A hot topic at the Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium in July was the increasing need to develop taxonomies for educational content. As one speaker pointed out, the challenge of today's world is not a lack of information. It is everywhere, it is freely available and even the person who decries YouTube the loudest has used it to demonstrate something at least once.
The true challenge is organizing the information into a
meaningful, useful and identifiable form. This is where taxonomies become
critical. Metadata can tag the information but who decides what the tags will
be and which associations are appropriate? Educational taxonomies must go a step further and decide how the bit of content might be used to support learning.
The presenters at the Symposium offered this as an ongoing challenge rather than an issue with a solution. Read more about taxonomies for educational media and implications for the semantic web.
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