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Is It Time for a Moratorium on Metadata?

Scott Leslie from Ed Tech Post points to this "great article by Dick Bulterman titled "Is it Time for a Metadata Moratorium".

Bulterman says "For nontext data - such as video, images, audio, and so on - direct mining is difficult, but exactly at the point that metadata might be useful, manual creation simply doesn't get done because creating useful metadata descriptions (the proverbial thousands of words) is not in the critical path of content creation."

Haven't read the article (it's queued for printing, but a couple of breakfast time thoughts occur. It is pretty obvious that metadata is not working. I struggle to think up apposite key words for straightforward papers - let alone multiple metadata fields reflecting the complexities of multi faceted learning materials. Furthermore I stick to my contention that most learning materials have always been and will continue to be created by teachers and trainers. They simply do not see metadata creation as a part of their everyday work.

Solutions?

• Simplify the required metadata to say the extended Dublin core. OK - but we said we needed all these fields in the first place - are we now saying they are not necessary?
• Get someone else to do the metadata thing e.g. librarians. Problem here is that to be effective metadata has to reflect the use of the materials - not just the creators intention.
• Deploy agents to fill in parts of the metadata- interesting but I still doubt that software can be that clever.
• Develop distributed metadata - reflecting the use of education materials - this is the most promising answer but still some way off being effective.

My other big worry in who is to use the metadata. Or, putting it slightly differently - who is it for. Up to now most educational metadata is for teachers - to help them find and sequence learning experiences for students. Yet - if we accept the idea that as Scott Wilson asserts - the VLE of the future will be learner oriented - then learners themselves will have a pretty big say in what learning material they access to use. My guess is that in many situations they already do - despite the attempts of many VLEs and LMS systems to 'control' learning.

This implies a completely different take on what sort of metadata might be available or useful.