[LINK] Designing an e-document management course

[Tom Worthington]

This is to request advice and assistance in redesigning a module on 
Metadata and Electronic Data Management for the Australian National 
University course "IT in E-Commerce" 
<http://studyat.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP6341;details.html>.

The content is being revised and the format changed to eliminate 
lectures. Lecture notes from last year are at: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/ecommerce/>. The new materials 
will be similarly available with a creative commons licence.

The course module is to cover Metadata, Standards for eCommerce, 
Electronic Document Management, the Digital Library and e-Publishing. 
It previously used examples from the Australian Public Service (with 
standards and procedures I helped write) and e-publishing by the ACS 
and IFIP (which I helped implement).

However, this material has become dated. The Australian Public 
Service doesn't seem to be actually following its own document, 
record and archiving procedures, so there seems no point in teaching 
about them, as they have failed in practice. Suggestions for suitable 
standards from the commercial sector and other governments would 
therefore be welcome. One source is Senator Lundy's Public Sphere 
policy development process: <http://wiki.katelundy.com.au/PublicSphere2>.

The material on the digital library and e-publishing also needs 
updating, but due to its success, not failure. There seems little 
point in telling students about the origins of card catalogs and 
paper journals, as these have been replaced with electronic versions.

Most of the paper books and serials have been cleared out of the main 
floors of university libraries, to make room for computers. There is 
little point in explaining an e-journal by analogy to a printed 
journal, as the students don't use printed journals. It is difficult 
to explain publishing metadata by analogy to a card catalog, as the 
students don't use card catalogs. My intention is to replace these 
with examples of web blogging and tagging which the students will be 
familiar with. I can then show them more rigorous use of the 
technology, using the digital library I set up for IFIP and which is 
run by the ANU <http://dl.ifip.org/>.

In the last lecture for the course in 2008 I told the students this 
would be MY LAST LECTURE 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2008/08/my-last-lecture.html>.

The Green ICT course for ACS was successfully run in the first half 
of 2009 in e-learning mode, providing the techniques and confidence 
to do away with face-to-face lectures 
<http://www.acs.org.au/cpeprogram/index.cfm?action=show&conID=greenict>. 
The ANU's Wattle (Moodle) learning management system was successfully 
piloted in first semester and is now ready for widespread use. In 
this case six hours of lectures can be replaced with web based 
material, supplemented by two one hour face-to-face seminars, to set 
the context.

Some will see replacing lectures with seminars, as just a matter of 
semantics. The Wikiversity would describe this as replacing Lecture 
1.0 with Lecture 2.0 <http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Lecture_2.0>. 
Others would argue that it is a matter of presenting the material in 
an engaging way, which is what educators have always tried to do.

Progress will be recorded in my blog: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/labels/designing%20metadata%20course.html>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University