XplanaZine

Yesterday, I kicked this series off with an introduction to the importance of content packaging and distribution in education. It was pointed out by some, however, that I failed to explain exactly what I meant by “tagging for dollars.” Fair enough. So, let me begin today with a simple explanation of the title.

In the coming years, we will see a severe switch from the way dollars in education are spent on technology (at least part of those dollars). We will witness the abandonment of large, expensive software platforms (i.e. LMS) and shift monies instead to lightweight tools that are geared towards creating better content, and to existing and pre-packaged content created by others. In other words, the future will focus entirely on good content as opposed to platforms on which to display that content.

One way to look at our current reality in education, likening us to the television industry, is that we have spent the first generation of development focusing on the television set while subsequent generations will be much more concerned about what channel through those sets. Just as television has expanded to cable and TiVo (PVR), education will expand to multi-channel distribution and more sophisticated methods of sorting and recalling data. And, just as the price of the physical television set has diminished and become secondary in terms of the dollars we spend on television, so too will the price of LMS platforms become insignificant.

At the center of this shift from platform to content lie two important technologies — content packaging and tagging. This series is concerned with the whole movement of content packaging and distribution, while today’s article focuses on one aspect of tagging (content organization) — taxonomies.

When it comes to getting the right information, it is important to know where to look for it. In our personal lives we come up with all kinds of organizing conventions to help us find items we have stored. I like folders. I use them for papers and I use them in my digital life. I tend to organize those according to a common system — work, public, and private being the top categories. Next, I drill down to sub-levels (in “work,” for example, I have folders for correspondence, legal, personnel, etc.). These sub-levels, in turn, have their sub-sub-levels. And, since I’ve been using the same system for many years, I tend to keep up with things (if I don’t delete them).

The system I have just described is a taxonomy — a classification system for information or objects. Unfortunately, my taxonomy isn’t sharable with others because it is extremely personal. In order for any taxonomy to be useful to other people, it must have an organization pattern that is either part of an accepted cultural pattern, or one that has been developed and implemented into a specific discipline or profession.

One of the easiest taxonomies to talk about is Dewey Decimal, or the one used to organize libraries. It is a accepted standard for organizing books and has been around long enough that we call all go into any library and find what we’re looking for. Other useful taxonomies include the classified ads (and other newspaper taxonomies), recipe taxonomies, and those taxonomies used in supermarkets (that’s why we can always find what we’re looking for in spite of the store). So, it’s easy to see that in order for people to retrieve and share things, it is helpful to have common or accepted taxonomies that make that possible.

When we say that the future of technology in education will focus on content, then, we are automatically expressing a need for clear taxonomies so that we can all find whatever it is we need, regardless of who created it or the specific “store” in which we are searching for it. In one sense, without common taxonomies, its becomes impossible to share content meaningfully.

So, the first step that will have to take place for digital content to become ubiquitous in education is for our content storage and distribution channels to have common and understandable taxonomies. These will lead to an organization system that can be used by publishers, institutions, commercial vendors, and individual content creators and users. This system will ensure that when, say, a professor of Spanish wants to go find an audio instruction for regular -ar verbs, he or she can go to any content storage system ( a school’s or publisher’s) and find that information easily and precisely without wasting any time. The same would apply should that same professor create her or his own content and want to store it for sharing with others.

Now, I know this sounds like a simple thing, and in one sense it is. On the other hand, this accepted or common taxonomy does not yet exist really, at least not in a final and usable form (for example, U.S., State Standards for K-12 are a partial or sub-taxonomy but won’t get the job done alone). When finished, the international schema will include taxonomies of all educational disciplines, country and grade-level-specific branches, discipline-specific branches (oral proficiency standards in languages), and a few other things. It will also be normalized against leading books and journals in the different disciplines so that users can search generally or using book-specific terminology.

Many are working in this first digital step of content organization. I say “first step” because without this we won’t be able to make the coming educational shift successfully. Some are involved in the effort as part of open source or communal efforts while other are building businesses around it. Controlling the infrastructure by which all content is stored and distributed in education could be a lucrative thing for a company. That’s why I’ve titled the series tagging for dollars. That’s why Google is important — because it is setting (controlling) the standard for searching. That’s also why Yahoo just bought Flickr (referenced in yesterday’s article) — to gain a foothold on taxonomies and tagging.

Finally, one thing we should realize about taxonomies for digital content organization is that there are multiple forces involved in solving the problem. All of what I have mentioned so far involves “top-down” classification efforts. There are a number of newer systems, however, that allow me to organize things the way I want to (like my folders) and share that organization with others so that, in the end, our individual organization systems can be rolled up into a big and shared taxonomy. These efforts general fall into the category of “folksonomies” and are “bottom-up” effort represented by sites such as furl or del.icio.us.

The bottom line is that taxonomies (and the ontologies that link them) will be the backbone for the future of educational technology. The sooner we solve this problem the faster we will have Learning Object Repositories and content tools that start to make a difference.