to learning standards, validation of json-ld and json-schema.

[On the day we failed to connect to Steve via skype, but here are his slides that we missed]

What next for LRMI?

I presented an overview of nine ideas that LRMI could prioritise for future work. These ideas were the basis for a balloon debate, which I will summarise in more detail in my next post.

 

 

Why is there no LearningResource type in schema.org?

A couple of times in the last month or so the question of why isn’t there a LearningResource type in schema.org as a subtype of CreativeWork. In case it comes up again, here’s my answer. We took a deliberate decision way back at the start of LRMI not to define a LearningResource as a subtype … Continue reading Why is there no LearningResource type in schema.org?

A couple of times in the last month or so the question of why isn’t there a LearningResource type in schema.org as a subtype of CreativeWork. In case it comes up again, here’s my answer.

We took a deliberate decision way back at the start of LRMI not to define a LearningResource as a subtype of CreativeWork. Essentially the problem comes when you try to define what is a Learning Resource. Everyone who has tried so far has come up with something like “a resource which is used in learning, education or training”. That doesn’t rule out anything. Whether a magazine like Germany’s Spiegel is a learning resource depends on whether you are a German speaker or an American studying German. In presentations I have compared this problem to that of defining “what is a seat”. You can get seats in all shapes and forms with many different characteristics: chairs, sofas, saddles, stools; so in the end you just have to say a seat is something you sit on. Rather than rehash the problem of deciding what is and isn’t a learning resource, we took the approach of providing a way by which people can describe the educational properties of any Creative Work.

We recognised that there are some “types” of resource that are specific for learning. You can sensibly talk about textbooks and instructional videos as being are qualitatively different to novels and the movies people watch in the cinema, without denying that novels and movies are useful in education. That’s why we have the learningResourceType property. You can think of this as describing the educational genre of the resource.

In practice there are two choices for searching for learning resources. You can search those sites that are curated collections of what someone has decided are educational resources. Or you can search for the educational properties you want. So in our attempt at creating a Google Custom Search Engine we looked for the AlignmentObject. Looking for the presence of a learningResourceType would be another way. The educationalUse property should likewise be a good indicator.