JohnsBlog

Blended Learning’s contribution to the eLearning discussion is a simple one. It forcefully makes the point that delivering learning online is a pragmatic not a dogmatic solution, that eLearning works fine in a mixed economy of learning, and that it doesn’t replace but supplements traditional modes of delivery. This point may seem obvious from the standpoint of 2008, but six or seven years ago it needed to be got across to educators, and BL performed that function.

(It’s for this reason that Blended Learning is best understood as simply a mix of on- and offline learning delivery. This definition clarifies BL’s place in the eLearning landscape, whereas other definitions that have been suggested – such as the blending of distinct web-based modes, or the blending of pedagogical approaches – actually obfuscate BL’s role.)

A blended approach makes sense in many scenarios because some types of learning simply ARE best delivered face-to-face: children will always need some physical schooling; learning ceramics, taekwondo or CPR will always demand hands-on teaching. eLearning in turn can help wherever learners are geographically dispersed, or on the move, or having to fit their learning around their work or domestic obligations – as well as putting enormously powerful exploration, research, communication and community-support tools into the hands of learners themselves.

There are cost factors to be balanced here too. eLearning can have high fixed costs, especially if sophisticated learning objects or simulations are involved, and so may only be cost-effective where there are large numbers of learners or where courses have a long shelf-life. Face-to-face sessions on the other hand may appear inexpensive to run but do not scale up well and will always carry high variable costs in the form of transport and accommodation overheads. A blended learning approach which combined high eLearning fixed costs with high face-to-face variable costs would be difficult to justify from a cost-effectiveness point of view.

We’ve been asked to think this week about the importance of metadata in eLearning. In his introduction to the metadata study theme, Martin Weller focuses on its role in making learning resources transparent and findable:

It is [its] potential to make resources more accessible to effective searching and the subsequent promotion of content reuse that makes metadata significant for learning.
(H806-08/Connected learning in practice/Metadata)

Vital as this identifying and labeling role is, however, I think Martin’s formulation understates the significance of metadata for educators and learners.

Properly understood, the term metadata encompasses more than just the web-standard header tags (title, description, keywords, script, creation date) that virtually every web page carries, or even the more comprehensive or specialised metadata sets such as Dublin Core or the UK Learning Object Metadata set. Every hyperlink on the web is a statement of relationship between data at the anchor location and data at the target location. Every online database or directory which helps to organise and categorise the web depends upon a pre-defined taxonomy which, again, describes relationships between different bits of data. Every user-generated tag describes someone’s individual take on the significance of a particular set of data. And Google’s regularly-updated back-up of the entire world wide web, stored for indexing purposes on half-a-million servers at Mountain View, California, is arguably the mother of all metadata sets.

Metadata is woven in to the fabric of the web. If eLearning is learning that takes place online and interactively, then metadata is what makes it possible.

Metadata and learning meet in a theoretical convergence zone. The act of writing metadata is one of stepping back from the immediate experience, considering and interrogating it. It involves asking questions like:

• What sort of data is this?
• What are the key points, and how could it be summarised?
• What is its internal structure?
• What other data does it relate to, and how?
• What conceptual patterns, categories or hierarchies does it fit into?

The act of metadata-making, in other words, is an act of metacognition. It is an act of reflection, which is agreed by virtually all learning theorists – from Dewey and Habermas, through Kolb and Schon to Boud and Moon – to be central to all but the most surface kind of learning.

Metadata is not just about indexing and locating learning objects. It is at the heart of learning itself.