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As part of our work on open content, and how to design systems that support authoring and translation that are both useful and usable, we have been thinking about the role of metadata and, by extension, search. This post contains some incomplete thoughts - a line in the sand, more than anything - and, six months from now, will provide something for all of us to laugh at. Possibly, we will all be able to laugh at this sooner than that. Time can be cruel.

In other words, I am firmly reserving the right to recant any or all of what I'm saying here. I'd love to hear different viewpoints on this.

Keep Data Simple

This sounds - and is - pretty basic, right up until it's time to implement an actual system. However, as soon as it's time to build a system, people "just need this one field."

In building data systems, additional fields are the equivalent of scope creep.

Humans Should Only Enter Metadata In Precisely Defined Circumstances

We'll get to this in more detail later in this post, but whenever possible, metadata should de derived from the data.

In some cases, this is simple: the author of a piece of content is easy to derive. Ditto for the date a piece was created.

A good example of metadata that should be entered by a human is a license.

But, in the case of a person remixing data that uses different licenses, the pool of possible licenses for the remix should be derived.

Your Picture Is My Image Is Her Binary

A system-defined metadata can be useful, but it will be most useful for the people who designed and built the system, as they are the ones who define the system-specific meanings of the metadata terms.

In other words, your metadata will be useful to you, but it might not be useful to your users. For better or worse, metadata is rooted in language, and words carry baggage and connotations that, among a large group of individuals, make a universal meaning elusive at best.

With this in mind, the "best" metadata is often good search.

But Community Tagging Is Awesome

No, it isn't. Community tagging creates the appearance of structure and organization when what you really have is a chunky stew of chaos.

If you can get enough people contributing tags, then - maybe - you will be able to pull some signal from the noise, but that also assumes a large number of people and a robust search technology.

Faceted Search: Blech or Ugh?

In designing search systems for sites, faceted search can be useful at providing structure when sifting through content. However, is faceted search something that we actually appreciate,or something that we have grown accustomed to?

On Google, how often do you use faceted search, or go beyond the options that you can access via the advanced search UI?

If faceted search went away, or was replaced with facets generated from metadata that could be derived from the core dataset, what would be lost? Anything?

Look at your search habits. Identify if or when faceted search saved you time. In situations when you use faceted search, was faceted search essential, or could it have been replicated by full text search?

Search Has Its Limitations

But with all that said, search has its limitations.

Understanding how stemming works (or doesn't work) is essential to interpreting the results we get.

And this is more complex when we work with translated content in multiple languages.

"Just In Time" Metadata

There are times and places where good, structured metadata is essential. By separating out the metadata requirements from the actual dataset (and keeping the core data as simple as possible) you help ensure that the quality of your underlying data remains high.

Implementing a metadata structure around data is firmly in the domain of a context-specific application.

In terms of open educational resources, this allows for easier reuse of the data. If a piece of content was written in the US, a school looking to resuse that content in the UK won't care about the Common Core alignment of the resource.

To put this another way, inflicting a metadata standard on your data (as opposed to applying metadata within an application that uses the data) makes your data both less portable and less useful.

Portability

In listening to people who are writing and using open content, a key barrier we hear about repeatedly is portability (there are others as well, and these other issues will get their own posts).

A barrier to portability - and really, to the usability of authoring and translation platforms that support open content - is the premature and often unnecessary application of metadata into the underlying data. If we keep the data as clean as possible - which means resisting the urge to apply metadata without a compelling need - we can simplify both portability and usability. Metadata should be applied as part of an application that uses the data, when there is a clearly defined need to catagorize the data. And then, the categorization should be done by people who know what they are doing.

It doesn't matter how good your categorization system is if it is applied to your data inconsistently, and/or if no one uses your data.

Image Credit: "faceted" taken by jenny downing, published under an Attribution license.

On Saturday, March 9th, we held an Open Content authoring day in San Francisco. It's the second we've put on this year, and for those interested, we have a third coming up in Portland, OR on April 6th.

The San Francisco meetup was held on the campus of Lick Wilmerding, made possible thanks to Jonathan Mergy. In the morning of the meetup in San Francisco, we spent some time working with the participants on converting existing lessons - stored in word docs, google docs, or as collections of files - into more granular, more easily reusable, chunks of information.

The work of transitioning existing instructional material into reusable open content is largely organizational, and involves reviewing and editing existing material to ensure that it is well organized and coherent. However - and this point cannot be emphasized enough - this review and editing process results in better material. This is something that, in an ideal world, would happen anyways. This review should be viewed through the lens of supporting better instructional design, and should be incorporated as part of ongoing teacher professional development. The process of organizing a lesson to make it easier to reuse as open content is EXACTLY THE SAME as reviewing a lesson to make sure it is coherent.

