Over the last fifteen years, considerable effort has been spent on the development of standards and specifications in order to improve the interoperability of e-learning systems, repositories, and content. These efforts have led to significant improvements in the arena of technical interoperability enabling the emergence and expansion of successful federations and alliances of learning object repositories such as the LRE, GLOBE, etc. Building blocks for this success have been the creation, evolution and adoption of standards such as the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM), the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and the Simple Query Interface (SQI). More recent developments in this field include the definition of a Simple Publishing Interface (SPI) and the ongoing work within the IMS Global Learning Consortium on the Learning Object Discovery & Exchange (LODE) specification to facilitate the discovery and retrieval of learning objects stored across more than one collection. The development of best practices (for example by projects like ASPECT and ICOPER), enabling more efficient use of these standards and specifications, has also proven instrumental in the successes of current learning content retrieval infrastructures. To further developments in this field, the main goal of this international workshop was to offer a forum where researchers and practitioners discussed theoretical aspects, open issues, and innovative approaches and shared the latest advances in the state of the art and practices for exchanging and describing learning content.
Among the 12 papers submitted to the workshop, 11 (6 full papers and 5 short papers) were accepted by the SE@M’10 program committee. The papers were presented in the course of the two day workshop. Two keynote speakers opened and closed the workshop.
Papers explored innovative approaches and technical solutions for the management of learning object repositories, data models for efficiently organizing multiple metadata standards, content packaging, digital curation, keyword extraction, user generated metadata and a series of issues encountered in federated metadata management.
David Massart and Elena Shulman, European Schoolnet (Belgium)