The Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons (CC) today announced a partnership to improve search results on the World Wide Web through the creation of a metadata framework specifically for learning resources. This work is being underwritten with grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This represents the first industry-specific initiative since the recent announcement of Schema.org by major search vendors Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Bing. Schema.org aims to create a universal framework for tagging web-based content to provide a faster and richer search experience. Google Shopping and Google Recipes are two prototypes of how metadata is used to improve search results and their presentation.

A potentially interesting announcement, which I take to mean that AEP and CC will look to develop a new schema for learning objects (one which can ultimately be hosted at schema.org).

The 'less good' news comes in the form of "The initial scope will at a minimum cover the Common Core State Standards for K-12" which seems to me to be very US-centric and potentially quite complex (I say this without having looked at it in any significant detail). It also appears to still be in draft?

Whatever... I'm not totally convinced that it forms a good basis for a simple, core, schema for learning objects? On that basis, I suspect there is probably room for alternative experiments around what schema.org can do for OER though, ultimately, it's not schema.org that matters but whether Google is interested in improving discovery of learning objects thru its search engine.

Well... they got this one pretty much right? It's just a VLE for the ears (or hard-wired to the brain?) rather than for the eyes? :-) And if they had imagined a way of wiring random people up outside the classroom, they'd have got OER as well!

Although our research is about reuse, nonetheless we should keep the notion of sharing at the back of our minds, as there seems to be a close link between the former and the latter in several aspects (for more about this, see our mindmap).

Reading this, I'm minded to ask whether our tendency to say 'reuse' in the context of initiatives like UK OER is semantically significant - or do we just mean 'use'? Often we actually say 'use/reuse' (as in the diagram attached to this blog post - but I know that I do this myself as well) so it seems like we mean something different. But I'm not sure.

Is reuse just a use that isn't what the original creator of the resource intended? Or is there, in fact, no difference between 'use' and 'reuse'?