In the afternoon, the discussion included sketching out a rough road map for an entire school to transition to a broader, more regular use of open content. The key element in this transition involves reinforcing the idea that the process of creating open content is identical to the process of creating any other type of content - the only substantial difference is the license that is applied to the work. It sounds obvious, but when discussing open content, the notion of openness - and the new horizons implied by the philosophical shift in focus - often distract us from the familiar act of creating useful educational material.

The starting point for individual teachers, a department, or an entire school is exactly the same: the individual lessons that teachers have already created, currently stored on hard drives, in Google docs, in notebooks, and/or in filing cabinets. These lessons exist; many of them have been tested and revised multiple times. Cleaning up this existing source material - a practice that leads to better instructional design, and a practice that should be happening anyways - provides a starting point. It's also worth noting that teachers working in groups, revising the lessons of their colleagues, provides natural opportunities for peer mentoring.

In an earlier post, we talked about the steps involved in creating open content. Working teachers have already done the first steps. Most are at the point where they can edit and revise to make their work clearer - and, as a side benefit, easier to reuse.

Teachers have lessons and other educational materials. They create them regularly, and use them every day.

Like just about anything, this material can benefit from review, and this review can include reorganization into a structure that makes it easy to reuse the lessons.

Once the lessons have been edited and restructured, they can be sequenced into a unit or a course. At this point, the goals of the unit or course can be used to determine what additional material, if any, is needed to round out the work. If any new material is needed, it can be created, or sourced from other openly licensed content.

In practice, this would look something like this:

The review process - steps 2 and 3, where existing lessons are converted into smaller, more granular components, would occur periodically throughout the year. The process of sequencing the lessons - step 4 - would occur less regularly - perhaps 2-3 times a year - with a semi-annual review session - step 5 - dedicated to cleaning up full courses by filling in any gaps that aren't met with the material that has already been created. This way, the work unfolds gradually, and is a natural extension of the work already required to teach a course, and to prepare for upcoming classes. The process can be sped up, of course, but that requires more focused time, and people who have both the content area expertise and the available time to do the work. If this was implemented at the department level - with all teachers in a department collaborating over the course of a year on focused lesson cleanup - the first year would produce a solid body of work, and the second year could allow for greater levels of experimentation and sophistication - for example, Chemistry and Biology teachers and students could generate some 3d molecular models that could be incorporated into science texts.

But in any case, when we talk about creating open content, the discussion needs to be framed around the act of creating. Teachers are already doing this work, and many teachers are already on board with sharing their work to benefit others. However, we have found calling this process "creating open content" confuses the issue. When we are introducing people to the concept of open content, we need to talk less about the licensing issues, and more about sound instructional design. It sounds counter-intuitive, but we have found that by reinforcing what teachers know, and how that pre-existing knowledge dovetails cleanly with the new concept of open licensing, people understand the new concept - open licensing - more fully, even though we talk about it less. Open content is good teaching, and this is the discussion that we need to be having.

If you are thinking about going to an open content authoring day, here are some tips to help you get the most from the day:

• Identify what you want to get from the day ahead of time. The authoring events are a mix of community work days and a maker space, and knowing what you want to do with your time will help you make the most of the day.
• If your goals for the day include working on a specific project, try and make progress on your working outline and your initial research before the event. This way, during the event, you can work with other participants on structure, editing, and other elements of the project where you will benefit from outside review.

• If your goals for the day don't include working on a specific project, that's fine - one of the other ways that you can participate in an open content authoring day is by helping to clean up existing open content that has been released in clumsy formats (pdfs, word docs, powerpoint, etc).
• If your goal for the day is to learn more about open content, that's fine as well - most events will have an intro session on open content, but then you will get the chance to learn by doing. The open content authoring days have more in common with Project-based Learning or Maker events than with traditional lecture.
• Identify potential partners - if you think that someone else might be working on a similar concept (or might be interested in working on a similar concept) ask them. If you can assemble a working group prior to the event, you will be better prepared to make the most of in-person meeting of the open content event.

Based on feedback we have gotten from other open content events we have run, we put together a series of posts to help provide background information for people authoring open content. This documentation works equally well for people looking to author open content on their own, with a small group in their school or organization, or for people attending open content authoring days.

