On metadata

We’ve been asked to think this week about the importance of metadata in eLearning. In his introduction to the metadata study theme, Martin Weller focuses on its role in making learning resources transparent and findable:

It is [its] potential to make resources more accessible to effective searching and the subsequent promotion of content reuse that makes metadata significant for learning.
(H806-08/Connected learning in practice/Metadata)

Vital as this identifying and labeling role is, however, I think Martin’s formulation understates the significance of metadata for educators and learners.

Properly understood, the term metadata encompasses more than just the web-standard header tags (title, description, keywords, script, creation date) that virtually every web page carries, or even the more comprehensive or specialised metadata sets such as Dublin Core or the UK Learning Object Metadata set. Every hyperlink on the web is a statement of relationship between data at the anchor location and data at the target location. Every online database or directory which helps to organise and categorise the web depends upon a pre-defined taxonomy which, again, describes relationships between different bits of data. Every user-generated tag describes someone’s individual take on the significance of a particular set of data. And Google’s regularly-updated back-up of the entire world wide web, stored for indexing purposes on half-a-million servers at Mountain View, California, is arguably the mother of all metadata sets.

Metadata is woven in to the fabric of the web. If eLearning is learning that takes place online and interactively, then metadata is what makes it possible.

Metadata and learning meet in a theoretical convergence zone. The act of writing metadata is one of stepping back from the immediate experience, considering and interrogating it. It involves asking questions like:

• What sort of data is this?
• What are the key points, and how could it be summarised?
• What is its internal structure?
• What other data does it relate to, and how?
• What conceptual patterns, categories or hierarchies does it fit into?

The act of metadata-making, in other words, is an act of metacognition. It is an act of reflection, which is agreed by virtually all learning theorists – from Dewey and Habermas, through Kolb and Schon to Boud and Moon – to be central to all but the most surface kind of learning.

Metadata is not just about indexing and locating learning objects. It is at the heart of learning itself.