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.