I’m the first to let my mind wander when someone talks metadata to me, but Digital New Zealand has converted me to its power. I posted recently on this initiative from the National Library. Well, DigitalNZ was officially launched this week by a talent National Library team and their content partners and collaborators, who should be rightly chuffed with their achievements.
To top the release of the Coming Home search widget and the remixing tool Memory Maker, DigitalNZ has released an open API that lets developers build services over the metadata that DigitalNZ has harvested from its content partners in the culture and heritage sector. To understand how this works, click on the fabulous diagram above, which explains it visually much better than I ever could in words.
An example of the kind of tool that’s possible (one that the DigitalNZ team ‘prepared earlier’) is the customisable search builder, which lets users design their own mini search engine to search for New Zealand content on a subject of their interest – volcanoes, disasters, ANZAC day, and so on.
Wow! You can see the educational uses immediately. Pop a search on your wiki or website relating to your class’s inquiry or project – learners will be guaranteed quality New Zealand content on that topic.
Education was a feature of the launch event, thanks to the great work by a group of learners at Nelson Central School, who’ve been using the Memory Maker. We watched this video about their Memory Maker creations. Thanks, Room 5 – it was a real highlight.
There was also much talk at the launch about ‘liberating content’ from the archives and storage rooms of our culture and heritage institutions to make it easier for New Zealanders to access and use – to strengthen our sense of national identity in the face of what Penny Carnaby called a ‘colonisation of the mind’ by global media conglomerates and networks.
Let’s hope the web development community picks up on the significance of this and we see a rash of widgets and mashups powered by DigitalNZ. How about a concerted effort on some educational tools? How about we get our students programming their own tools using the API? How cool would that be?
Notions of liberating content stand in opposition to those older models of websites as ‘one stop shops’ and ‘portals’. Providers of content and services for the education sector need to look beyond building online empires and expecting audiences to turn up. Now that most schools have their own websites and intranets, increasing numbers have learning management systems, and teachers are blogging and wikiing, we have to explore the mobility of our data and make it available for users in the spaces and places where they and their audiences go. And, as the National Library is doing, let the users themselves define and design the services that they want.
NZLive.com is another government initiative that’s been thinking about these issues and is free with the bulk of its content. Launched back in September 2006, this cultural and sporting events guide (amongst other things) has the potential to turn into the largest aggregator of cultural events content in town. From the start, it’s made RSS available of all its events information (you can settle on any subset of the data that you wish).
Events feeds have been picked up by the Met Service, Air NZ, newzealand.govt.nz, NZ Now, business.govt.nz, and regional sites for the Great NZ Travel Guides and the NZ Entertainment Network. By providing its data for distribution, NZLive is improving the quality of the services that use its feeds and contributing to the economy of the culture and heritage sector by promoting events more widely than it could on its own.
If we’re talking about taking information to the people, using social media, with its networking effects, is a must (as well as cost-effective). We’ve tried to model this approach in the new, improved Software for Learning website. As well as a catalogue of software recommended by teachers for use in the classroom, the website is constructed from components that are connecting with educators in various web ecosystems – this blog, a Delicious page (examples of students’ digital work), and a wiki (under construction – with classroom examples and contributions).
What I’d love to do next is ask DigitalNZ if they’d be keen to harvest the metadata from the Software for Learning catalogue. Then I can use their customisable search builder to create a Software for Learning search widget – a software search engine that teachers can pick up and put down wherever their online home may be. Coming soon, I hope …
For more on DigitalNZ, check out:
- an interview with Fiona and Andy from the DigitalNZ team by Simon Morton for the ’This Way Up‘ show on Radio New Zealand on 29 November
- Seb Chan’s interview with the DigitalNZ team on Fresh + New(er), the highly recommended blog from the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, on 2 December.
Drilling down to find New Zealand digital content has never been so easy.
The customisable search builder is so very cool, and it is easy to imagine its usefulness in enhancing the conditions of value in teaching and learning when students are researchers or when students are inquirers or when students are knowledge builders.
Andy Neale from DigitalNZ presented on Memory Maker and the Coming Home search widget at the NDF 2008 conference in Auckland last month. Nix and I could immediately see the value of this and of customising the widget for students in our cluster schools. Would be great if Andy or someone else from DigitalNZ was invited to present a workshop at Learning@School in February so more teachers could hear about it.
Hi Artichoke, What a great idea to get the DigitalNZ team to Learning@School. Let’s see if we can make this happen – I’ll contact DigitalNZ about it … Since writing the post, I’ve also been wondering how we can tempt developers, suppliers and publishers (eg of LMS and other tools, as well as educational web and multimedia resources) to develop services and products for schools that access digital content using the open API … Perhaps the session at Learning@School could explore with teachers what sorts of services we might want? Sarah
And what about at the EHSAS conference next year? It would be great to have this shared there too…