The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) specification (14 properties) has been accepted and published as a part of Schema.org, the collaboration between major search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex (press release). This marks the culmination of a year’s worth of open collaboration with the LRMI Technical Working Group and the wider education publishing community. To view the LRMI properties within the context of the full Schema.org hierarchy, visit schema.org/CreativeWork. See this post by Phil Barker for additional detail.

The LRMI, a simple tagging schema that draws from and maps easily to existing metadata frameworks (e.g., IEEE, LOM and Dublin Core), is intended to be an easy way for open and proprietary content publishers to standardize the way they describe the education specific characteristics of their resources.

This is wonderful news as the LRMI specification will be a piece of the future of education, especially as it pertains to Open Educational Resources (OER). Some of the features of LRMI will allow next generation learning systems based on personalized guided learning. To get a better idea of what kinds of things are possible with LRMI, watch this OSCON keynote by Danny Hillis describing the concept of a Learning Map.

Creative Commons is currently working with 10 different OER platforms and repositories to implement LRMI support and we hope to announce the first few complete implementations in the coming months.

To join the ongoing discussions around LRMI support and implementation, please join the public mailing list.

And… Creative Commons is hiring a new LRMI Project Manager. Please send us the best and brightest to lead this important project!

Years from now, what will it mean for teachers to prep for a new school-year? Will they be reviewing digital textbooks? Collaborating online with colleagues in revising and adapting digital lesson plans? Upgrading operating systems and software on classroom laptops? Scouring the net for those perfect open educational materials to print or distribute to students?

Everyone might have their own image of how preparation for a new school year will look, but the current excitement about open and digital educational resources indicates that teachers are ready for a new model.

As textbooks and learning materials move online, the copyright status of those resources becomes more important to teachers. At ccLearn, the education program at Creative Commons, we strongly believe that developing a global education commons of openly licensed educational resources is the best solution to the legal and technical challenges that teachers face when trying to share and adapt educational resources. But how exactly will teachers be able to find and share open educational resources? After all, a resource simply being accessible online isn’t itself enough for it to be easily discoverable.

ccLearn has developed a prototype search engine, DiscoverEd, that provides one solution to this challenge.

DiscoverEd provides scalable search and discovery for educational resources on the web. Results come from institutional and third-party repositories who have expended time and resources curating metadata about resources. These curators either create or aggregate educational resources and maintain information about them. Metadata, including the license and subject information available, are exposed in the result set.

We are particularly interested in open educational resources (OER) and are collaborating with other OER projects to improve search and discovery capabilities for OER, using DiscoverEd and other available tools.

Our search engine is a prototype and shouldn’t been seen as the only solution to OER search and discovery. But assuming that categorization and assessment of OER are embedded at the point of publication as open metadata, the DiscoverEd model is a powerful and scalable method for discovering and utilizing those data.

To learn more about DiscoverEd, you can explore the DiscoverEd site, FAQ, or read our report entitled “Enhanced Search for Educational Resources: A Perspective and a Prototype from ccLearn“.

You can also test out our DiscoverEd widget below:

En esta entrada Alex Kozak aborda la solución que ofrece ccLearn, el programa educativo de Creative Commnons, para apoyar los problemas legales y técnicos que enfrentan los profesores cuando buscan recursos digitales y abiertos en el universo de Internet donde encontrar no es tan sencillo. Se trata del buscador piloto DiscoverEd que busca enfrentar este reto.

DiscoverEd es un buscador para recursos educativos en la red. El buscador revisa repositorios de terceros que han dedicado tiempo y esfuerzo a curar los metadatos de los recursos. Estos curadores crean o cosechan los recursos y conservan la información sobre ellos en metadatos, incluyendo la información sobre la licencia y el tema que es presentada como resultado en el proceso de búsqueda.

DiscoverEd se ocupa esencialmente de proyectos abiertos, de Recursos Educativos Abiertos (REA o OER por sus siglas en ingles) y colabora con otros proyectos de este tipo para mejorar los resultados en la búsqueda y descubrimiento de estos recursos..

Kosak finaliza indicando que este es un piloto que no debe ser visto como la única solución para la búsqueda y descubrimiento de REA pero, considerando que la categorización y valoración de los recursos se hace en el punto de publicación a través de metadatos abiertos, cree que DiscoverEd sera un modelo poderoso y escalable para encontrar y usar los datos.

La información sobre el proyecto esta por ahora en ingles, puede revisarse en DiscoverEd site, FAQ, o en el informe “Enhanced Search for Educational Resources: A Perspective and a Prototype from ccLearn”

After last week’s exciting announcement that Google Image search is now capable of filtering results by usage rights, we realized there is a lot of interest in how creators can signal their work as being CC-licensed to both humans and robots.

Fortunately, CC has a solution for this that is not only a standard, but recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Its called the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language and is part of the semantic web. Without getting too technical, ccREL uses a technology called RDFa to express licensing information to machines so that they can deduce the same facts about a work (such as its title, author, and most importantly, its license) that humans can. If you’re interested in the future of the web and structured data, you’ll want to check out our wiki pages on RDFa, ccREL, and our white paper submitted to the W3C. Google has a page explaining RDFa and Yahoo has a page explaining how RDFa is used by Yahoo Search.

The easiest way to signal to both humans and robots that your content is CC licensed is to head over to our license chooser and choose a license to put on your own site.

Our license chooser automatically generates the proper ccREL code, so its easy! Don’t forget to fill out the “Additional Information” section. You’ll then get a snippet of XHTML embed that will contain ccREL. Place this near your work (preferably on its same page of the work which also happens to be unique) and you’re all set. If you’re running an entire content community, you can also dynamically generate this markup based on the particular user, title of the work and so on. Check out Thingiverse for a excellent example of this functionality.

Are you already using ccREL or RDFa on your website or platform? Let us know or add it to our Wiki page!

Two fantastic Creative Commons and related events happening in Turin, Italy late this month, with registration deadlines fast approaching.

June 26 is a one day CC Technology Summit. This is the place to be for learning how CC and others are using the Semantic Web to support open and interoperable rights information, decentralized copyright registries, machine-readable citation, and more. Unintentionally it is also a showcase of the global nature of CC technology innovation, with 13 presenters from 8 countries. The registration price is €75 or €50 for COMMUNIA attendees (see below) and CC Network members and the deadline is June 15. See video and slides from last year’s CC tech summits at Google in Mountain View, California and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Second COMMUNIA International Conference 2009 is scheduled for Sunday 28, Monday 29 & Tuesday 30 June 2009 in Torino, under the title Global Science and the Economics of Knowledge-Sharing Institutions. Among the exciting keynote addresses is John Wilbanks of Science Commons. Registration is €168 and closes June 12. See one of our past posts on COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network for the Digital Public Domain.

Both events promise compelling, cutting-edge talks, and are also a fantastic opportunity to meet many of the leads of CC jurisdiction projects in Europe. A special mention and thanks must be given to Juan Carlos De Martin, project lead of CC Italy, organizer of COMMUNIA, and Co-director, NEXA Center for Internet & Society, Politecnico of Torino, speaker and host at both events!

I hope to see you in Torino.

We’re currently looking for presentations around copyright registries, ccREL and provenance in semantic web applications for the day’s program. If you’re interested, see the full details and CFP in the wiki. Hope to see many of you there!