The Telematics Project

Description of innovations in learning enabled by Technologies

Main users/beneficiaries: educators including practitioners and researchers, educational and cultural systems and the general public.

Summary

This project will accompany a museum acquisition process, determining critical criteria for the identification of ways of learning enabled by emerging technologies from the past 40 years. It will produce a taxonomy for the attributes of the (new) ways so a learner (or their agent) can ask such a question as: What is a new/good way of learning ‘x’, or ‘with technology y’? The taxonomy will be expressed as an interoperable metadata conforming to ISO/IEC 19788-1, the international standard Metadata for Learning Resources.

Explanation

Museum Victoria (MV) is acquiring the Sunrise Collection from Dr Liddy Nevile. It records 40 years related to emerging technologies. MV will digitise and archive the materials. The project proposed here will support a researcher engaging with that process for two years with a specific goal.

For decades, Sunrise work investigated what students do, can do, and maybe should do with new technologies. Over the years, many observations were recorded. Sunrise prioritised a radical question: Are better opportunities for individual learners enabled by the technology?

The researcher will examine the collection to find ways of describing the learning opportunities exemplified therein. The outcome, a taxonomy, will be expressed as properties conformant to ISO 19788-1 (Metadata for Learning Resources, MLR) and W3C Resource Description Framework standards. The Collection will be archived using the taxonomy which will also be submitted to Standards Australia and the ISO/IEC for adoption.

In the collection, there is a video of young children trying to model the flight of a tennis ball. They soon realise the ball does not deliberately turn somewhere but is constantly losing height. Why?

The video will be catalogued by the Museum in the usual way. But how and where is the new way of learning using coding, described? How will it link to similar activities? While there may be a search for devices, or applications, or learning-rich questions, values recorded using the taxonomy may be the most useful. That is, the metadata record may be what is wanted.

By definition, a catalogue/metadata record refers to a single object or a single collection. It may be in a variety of digital formats. This project envisages the use of artificial intelligence, made possible by what is here called the interoperability of the metadata, but actually reliant on the expression of information conformant to the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The MLR shows how to present individual metadata records of a wide range of types in sharable RDF. A single RDF record can be linked to many others, automatically, providing a network of information.

Outreach

The metadata developed by the project will be submitted to Standards Australia for approval to be presented to the International Standards Organisation. The project advisor, Dr Liddy Nevile, will present the draft standard to ISO SC36 and it will be subject to the ISO processes, hopefully emerging within 3 years as an international standard. As this standard will conform to ISO/IEC 19788-1, upon adoption it is most likely to be adopted for Australia, mandated for Europe, and useful to others.

Innovation

The researcher will determine descriptors to enable someone to find, understand, and possibly implement a new way of learning enabled by technology. They will use the new taxonomy to add to the cataloguing of the Collection as typically done by the Museum, both systems being compatible and thus interoperable.

The geometric learning referred to above may be called ‘syntonic geometry’. The concept, given whatever names as ‘label’ attributes, and description of its dependencies as attributes, such as the need for a robot and a suitable programming environment, and catalyst for its use, etc., is what will become an interoperable metadata record of a new way of learning. Such a record, containing descriptions of attributes of the conceptual new way, will itself be an identifiable resource and may be subject to description in metadata.

The attributes of the concept’s metadata record may be used in a discovery process. For example, when one is looking for a new way of learning using an animation application, that may be one of the search criteria.

In this project, in addition to working within the constraints to make this possible, the innovation of a standard for describing a concept such as ‘a way of learning’ breaks new ground, drawing on the work of the library world and how they relate books to original works, reproductions and more.

Explanation of Innovation

Many pedagogical descriptors are in use today but this standard will consider the resources from the perspective of the learner. The questions in focus will be: “What new ways of learning are enabled by this resource? how can they be found and used? to achieve what opportunities?” Separating the learner’s question from the teacher’s perspective builds on a significant body of research with respect to new technologies, led especially by the work at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory and the Institute of Education (London). The Sunrise collection relates closely to this work. Consideration of child-initiated learning activities, often outside the school context, are a feature of the Sunrise Collection even though techniques for their creation are still a major challenge for educators.

