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.

In Diffusion of Innovations (core reading for H807 and a social science classic) Everett Rogers identifies compatibility as a key factor in the rate of spread of new technologies. Rogers means that to be successful, an innovation must not seem so alien to existing practice that people can’t imagine themselves using it. There needs to be a hint of continuity in among the newness.

Sometimes though, this need for compatibility has strange, backward-looking consequences which very nearly seem to cancel out the benefits of the innovation. Consider the fax machine, which became ubiquitous in offices in the 1980s and 90s. You start off with a digital document on a computer, but – instead of sending it directly down a telephone line – you make an analogue copy by printing it, then convert it back to digital by scanning it into the fax, send that down a telephone line, then at the other end convert it back again to an analogue form which is less useful than the digital document it started out as! The sole point of this wasteful round-about seems to have been to generate the familiar pieces of paper that office workers were used to.

From an ethnographic point of view, such behaviour looks almost like the cargo cults of Pacific islanders who fetishized the technologies of the first Europeans they encountered and made radios out of coconut shells and straw. Such misunderstood objects are described by sociologists as boundary objects: objects which mark the boundary between cultures, between conceptual worlds, only dimly understood because of their place at the periphery of what is known.

I’d argue that the CD-ROM, which as Martin Weller points out was once hyped as “the new papyrus” (Weller M, 2002), is another example of a boundary object, a digital instance of non-digital thinking. Think about it: you invest a lot of time and money making multimedia, interactive content which (if placed online) could be easily updated and distributed virtually free to anyone online; then you seal it into a piece of plastic so it can never be updated and becomes difficult and costly to distribute! Such crackpottery can surely only be explained in terms of an inability to escape from the model of the printed book which has been our main means of distributing knowledge these last 600 years.

That, plus a weird obsession with plastic.

Weller M, 2002. Delivering Learning on the Net. RoutledgeFalmer