Use the Metadata and set our children free!

August 6, 2011

In an earlier post I wrote about the emergence of a new UX for personalized learning called Learning Maps and how they will sit at the nexus of content, performance data and diagnostics for individual learners and study groups.  One of the enabling components which will make that nexus possible is a more consistent approach to metadata and metadata’s contextual wrapper, paradata, (a topic I just blogged on and which @stevemidgley is a key sponsor of at DOE)

Recently @BrandtRedd and I have collaborated to underwrite a partnership between the Association of Education Publishers and Creative Commons on their publication of a lightweight extension to schema.org – the Open Search collaborative recently launched by Google Bing and Yahoo and which is intended to accelerate markup of the web’s pages in ways recognized by the major search providers.  In an exercise in mutual self-interest, it is our hope that early adoption of a schema extension can drive an improvement in the search experience for educational resources while giving OER and commercial publishers sufficient incentive to stay the course as a result of the improved UX the extension will help them to deliver to their customers (and yes, in some cases advertisers, as a result).

Our investment in a new and lightweight schema represents one of the 4 building blocks necessary to create a vibrant, competitive market of high-quality resources for personalized learning (the other three being learning maps, data and identity interop, and APIs for learning orchestration)

You can read more about the extension effort here and I will be blogging shortly on the improvements in UX we can expect as a result of the introduction of schema.org and its purposeful leveraging of HTML5 and CSS3