Learning Object Metadata is…? Long live Learning Object Metadata!

I have been looking into the current status of the Learning Object Metadata, an IEEE standard that was a central focus of my professional life –at least while the CanCore initiative was active.

Projects and writing on the LOM seem to drop off precipitously after around 2006 –right around the time that the term “Open Educational Resources” was coined at a OECD meeting. (See this survey of LOM projects and of the rise of OER/CC licensing in the special OER issue of IRRODL). But this is not based on objective measures; it has much more to do with what one can glean based on the last time a site was updated, or an article was posted or published.

At the same time, though, I say a tiny note at the bottom of a page at the IEEE site (and had this confirmed by Erik Duval) that the IEEE LOM has been reaffirmed by the IEEE –in May of 2009. It will be an international standard for at least 5 more years.

This left me wondering: If this describes the de jure status of the IEEE LOM as a standard, is there information –other than musing and gleanings– about its status as a de facto standard?

So I decided to look up a few search terms on Google insights, and the results are illuminating.

The flash graph below shows I got when I keyed in “learning object metadata,” “cancore” and “open educational resources.”

While hardly definitive of “interest” (as Google might lead one to believe) –and while OER and the LOM are obviously not mutually exclusive– the trendlines represented in this chart provide some grounds for speculation…

This is a screen capture (due to variations in Google’s data). See “live” Google insight data here.

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