Re: Welcome & introductions

On 16 December 2015 at 08:59, Phil Barker <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hello all, and welcome to the W3C schema course extension community
> group[1]. Thank you for joining. By joining the group you also subscribed to
> this public email list.
>
> With holidays for many of us coming up, now isn't a great time to start the
> main business of the group, but I think it might be useful to make a start
> with some introductions and some initial setting up tasks. I'll deal with
> the latter in another email; first introductions.

A belated introduction.

My name is Dan Brickley. I'm based in London and work for Google,
primarily on schema.org but also related standards efforts e.g. W3C
CSVW [0].

My interest in course description metadata dates back to the first Web
projects I worked on - online teaching and learning efforts [1],
career development and networking sites for researchers [2], and
standards-based content sharing for online question/answer delivery
[3].

However as you can tell from all the 1990s archive.org cache URLs and
mentions of SGML on those sites, I haven't been active in that field
for a while. My main responsibility in this group is not as an
educational technologist, but as liaison to the broader schema.org
initiative where I serve a chairing, webmastering, and
coordinating-dogsbody role. In a W3C setting I chair the W3C
Schema.org Community Group [4]; I also help Guha lead the schema.org
steering group [5] and handle the process of turning rough consensus
in these community groups into draft changes to schema.org which (with
steering group review/signoff) get periodically published to the
project's official site. A good practical way to get a feel for the
typical style, granularity and pace of our work is to take a look at
the schema.org release notes page [6] and the corresponding Github
repository to which it links [7].

This relatively new Community Group brings into focus some discussions
around schema.org for courses which have been moving along slowly for
quite a while. I am optimistic that we will be able to move fairly
quickly by building on those existing efforts, despite the many ways
in which it can be difficult to scope and finalize education-related
schemas.

I look forward to working with you all,

Dan

[0] https://www.w3.org/2013/csvw/wiki/Main_Page
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19961030081652/http://bized.ac.uk/
[2] http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue15/planet-sosig/
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/19980610224343/http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/netquest/
[4] http://www.w3.org/community/schemaorg/
[5] http://schema.org/docs/about.html
[6] http://schema.org/docs/releases.html
[7] https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg

Received on Monday, 25 January 2016 17:39:11 UTC