EdReNe Newsletter 8

The area of educational repositories is an area of constant change. Countries change strategies and agencies, and companies merge and find new business opportunities. So do staff members, who play a central role in representing the members. This naturally also affects the EdReNe memberships. Some of the 23 founding members no longer exist, and on the positive side new enterprises ask for membership. By August 2011 EdReNe comprises more than 40 member organisations from all over Europe.

In EdReNe’s first year as a self funded network of educational repositories and stakeholders from research and industry two seminars have been arranged, and the third is planned.

An updated presentation of EdReNe is available at http://edrene.org/results/deliverables/EdReNev11.ppt

History

Futurescope

EdReNe’s next seminar will be in Copenhagen October 6th-7th 2010.

The seminar presented and discussed EdReNe’s recommendations and experiences on repository strategies, the engagement of users and producers, relevant standards to ensure interoperability, and handling of intellectual property rights.
The connection between the learning object and the learning line, the curriculum was another theme of the seminar.

Besides news from members and new members, the seminar also debated EdReNe’s potentially future role in new contexts.

Tommy Byskov Lund, NTS-center Midtjylland, presented EdReNe’s recommendations of building successful repositories. See the recommendations at: edrene.org/results/deliverables/EdReNeD2.7 Recommendations.pdf

The seminar resumed the discussions of linking content and curriculum by addressing quality in relevance, usefulness and metadata.

Jacob Molenaar and Jeroen Hamers described how the Els project (The Educational Linkedscape) links all educational related data in the educational landscape. They use semantic web technologies for modeling curricula and related information in order to improve the quality of retrieval learning objects and of knowledge, and improve the ease of adding metadata to information.

Allard Strijker gave an overview of the situation in The Netherlands (which resembles most European countries in this respect) that national curricular frameworks give an increasing freedom to schools. However, at the same time the government tends to exercise more substantive control on the curriculum in other domains by drawing up frames of reference that more precisely define the desired learning results. This requires that teachers must be better at matching pupils’ individual learning goals with the right content.

Fredrik Paulsson presented a semantic web service for connecting the curriculum to learning resources and personal development plans. The WILD project is to provide the (Swedish) curriculum as a “Cloud” service, which will enable the curriculum for a digital world by making it machine-readable and machine-processable by the use of semantic web technologies, and providing meaning for humans (i.e. students and teachers) as well as for machines (i.e. software and services).

Steward Sutton, University of Washington, Jes & Co, initiated a discussion on how an ASN-like solution (Achievement Standards Network & curriculum alignment) could be deployed in Europe, e.g. by private & public sector cooperation to link learning resources through learning outcomes.

See all presentations and national approaches at http://edrene.org/seminars/seminar6haag.html.