Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Putting a course on content together (4)

The value chain and the implication are important subjects in the course on content. But areas of content application should be drawn into a course on content.

There are a few areas of application in the field of content, that have been deeply affected by digitisation and by online availability (I borrow the body texts from definitions in the EU e-Content programme):

Culture. The work on cultural heritage exploits emerging knowledge and visualisation technologies to create new forms of cultural experience, and to develop new forms of cultural expression and narratives for different communities. Leading-edge information and communication technologies provide manifold opportunities for the use of rich cultural resources. They open up new ways to preserve, store, describe and discover the content of archives, libraries and museums and to reconstruct and visualise artefacts and archaeological sites. Innovative systems and tools, broadly accessible through online applications, enable new experiences for interacting with culture and for cultural expression. This area has developed into a well developed content field thanks to metadata use and standardisation for example by use of the Dublin core. It has had a profound influence on museums, archives and libraries.

Learning. The work on learning draws on different research disciplines (computing, technological, pedagogical, cognitive and psychological sciences) in order to investigate how technology-enhanced learning can better facilitate the learning process, in different learning situations, for individuals or groups of learners. The longer-term vision is to encourage the transition towards intelligent learning systems that autonomously adapt to the learner. So far the technological influence has influenced e-learning a lot. But slowly attention is paid to content aspects as creation of new e-learning material and learning for life content.

Government. eGovernment is the use of information and communication technologies in public administrations - combined with organisational change and new skills - to improve public services and democratic processes and to strengthen support to public policies. e-Government promises to deliver better, more efficient public services and improve the relationship between citizens and their governments. The resulting benefits to the quality of life, industrial competitiveness and society will only be realised, however, if administrations change the way they operate. The Commission has just published a Communication setting out the state of play and charting the way forward. E-Government knows three phases: computerisation of the government services; communication with the citizen; use for the democratic process.

But there are also other areas which are interesting to be studied on e-content, such as e-entertainment and e-science:

e-Entertainment is more than just shoot and drill games for kids. Serious gaming is coming up with subsets like social games for kids and games for seniors. And all these games can be filled with digital content.

e-Science. The process of scientific publishing has changed drastically over the last three decades. The publication cycle of scientific articles had been shortened, while the multiple uses in repositories has increased due to the use of XML and metadata coding.

This list is definitely not exhaustive. There are more area such as e-Business and e-Health which are interesting. However the question is whether in these areas it is basically the efficiency gains or the e-content aspects. One of the area s which still has not been studied systematically with regard to the aspect of content is e-Marketing. I think that it is an interesting area, which warrants a closer look.

(BTW. I just received a reference to the new Pew report on online health search.

Tags: content

Blog Posting Number: 554

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