Linking research & learning technologies through standards

As referred to in an earlier post, Link Affiliates is working this year on supporting the Digital Education Revolution, through the Technical Standards for Digital Education project. A large part of the activities includes the establishment of Focus Groups, which have been established for 6 of the 7 activities. Each Focus Group consists of representatives from various jurisdictions within the education sector – primarily schools-based representatives, but also including some representatives from the VET sector. Different groups may also include people from other relevant organisations including government organisations.

So far we have identified three main purposes for the Focus Groups:

1. Members bringing their own expertise and experience into the group to share
2. Members acting as conduits back into their own organisations for the information that comes out of the Focus Group meetings
3. Members utilising their own linkages (eg professional networks) to disseminate the information that comes out of group meetings, as well as utilising these linkages to bring further information into the group.

Each Focus Group operates a little differently from the others, based on the requirements of that activity. Initial meetings of most Focus Groups were held in August 2009, and regular meetings will continue to be held throughout the duration of the project until June 2010. The first meetings of the various Focus Groups have been very positive, and much discussion emerged on various topics. It also became apparent in a few of the groups that many of the members were delighted to have such a forum on which to discuss these pertinent matters with other members of their profession who, being in a variety of jurisdictions and organisations, were able to provide new perspectives. The Focus Groups are also making use of Edna groups in the form of wikis and forums to support group communication.

The Focus Groups are expected to help in providing a couple of important outputs for the Technical Standards for Digital Education project. Firstly, each Focus Group will provide input into a Briefing Paper which has initially been created in draft by Link Affiliates, but will eventually be an output of the whole group. This Briefing Paper will provide a snap shot of the state-of-play for each of the activities, and will benefit greatly from such a wide range of input from group members. In turn, it is hoped that the Briefing Papers will be of benefit to the education sector, providing resources for the sector as well The papers are a work-in-progress, and are expected to be completed by June 2010.

Secondly, the Focus Groups provide a medium for cross-jurisdictional and cross-organisational discussion regarding the various activities, ranging from the new WCAG2.0 guidelines and their impact upon content creation for the sector, to supporting schools in the use of ‘safe’ Web2.0 content, to looking at the interoperability challenges for e-portfolios in the Australian schools sector, to name just a few. It is expected that this melding of experiences from each group member will also result in members being able to take away something positive from their participation – something that can be taken back to each jurisdiction and organisation involved and assist in supporting the development of these key areas within the sector.

Link Affiliates has been working this year on supporting the Digital Education Revolution, through the Technical Standards for Digital Education project. This project aims to enhance IT system support for the range of teaching and learning possible in the digital world, and works with the Australian school education community to create technical standards relevant to the Australian schools digital environment. The project will also provide mechanisms for the Australian school education community to influence the development of global technical standards.

The project is split into seven themed activities; further descriptions of the activities are available at the Link Affiliates web site. Because we blog about our work on the project, we have up a tag for each of the activities, which you can use to track them:

21st Century Curriculum Content: 21C Curriculum Content

Support schools sector use of “safe” web 2.0 content

Engage with W3C Accessibility Guidelines: Accessibility Guidelines

Build capability and assist the schools sector to understand the potential impact, challenges and opportunities the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) could present for the Australian schools sector

Curriculum description: Curriculum Description

Support schools sector uses of machine readable curriculum descriptions

Lesson Plans: Lesson Plans

Support schools sector sharing of lesson plans

Learning Content Discovery and Exchange: Learning Content Discovery & Exchange

Support discovery and exchange of learning content between school sector systems

e-Portfolios technology: e-portfolio

Articulate key technical interoperability challenges for e-portfolios in the Australian schools sector and propose future work on e-Portfolio interoperability in the schools sector

Integrated Learning Environments and 21st Century Learning: Integrated Learning Environments

Support the SIF-AU project and articulate web 2.0 and service oriented approaches to integrating learning environments

Introducing SUM Composition Diagrams

In our continuing quest to help identify common services for generic infrastructure, we present a modular extension to the e-Framework. In the e-Framework, a Service Usage Model (SUM) usually represents an orchestration of services to support a few closely related business processes in a particular context. We are instead developing SUMs that group generic functionality useful in a wide range of contexts. To make this work, we need a notation more precise than standard SUM diagrams: SUM Composition Diagrams. Details below the fold.

A SUM Composition diagram for a collaborative biographical encyclopaedia. A forthcoming blog post will describe this SUM and its components in detail.

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Project Bamboo is an Andrew W Mellon Foundation-sponsored project that aims to dramatically improve the way digital technologies are used in humanities research, with a particular focus on shared services infrastructure. The main participants are humanities departments and libraries in major US universities such as Chicago and Berkley, but overseas universities including Cambridge, Oxford, ANU and the University of Melbourne are represented.

Founded in March 2008, Project Bamboo has run five workshops to turn input from the e-Scholarship community into a proposal which it will submit to the Andrew W Mellon Foundation at the end of 2009. The proposal will describe a 7-10 year process, but will focus heavily on implementation in years 1 and 2.

As the project has developed, its thinking has evolved. The project began in more optimistic financial conditions, and implicitly supported a very wide agenda to be realised over ten years. This includes shared services, an extensive, ongoing business analysis model (scholarly narratives, recipes, activities in theme groups, and a marketplace for goods, services for labour (Bamboo Exchange). The project argues that with a solid service based infrastructure supporting reusable applications and tools across different institutions, the cost and effort of using technology in humanities research will be reduced, with many new benefits. With the current global financial situation, the project’s immediate scope has become focused on two parts:

• The Bamboo Services Platform is a cloud-based environment which will host shared services useful to researchers in e-Humanities. They will include existing services and applications re-engineered for the new platform, as well as novel services created to fill identified niches.
• The Bamboo Commons is a broad discovery mechanism that allows Bamboo participants to find Bamboo services, tools, business analysis – and each other.

Link Affiliates has submitted two recipes and is using the e-Framework to model solutions to the problems they pose. The e-Framework with its principled binding of services analysis to business requirements is well positioned to offer a structured approach to the problem of interoperability of services, tools, content and business processes within the digital humanities sector.

Hi, and welcome to the Link Affiliates Blog.  A place were you’ll be hearing about our team’s thoughts on international e-learning and e-research interoperability and standards activities.

But, before we go there, I thought I’d tackle the really big question of …

Why a Link Affiliates blog?

Link Affiliates team members have been providing interoperability and technical advice to the Australian education community since the mid 1990′s. Traditionally, we have provided this advice directly to projects and consultative groups like LORN, The Le@rning Federation, the e-Framework …

We’ve always known that the conversations and experiences we share with these projects deserved to be shared more broadly through a forum like a blog, but have never done anything about it, until now …

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