JohnsBlog

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.

Personalising learning – allowing the learner to learn whatever, however and whenever they want to learn – has got to be a good thing, right? Well, maybe not. In his 2002 article MyUniversity.com? Cass Sunstein argues that too much personalisation could have consequences that are bad not only for learning, but also for a diverse, democratic society.

Sunstein’s argument is twofold. First, if students are set free to filter out the content they find unfamiliar or unsettling, focusing only on what they think in advance they want to learn, they will actually miss out on the richest learning opportunities. Those

unanticipated encounters involving topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating, are central to education, democracy, and even to freedom itself.

Second, if every learner is free to construct their own personalised learning experience, a vital social dimension to the learning is lost. Knowledge risks becoming individualised and fragmented, with no common set of reference points for learners and educators to coalesce around. Sunstein believes that

Citizens, including members of educational institutions, should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences … people will find it increasingly hard to understand one another. (Sunstein, 2002)

I think Sunstein is about 75% right. It’s true that without a shared set of reference points, without those unexpected encounters, learning can barely happen at all. And he’s right to suggest that the current preoccupation with personalisation – the desire for everything to revolve around ‘me’ – is related to a more generalised consumer-individualism: the idea that we have the right to purchase whatever we want, from anywhere in the world, whatever the cost, in order to construct a unique persona for ourselves.

And yet, and yet…

There’s a more positive way of looking at personalisation in learning which Sunstein perhaps overlooks. Not as filtering out the unfamiliar, not as the fragmenting of collective experience, but simply as an increase in the individual learner’s control over the learning experience. Any cognitive or constructivist approach to education requires the learner to be an active partner in the process, and that in turn implies scope for decision-making and the expression of personal preference by the learner. If educators hope to produce independent learners, they must first give learners some independence.

And there’s a crucial aspect of online learning that Sunstein has not taken into account: community. Properly understood, eLearning is a networked activity, with dialogue between a community of learners (and teachers) at its heart: such a dialogue presupposes, and could not take place without, a common core of learning content and a shared set of learning experiences.

My current OU course exemplifies this. H806 consists of a core of texts, themes, modules and assignments which all students must engage with in order to complete the course; but at the same time gives students a great deal of choice about which learning objects to focus on, and enormous latitude in how they relate the new ideas to their personal experience, in what to read, and in how to express and record their learning. H806 also, and crucially, consists of a community of learners who continuously share their experience, their knowledge and their insights in various online communities – communities where students’ diverse professional and cultural backgrounds are a regular source of different views, new knowledge, challenged assumptions, and unanticipated encounters.

At its powerful best, eLearning can be both personal and communal.
…
Sunstein C, 2002. MyUniversity.com? Personalized Education and Personalized News. EDUCAUSE Review Volume 37, Number 5, September/October 2002. Available online @ http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MyUniversitycomPersonaliz/40359?time=1209199791

Certainly it’s perceived to be a serious and growing one. One recent survey, by Northumbria Learning, found that half UK HE students believed their tutors would fail to spot work that had been plagiarised from the internet; while another, by the Times Higher Educational Supplement, found that 1 in 10 students had attempted to find model essays online. JISC, the UK HE technology advice and research body, has set up an Internet Plagiarism Advice Service and will be holding its third International Plagiarism Conference later this year. A JISC report suggested that student plagiarism was “common and probably becoming more so”; Oxford University has suggested that internet plagiarism was becoming so rife that the reputation of its degrees was in danger of being undermined; and Google has responded to these fears by banning adverts from the so-called ‘online essay mills’.

On the back of these concerns, plagiarism prevention has become highly profitable, with 90% of UK universities – more in north America – paying to use plagiarism-detection software, mostly using a package called Turnitin from US company Plagiarism.org, which uses a smart search of possible online sources combined with textual analysis of assignments using a rapidly growing database of past students’ work.

However there is little solid data supporting this perceived explosion of copying-and-pasting from the internet. Closer reading of the THES survey for example suggests that the overwhelming majority of student copying is done not online but offline from friends, and that only a tiny percentage of students – 3% – are copying wholesale chunks of text.

It’s not easy for academics to stand out against the plagiarism panic, but a few do. Barry Dahl, VP of Technology and Distance Learning at Lake Superior College, Minnesota, maintains there’s no evidence supporting the assertion that online plagiarism is more prevalent (it’s merely that online students get caught more than traditional students) and that plagiarism detection software is both a gross infringement of student intellectual property rights, and less effective than intelligent use of Google (see Turnitin Sucks).

And Steven Heppell, Professor of New Media Practice at Bournemouth University and UK government advisor on education and technology, thinks at least some of academia’s plagiarism concerns are the result of industrial-age thinking about learning as information transfer, students “learning stuff’ and then being tested to see how much of it has been absorbed. He points out in his weblog that

One huge impact of ubiquitous [internet] technology is to move information towards being a free good. So much information, so many providers. All the heated debates about IPR and plagiarism fall away with the realisation that, like Technology, Information is everywhere… (Play to Learn, Learn to Play, 20/10/2007)

In a learning environment where Google, Wikipedia and the social web have made virtually all information public, free, and collective in nature, the idea of information ownership begins to lose its meaning. Perhaps plagiarism too.