Rocket Science

At the Technology For Education 2009 conference in Bangalore, India there were a number of presentations that have caused me a sense of deja vu (and not just in me, I was at the meeting with Vijay Kumar and he agreed as well).

There are professors talking about the technology they’re using for education, and probably some of them really, really believe they’re doing something new and exciting. But, are they really?

One of the first presentations was about learning objects and metadata. I think it’s 2009, but the presentation was back from the days of 2001 or 2002. Frankly, I’m surprised folks are still talking about learning objects, and the metadata standards used to describe them in the way the speaker did.

Photo Credit: milsom

Metadata = Sleep

Times change, or maybe the world changes–the notions of social media, folksonomies, communities and crowdsourcing didn’t widely exist in 1997 when we started with learning objects and metadata. Or, maybe we recognize better ways to achieve the same outcomes–combining automatic metadata generation, with crowdsourcing to help users better find and use online learning resources.

(Full disclosure, I helped author the IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard. I think that the standard has great value in describing resources. But it’s biggest value is for systems to communicate between systems and for systems to use internally to describe resources.)

Or, maybe, as researchers, we’ve just forgotten how to do literature reviews and learn from the past. But that’s a topic for another post.

I’m halfway through my marathon two-week, around the world trip. I’m not dead yet, but I think I flew over it sometime on Saturday/Sunday.

I gave three presentations (2009 Technology for Education Workshop, Microsoft Research India and IEEE Computer Society Bangalore Section) while in India, basically the same one–but in three different durations. First was 20 minutes, then 5 minutes and then an hour. Needless to say by the third one, I had things down pat.

My presentation to the IEEE-CS Bangalore Section was also the best presentation of the three–I was able to spend the time to present the material, and got great questions from the audience. I’m really annoyed at myself that I didn’t record the presentation, it would have made a great slidecast.

I’m embedding the first presentation, the one with a slidecast, below.