How can Microformats help Higher Education
Posted by Jesse Rodgers on August 14, 2008 at 09:00 AM
In my paper, my research focused on an assessment technique and possible application of Microformats on a higher education home page. What I don’t think I included in that report was a really good reason why you would apply the formats to your entire site or if the current formats are good enough. There are many making the case out there that cover the ‘why’ with my favourite being that you can make your web site or web application your API. That line of thought is what I applied when UW Events was built.
How does that work in higher education specifically? In higher education there are many issues that make a universal application or Microformats fairly difficult. But higher education web sites have so many consistent patterns in content and design along with a general attitude of openness that there is a huge opportunity that could be realized through the application of current and future Microformats.
Using the following diagram you can apply a couple use cases.
One of the use cases that initially comes to mind is the student that is trying to figure out what courses are offered at what school and where those schools are:
- geo and hatom can give a student an idea of the location and the latest news coming out of the school
- a new format for course information (lets call it hCourse for now) can help a student compare courses across different schools
- hReview can mix in prof rating and/or course rating web sites that use hReview to mark up their ratings and a student can get a better picture of things.
Another would be a prof trying to determine where to spend their next sabbatical without knowing much about the smaller schools in a particular area:
- the geo information can accurately place the schools
- hatom would give them quick access to the latest news
- a format for course information (hcourse) can help them connect with new colleague with similar interests
- hreview can reveal a hidden quality a smaller institution might have
A third scenario might be a person that is looking for a good resource on a story or book. Usually that information is being sent to the typical media outlets.
- hatom identifies the news so it can be easily found through searches
- geo can tie that information to a particular area
This is just off the top of my head, I could probably go on for a while about how easier to find and more accurate content could enhance the experience for people that are looking for information. I can think of some political barriers to this but thankfully it doesn’t require a top down decision to apply it. In the spirit of higher education, application of Microformats can be done on a grass roots effort without any decisions needing to be made ;)
Comments
There are 3 comments on this post. Post yours →
Jesse,
Thanks for another very useful post on microformats and higher education.
For the “course” microformat in your diagram, consider suggesting using an hCalendar event for the course (since a course has a start date, end date, summary, description, organizer etc.) rather than a new microformat1 so that institutions can immediately make some use of this information and your overall suggestions without the work necessary to create a new microformat.
I’ve created an “education” page on the microformats wiki to collect such suggestions and linked to your two blog posts.
http://microformats.org/wiki/education
I encourage you to add directly to that wiki page as well, so that hopefully as a community we can collaboratively further the “huge opportunity that could be realized through the application of current and future microformats” to education sites.
Thanks!
Tantek
[1] For new education related microformats, take a look at the “education related” section on the Exploratory Discussions page: http://microformats.org/wiki/exploratory-discussions#education_related
Hi Jesse,
if I see things right, you are focussing on websites of educational institutions (like universities).
This is a good approach for institutional information distribution, but I think microformats are suitable for a lot more than that, especially in higher education.
At the moment, there is a lot of research done on how the so-called web2.0 concepts can be used for educational purposes, especially technology-enhanced teaching and learning (also known as e-learning). This field is still dominated by LMS/LCMS (like Blackboard, Moodle, CLIX…). However, these systems gained a lot acceptance with orgnisators but most learners don’t like them, and teachers are limited to apply new creative didactical designs.
@tantek: with regard to information distribution and comparability, I agree that an hCalendar event would be sufficient.
But there are scenarios, where a new composite format might be reasonable. (A course contains a title, a format (lecture, tutorial, seminar), teacher (hCard), location (geo, address) event-series (hCalendar), prerequisites,field of study, exam (type, hCalendar), feed (hAtom), learnig related material (hLicense?, OPML),….)
Just my 2 cent…
Thank you,
martin
Glad to see your work on microformats. I have worked on a course microformat at http://microformats.org/wiki/hied-course-examples.
Yet never found interest in the mailing list so I sort of left it alone.
I think we should work on the format, even if its a grassroot thing like you mention. I’m a fairly good programmer (or so I heard), we can get some tools, parsers to aid on the adoption.
Post a comment
Required fields in bold.