Being able to characterise attributes of the range of new ways of learning will enable interpretation of the collection, sharing of them and the ideas they offer, and future research based on empirical data. These outcomes are of interest to the Museum for other collections and educators world-wide. What is new about the work proposed is that a concept rather than an object, physical or digital, will be the focus. They can be named as one of their attributes

In previous work, creating a set of attributes for description of the accessibility attributes of a resource, without using them to describe a resource but instead the desired attributes, has taken many years to gain acceptance of the metadata community. To many, the model for metadata was the cataloguing of a book. Now, however, the practice has been endorsed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (ISO/IEC 15836), the Global Learning Initiative, and ISO/IEC (ISO/IEC 24751-1 and another standard not yet published).

How does it help Telematcis Trust?

The Telematics Trust’s mission is laudable but not trivial. Emerging technologies can be seductive. A new ‘smart’ technique may or may not make for new and valuable learning opportunities. In fact, one of the major discoveries in the 1980’s was that while it is very difficult to create an environment in which users will learn specific things, it is common through careful observation to discover very rich learning environments.

This project advances the TT’s goals for innovation in two ways. Making new ways of learning discoverable can support both the development of new ways of teaching and it represents a new way of using metadata.

New ways of learning are often the subject of literature or, in the case of the Sunrise Collection, raw data (audio and video files) showing children engaged in what might be described as new ways of learning.

Typically, metadata is used to describe a resource, much as a library catalogue used to describe a book. An innovation in metadata work is to provide descriptors of attributes of resources to enable discovery of resources.

The Sunrise collection of resources being acquired by Museum Victoria recognises and shares some local pioneering work from the last 40 years. Some activities took place within the Museum and some were funded by the Telematics Trust. Placing the participant in the Museum ….

Relating geometric ideas to children’s experience provides an example. Commanding a robot holding a pencil, or a trail-marking screen-based object, to REPEAT 3 [FORWARD 100 RIGHT-TURN 120] provides children with a learning prosthetic. They are isolated from the real-world effects of friction and momentum. Instead of using traditional Cartesian terminology and viewpoints, they use everyday language to engage with the same powerful ideas. Whatever the children are doing, perhaps ‘drawing’ images that otherwise would be beyond their dexterity, they inevitably encounter possibilities to challenge their current ideas.

The Museum will have access to a large collection of work so it wants to find ways to identify and make any significant contents both discoverable and accessible to the public. The outcome will be a cataloguing system, in internationally interoperable form, that can advertise the new collection, and make way for others in the future. It will focus on sharing information about learning opportunities, as opposed to or independent of, teaching practices. In fact, teaching is frequently involved, but indirectly in the creation of digital environments and tools, and often learners operate in unintended ways, revealing new possibilities.

Risks

Melbourne University research officers advise that it should not be hard to find a researcher to work for 2 years, given a stipend, a desk in the Museum and access to the Sunrise collection, and guidance. They may be a graduate student. The risk is that such a person may not be found, and an associated risk that the project may be delayed until that person is found. These are considered insignificant risks

New ways of learning do not happen simply because of the advances in the technology. The project focus is on the new possibilities for learners, anticipating new forms of teaching within and beyond schools. This means investigating the individuals’ experience. The Sunrise collection contains many documented examples of new possibilities but not how to describe them. Knowing this will amount to a significant contribution to education services.

The risk associated with this innovation is that the metadata community is not always receptive to metadata about abstract concepts, as is expected in this case. Nevertheless, it has been accepted recently (the new ISO/IEC standard for description of accessibility characteristics of resources will be used this way – see ISO/IEC 24751 and soon ISO/IEC…). This project will draw upon the expertise of Dr Liddy Nevile, co-editor of the ISO standards for accessibility and the standard for Metadata for Learning Resources. The risk is not considered likely to cause a problem.

If Museum Victoria can acquire the Sunrise collection and catalogue it in a way that will be of benefit broadly, Museum Victoria will have enabled other organisations dealing with new technologies. As is the case here, the new technology may not have continued to be undestood as new but, from the perspective of its time within the history of information technologies and today, it may have led to new ways of learning that are timeless.