Michael Paskevicius is interested in metadata for online education. Metadata (information about information) is a fascinating area of research in Web 2.0 technologies. Says Michael, 'We believe that it is vital for vocabularies of OER metadata to be standardized and therefore shared more easily and interchangeably using the web.'
Working on the Open Educational Resources (OER) project at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Michael wants to make UCT's learning materials more widely accessible for use and/or re-mixing both within the university itself and across disciplinary communities globally. The project that he is working on is to create a searchable directory of OERs created at UCT, advocacy and support for the creation of learning materials as OER, and ensuring that UCT OER is visible in global OER directories such as OER Commons and CCLearn.
Says Michael, 'One of the greatest challenges we have faced is in supporting academics to create OER materials. Academics are busy people who don’t always have the time to ensure their work is licensed properly or described adequately (metadata) to be made visible on mass.'
Michael wants to design a set of online resources that will support the UCT community to create or adapt teaching and learning materials that are appropriately licensed and contain adequate metadata to ensure that these materials are discoverable on the Internet.
'Ideally I would like to encourage academics to employ more web 2.0 tools so that they can increase contact with their students and the world at large. Using the institutional LMS, a social site such as Ning, or the directory itself, I want to create a space for academics to learn about the concept of the “Open Scholar”, understand why OER creation is beneficial and gradually move to using the social web.'
Michael says that he is excited to be participating in the upcoming GeekRetreat. 'I hope to garner feedback and interest in the OER UCT project, but particularly around this course which itself will be an OER. I would like to interact with social media gurus who have experience in introducing otherwise non-geek people to the benefits of technology. The take away from the event would be a plan on how to best design an online resource to help transform UCT academics into social gurus (“Open Scholars”) themselves.'
Michael Paskevicius is an Old Mutual GeekRetreat scholar
