{"id":321,"date":"2011-09-16T11:30:05","date_gmt":"2011-09-16T11:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/managingtoteach.org\/?p=321"},"modified":"2011-09-16T11:30:05","modified_gmt":"2011-09-16T11:30:05","slug":"how-can-we-make-online-educational-content-findable-and-usable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/?p=321","title":{"rendered":"How can we make online educational content findable and usable?\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

How can we make online educational content findable and usable?\u00a0 Albert Einstein famously said that \u201ceverything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.\u201d\u00a0 Let\u2019s assume that using requires finding.\u00a0 One way to make this question a little simpler, we would ask how can content be findable?\u00a0 (We can then answer what makes content \u2018usable\u2019 some other time.)\u00a0\u00a0 This question was recently asked by DigitalPromise<\/a> To be more concrete, how can a teacher or student (or parent) find the content that is available about a topic they are interested in teaching and\/or learning about?\u00a0\u00a0 To be even more concrete, if a student needs to learn about volcanoes, how can their teacher find material for them that is available, how can they find it for themselves?\u00a0 These are the questions that get close to making that information usable in the context of a structures educational system.<\/p>\n

At first, locating digital content might seem like a matter for a search engine (type in \u201cvolcanoes\u201d) and tons of material is listed.\u00a0 But, how much of those millions of URLs has the right stuff for a given student?\u00a0 Well, we need to know what grade the student is in and what part of volcanoes the student and other students in a class need to know about.\u00a0 Do they need to see pictures of eruptions or understand about plate tectonics or some other aspect?\u00a0 Are they in a state that has science content arranged into learning progressions?\u00a0 Are they answering big questions about the earth\u2019s movement?\u00a0 All of these are questions that help to focus and narrow the search for content.\u00a0 The key for this activity to be efficient and directed rather than random and likely inefficient involves the learning goals for this student. \u00a0The learning goals can also be called standards, content standards, learning progressions, objectives and other terms.\u00a0 Let\u2019s just call them content standards for now even though to say \u201ccontent\u201d can be pretty limiting from an educational sense.\u00a0 And then the key here is to embed the content standards into the digital infrastructure to support searching for content and other supports such as assessment items.<\/p>\n

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Content standards have been in digital forms since the 1980s when publishers of standards (see AAAS Benchmarks for Science Literacy for an exemplar<\/a>) began to publish documents that describe the standards and how they relate to each other.\u00a0 Anyone who spends even a little time with standards documents might quickly realize that these are complex texts with a lot of information.\u00a0 Navigating them is not trivial and they are the product of many hours of expert work.\u00a0 Individual statements are often rich with condensed instructional detail.\u00a0 They often relate to each other in strands.\u00a0 They use special terms or terms that they may have heard, but that have special meaning in the context of the standard (ex: \u201cuplift\u201d and \u201cbedrock\u201d).\u00a0 When we consider that standards are likely to also relate to the work students are assigned and examples of the work they, each standard statement is like a microcosm of educational possibilities.\u00a0 Putting them into a digital form that is reusable across different contexts and that could be used for searching is not trivial.\u00a0 It is not trivial.<\/p>\n

An important first step has been taken by the Global Learning Resources Connection (GLRC)<\/a> that has funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Department of Education, and many corporate and non-profit partners.\u00a0 GLRC is using semantic web <\/a>technology and has developed an international approach.\u00a0 This makes sense as a large number of educational topics are not specific to a region.\u00a0 Part of the appeal of GLRC is in its simplicity.\u00a0 It uses a mainstream method of information representation that should be able to be integrated into search engines and other types of resources easily.\u00a0 It also has the advantage of a head start on this problem and years of experience with it.\u00a0 At the same time, the type of tools educators may need in the future can be different from the ones we have needed in the past.\u00a0 Tools for locating educational resources seem to be rich with challenges and questions about how to get the right information to students when they need it.<\/p>\n

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How can we make online educational content findable and usable?\u00a0 Albert Einstein famously said that \u201ceverything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8,6,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}