TLRP Phase III: Towards an Integrated ICT Strategy

Patrick Carmichael

“Learning how to Learn”

http://www.learntolearn.ac.uk

The Learning how to Learn Project

Key features:

• Project Team of 15-20 in 4 separate institutions• Over 40 schools in 6 LEAs• Hundreds of teachers, thousands of students• 17 separate data collection instruments• Reflective diaries/logs maintained by key respondents • Classroom data including observation schedule data, audio, video,

interviews, paper resources• Outputs aimed at different audiences• Commitment to sustainability and ‘leaving things behind’.

The Project Website

• Not a traditional website – more a set of web ‘services’

• Has to address a number of roles:– provides information about the nature and scope of the project,

together with profiles of team members and contact information

– provision of materials for use by LEA and school coordinators as they support project development within their schools

– data collection via web forms particularly reflective diaries for school coordinators, ‘critical friends’ and other key respondents

– monitoring of non-electronic development and data collection

– project management and data analysis tools

– provision of exemplification of best practice in classroom assessment

• More on these roles in my paper on the website.

Tiers before Bedtime

• Central to our strategy was the development of an “n-Tiered data architecture” involving the separation of:

Data

Metadata

Logic

Presentation

Data Issues

• What combination of resources need to be available electronically?

• Does this differ for different users?

• Do these make any demands of users?

• Who is responsible for the collection, maintenance and monitoring of these resources?

Here are some of the answers I got within Learning how to Learn:

Some of the Learning how to Learn Data• Workshop materials

– Accessible to wide audience– Need to be platform-independent– Ready to print– Need to capable of adaptation and editing by users– Decision: use RTF files with minimum formatting, presented on the Web

as downloads and Zip files

• Headteacher Interviews– Access carefully controlled – Need to be printable to return to respondents and for quick review– To be analysed with Atlas/ti by multiple users within the team– Decision: Transcribed as RTF for quick review, then converted

(automatically) to formatted text for Atlas/ti, both available as web downloads

• and so on … (SPSS files, Excel Spreadsheets, log data, etc etc)

Data: Review

• What forms of data will necessarily be collected or exchanged in the course of your project? – Within the project team?– Between the project team and subjects/respondents?– Between the project team and other groups and audiences?

• What additional forms of data might be generated in the course of the project?

• Are choices of format and other approaches predetermined:– By the subjects of your research or their field?– By your project members current or prior work?– By other factors or influences?

Metadata Issues

• Transaction Objects– Borrowed from dynamic domains in which knowledge

exchange is a critical element• Financial Services• News Services

– Different from the documents and other assets we have just talked about:

• characteristically small ‘packets’ or ‘components’• although descriptive language may be verbose!• domain-specific and frequently ‘knowledge-laden’• may contain or be contained by other transaction objects• can be aggregated into other formats

Some Examples

• Financial Services:– stock quotes– exchange rates

• News Services:– headlines and summaries of news events– weather forecasts– sports results

• My daughter:– txt msgs whch cm 2 b impntrbl 2 ne1 llll

• Teachers:– Lesson plans? Weekly plans? ‘Bright Ideas’? ‘War Stories’?

What are our Transaction Objects?• We needed TO’s to help monitor and manage the project:

– bibliographical records

– log entries

– dates and times of events

– contact details for schools … and so on

• We also needed ways to describe, store, disseminate and facilitate the exchange of examples of classroom practice.– audio clips and video clips

– excepts from transcripts

– ‘strategies’, ‘anecdotes’ and other teacher knowledge

Review: Transaction Objects

• Does the domain of your project have identifiable ‘transaction objects’: or is this itself an area for debate?

• What transaction objects might you have to describe in order to enable knowledge exchange:– Within the project team?

– Between the project team and subjects/respondents?

– Between the project team and other groups and audiences?

• Try to think about ‘components’ rather than ‘documents’ or ‘webpages’.

• It’s always easier to aggregate than disaggregate!

Descriptive Frameworks

• Some descriptive metadata frameworks already exist:

dc Dublin Core bibliographical infomation

lom Learning Object Model learning sequences and resources

vcard vcard contact information

vcal vcalendar times, dates, events and repetitions

foaf Friend of a Friend personal relationships

cerif Common European Research Information Format

research activity

Descriptive Vocabularies

• As do some ‘constrained vocabularies’:– Dublin Core formats

– Ortelius (European research areas)

– National Curriculum Metadata Set

– vCal interval and repetition grammar

• So we have to identify both:– Framework

– Vocabulary

• The latter is – in some ways – more difficult!

More Tiers before Bedtime

A proposal for discussion -Tiered metadata:

• Tier 1:– Bibliographical Data: Dublin Core

– Project Descriptions (part): CERIF

– Personal Descriptions: FOAF

• Extended by: Tier 2:– Project Descriptions (part): TLRP Metadata Set

• Extended by: Tier 3:– Project-specific and domain specific vocabularies

• All ‘wrapped’ in a common interchange format (RDF)