Author: Stephen Downes
If this were a real book, I would have to eliminate the redundancies, correct awkward expressions, employ a consistent chapter scheme (including the provision of names for all the chapters), and locate (or at least explain the disappearance of) a certain section B in one of the papers.
If this were a real book, I would have to make it interesting. And rest assured, unless you are deeply interested in such topics as learning objects, metadata and content syndication, this will be to you one of the least interesting books of the year. For myself, I find these issues fascinating, and the issues surrounding them pressing. But I do not expect my enthusiasm to carry.
So why does this book exist at all? This is actually two questions: why does the book exist now, as a book, when it did not exist yesterday? And why did I engage in what amounts to a discourse on these topics in the first place?
The second question is easy. This afternoon I received an email from someone announcing a number of ‘discoveries’ consisting of some of the works contained below. And while on the one hand I was pleased that he had found the (to me) important works, on the other hand I was disappointed that he had missed them for so long, and still missed some crucial papers. But in the end, this is my fault, as my work is scattered across the four corners of the web. This book is something like an attempt to create an authoritative account of the last three years.
Which brings me to the second question: why bury one’s mind in such arcane matters at all?
In the first months of 2001 I accepted a research fellowship at the University of Melbourne where philosophy professor Tim van Gelder was attempting, like many professors, to put his course online. During the course of this work I explored the idea of making his courses available through learning management systems. On finding one roadblock after another, I concluded that the vision outlined in some of my earlier work was being hampered by a lack of vision of what could be realized by online learning.
In Australia, I wrote a paper that may be found below, The Learning Marketplace, in which I outlined the mechanics of a content syndication system. It drew on some of the concepts outlined in Learning Objects and Content Syndication and Online Learning. In bits and pieces over the next three years, I continued to fill in the details of the model. This book does not contain everything I wrote during that time – it is devoted solely to the topics of (as the title suggests) meaning, metadata and content syndication in online learning.
That’s the beginning, then. Most of these papers are part of that work in progress, in a sense, drafts that build on each other (which is why you will find repetition (which in a real book I would have to excise, thus removing the essence of discovery). In addition to the straightforward mechanics of content distribution (which you would think is straightforward) I encounter issues as varied as ontology, legal policy, the open source credo, morality, semantics, and technical design.
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