Learning Application Readiness (LAR) Workshop - May 11-12, 2011

 

Workshop Activity

Use LAR Guiding Principles and the questions below to judge the resources and metadata listed under workshop activity links.

  1. Given the resource’s title, what is the resource and is it what you expect? Now taking the resource title and URL into account, does it change your original idea about the resource? Why or why not?
  2. What is the perceived use of the material? Is it intended for learning or useful in an educational setting?
  3. Is the metadata what you expect? What is missing? What was helpful?
  4. Pretend you are a learning application, would you provide access to the resource based on solely on the metadata? Why or why not?
  5. After you have reviewed the resource and its metadata, would you provide access to the resource based on resource and metadata knowledge? Why or why not? Were there barriers to use?

 

Workshop Activity Links

Resource 1: Dynamic Algebra for Technical Students:  http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0603319
Resource 2: Every cell is covered by http://strandmaps.nsdl.org/AAAS-Collection/NSDLbenchmarksContent.jsp?bm=SMS-BMK-1849
Resource 3: All About Rocks http://ia.usu.edu/viewproject.php?project=ia:11012
Resource 4: Calculating the Volume of Water http://www.engineeringpathway.com/ep/learning_resource/summary/?&id=2FA621DA-1F27-4A9B-A76F-7EE279EEC9E8
Resource 5: Cloud Watch http://www.globe.gov/tctg/atla-cloud-watch.pdf?sectionId=26
Resource Raw and Normalized NSDL_DC metadata

 

Other Needed Workshop Links

NSDL Collections Policy (http://nsdlnetwork.org/sites/default/files/NSDL_Collection_Development_Policy.pdf)
NSDL Resource Quality Guidelines (http://nsdlnetwork.org/sites/default/files/NSDL_Resource_Quality_Guidelines.pdf)
NSDL_DC Metadata Guidelines (http://nsdl.org/collection/metadata-guide.php)
Sample NSDL_DC metadata record (http://ns.nsdl.org/schemas/nsdl_dc/nsdl_dc1_v1.02.xml)
Sample paradata COMM_PARA metadata record (http://ns.nsdl.org/ncs/comm_para/1.00/records/planets.xml)
Sample annotation COMM_ANNO metadata record (http://ns.nsdl.org/ncs/comm_anno/1.00/records/rating-and-teaching-tip-url.xml)
Steps to LAR (http://nsdlnetwork.org/sites/default/files/lar-steps-by-nsdl.pptx)

 

Workshop Description

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) can make a measurable impact on education and learning by having its resource metadata embedded into school applications, web sites, other digital libraries and harvested for local use. This makes cataloged NSDL resources, especially those with high-quality metadata, available to many audiences beyond NSDL.org. Consumers of NSDL metadata can target resources of interest by topic, metadata provider, grade level, audience, resource type, educational standards or language or any combination of these.

When this resource metadata embedding is focused on presenting resources for educational outcomes, the metadata and resources together can be described as ‘Learning Application Readiness (LAR).’ That is, how closely educational resources, collections, and their related metadata are aligned to educational goals, curriculum, or professional development needs of users and how readily said resources and collections can be embedded in tools and services that educators and students use.

In the fall 2010, the NSDL Collections Development Team (CDT) developed initial guiding principles for determining Learning Application Readiness as it applies to NSDL.  As such, the NSDL Resource Center (RC) and Technical Network Services (TNS) would like to propose a LAR workshop that (1) provides greater detail on how these guiding principle were developed, (2) uses these guiding principles to create detailed criteria and guidelines that can be applied to resources and resource metadata either programmatically or by humans and (3) establishes a working group(s) to complete work started by this meeting.

Topics:

AttachmentSize
resource-metadata-examples.pdf95.15 KB
lar-steps-by-nsdl.pptx91.43 KB