Placeholding: Location-Specific Metadata and Context for Open Content

Presenters
Amee Godwin, Program Director, ISKME / OER Commons
Leslie Rule, Project Supervisor, Digital Storytelling Initiative, KQED

In Brief
Blended learning, incorporating online and mobile interactivity, allows learners to tap into a collective knowledge base from nearly any location. The process of creating and annotating educational content with geo-located tags, or metadata, will be explored within the context of localization. Participants will create an example of open geo-located media

Abstract
Localization of Open Educational Resources (OER) is an expanding set of approaches in which users of content, whether teachers or learners, can adapt content to meet their local needs. The practices involved in teaching and learning are taking advantage of technological, legal, and cultural developments to transition from traditional to blended models. Traditional classroom learning is taking creative inspiration from activities often first forged in informal educational settings, and promoted by passionate explorers and lifelong learners, such as amateurs, artists, or researchers.

The OER movement also involves tapping into and building a shareable knowledge base using new technological, legal, and cultural developments. Through an iterative process of involving content creators, practitioners, and learners, educational content is enhanced by adding new context, which may be in the form of tags or entirely new derivative works. Passing the skills and tools for content creation to students is one example of education joining the ranks of the web 2.0 amateur production paradigm. Through their comments and tags, OER contextualizers pass on important information in the form of metadata to enhance content for future users.

A key element of context to consider is exactly where OER are being created, used, or adapted. Geographical markers and location-based data are examples of specific contextual information that can make OER more relevant, reusable, and engaging. Some content, such as scientific or historical investigations, depend upon locative media and location-specific data. New technologies and tools that gather and transmit geo-location metadata, for instance, through the use of digital cameras and cell phones, can be put into the hands of content creators, teachers, and students to supplement content with specific place-related data. In this way, OER localization is a continual process drawing on the use of available tools and metadata to create and adapt content with location-based context.

This session seeks to illustrate and get participants involved in this locative and localizing process through discussion, examples, and a participatory exercise to explore the potential of location-based open content. Drawing on real OER use case scenarios as collected through the facilitators’ research and work around OER use and reuse, the session will invite participants to step into a user role and contextualize and adapt content based on a set of location-specific parameters.

We will explore ways that open learning content may benefit from adding metadata such as global positioning coordinates, addresses, mapping files, curriculum standards, or embedding information in actual physical locations. We hope to take the process of contextualizing out of the realm of the abstract, by creating a concrete example of context for open teaching and learning content, in order to illustrate newly available forms of localization. We will create an example of geo-located media for a new OER. Through discussion, the session will seek to elucidate the elements that enable teachers and learners to keep content alive, relevant, and usable, and moreover, demonstrate a central role of location-based contextualization, and adding context to OER in general, in the iterative localization process.