• A General Guide for Creating Open Content; and a shorter version
• Using Advanced Search To Find Open Content;
• Licensing, Attribution, and Reuse;
• Resolving License Conflicts When Authoring Open Content
• Background Information On Open Content

But really, the short version of this post is that if you are coming to an open content authoring day, that's awesome. Talk about it. Talk about the work you want to do there. During the day, start the planning for the next one. Identify people you might want to work with to collaborate on a year long project where you each save ten of your best ideas, and then, over the summer, get together to refine that group of great ideas into the best open educational resource ever. The open content days are group work days, but as educators, every day is a work day. Using the ethos of open content, infused with the learn while doing of Project Based Learning, flavored with some of the inventiveness and freedom to experiment that comes from Maker spaces, let's see what we can build.

Image Credit: "Working - Glass Blower" taken by Bob Jagendorf, published under an Attribution Non Commercial license.

As discussed in Open Content: Licensing, Attribution, and Reuse, the licenses of our source material can affect the licenses we can use when we release our remixed work. At times, there will be potential conflicts that need to be addressed. Unlike traditional copyright, where our options are limited by the whims and decisions of the copyright holder, Creative Commons licensing provides authors with more flexibility and choice.

With some thought and planning, licensing issues can be relegated to just another step in the process of authoring open content.

Resolving Potential Conflicts

If you come across a situation where you are looking at a licensing conflict that appears insurmountable, you have a few other options:

• Contact the license holder and ask permission; or
• Fair Use; or
• Curation; or
• Multiple licenses covering components within a resource; or
• Write your own.

Frequently, contacting the license holder and asking for permission will be all that's needed. In many cases, the original author wanted to have some degree of control over where there work will be reused, and are open to allowing it to be incorporated into a derivative work. When we have asked authors to use their work under a different license, we have written a brief email describing our project, how the piece will be used, and why the piece is important within the project. Additionally, we let the author know that we will attribute them, and ask if there is a specific way that want to be recognized as the original creator.

Fair Use is a second option; Fair Use is part of US Copyright Law; there are also some international parallels. The concept of fair use defines a set of conditions under which a portion of a work can be reused or remixed within a new derivative work. This video provides more information on Fair Use. The short version: using information within an educational setting is widely protected under Fair Use.

If Fair Use is not a fit for your specific situation, you can also incorporate work by curating external sources. In this context, "curation" includes a description of how the external resource fits into your work, along with a link to the resource (or, for information not on the web, instructions on how to access the resource).

Using multiple licenses is a third option; while this is the most complex of all options, it does allow for reuse of content under different licenses. When a work uses more than one license, individual components within the work retain their original license, while the bulk of the new work is licensed under a different license. As one example to illustrate when this is a viable approach, if an image under a No Derivatives license is reused in its original format, the rest of the work can be released under a different license while the image retains its original ND license.

The final option covered here is to create your own resource. If none of the options discussed so far work, creating your own new work and releasing it under a Creative Commons license is always a viable option.

Through the options described above, many external resources can be incorporated into open content without infringing upon the rights of the original authors. Attribution and transparency, discussed later in this post, provide additional ways that we can safely and ethically reuse existing content within open educational resources.

Transparency and Intent

One of the fears we hear repeatedly about adopting open content is the fear that it can lead to legal action for infringing on the rights of copyright holders. As with every fear, it helps to temper the concern with some reality.

The reality is that large companies use the threat of a lawsuit as a means of chilling competition. However, the likelihood of that happening is incredibly small, and it becomes even smaller when we use the steps described in this post to make sure that we are respecting the licenses that creators put on their work.

By being completely transparent about the source material we use, by using proper attribution, and by making an intentional effort to use and support open content creation efforts, we minimize any risk even further. The companies and organizations looking to sue are concerned about the long term prospects of their business model, and they should be. The goal of open content, however, is not to ruin the textbook industry in its current form - while that might happen, that's a secondary effect. The goal of open content is to support teachers and learners working together to create the best learning process possible. Content plays a role in that, but, the process of creating and reusing open content becomes more valuable than the actual content.

When discussing open content, many people become focused on the "content" rather than the "open." By being transparent about our sources, our methods, and our goals, we can provide a clear roadmap of how we got to a specific piece of content. In most cases where the author of a piece of work has a question about how their work is being used, they will ask that the work be removed, or they will ask for more information. In these situations, being fully transparent about how we created the work will help demonstrate our intent. This is not a blanket protection against legal action, but given that (in the US, anyways) anyone can sue anyone for any reason, it's difficult to get that blanket protection whether we use open content or not.

Being fully transparent in how we source and create open content, however, helps illustrate the process by which more people can benefit from open content. It's also a stark contrast to traditional textbook companies, where various interest groups vet and make recommendations to textbooks prior to publication. Transparency offers demonstrable evidence of how our work came into existence.