EdReNe Newsletter 6

It seems striking that many of the most successful repository initiatives – measured in terms of active users – have not heavily engaged with educational technology standards … This leads to the question of whether current standardization bodies and organizations are in sync with actual user needs… (read more in EdReNe synthesis report on standards and interoperability)

The most general conclusions that can be drawn from the discussions so far are that current copyright legislation is not in tune with what would be expected and considered fair in relation to education, and that currently the strongest and most often heard response from the educational sector is to use open licensing while waiting for a reform of copyright law… (read more in EdReNe synthesis report on rights issues)

In September 2009 EdReNe members met near Giunti’s premises in Sestri Levante to discuss the new development in repository strategies. In November the EduHi and the city of Linz hosted the third workshop on how to engage users and producers in the running of repositories of learning resources.

3^rd EdReNe expert workshop on repository strategies

took place in Sestri Levante, Italy, on the 17th – 18th September 2009

In the opening session Lilla Voss, former expert adviser to the Danish Ministry of Education on ICT in education, gave an overview of strategic national initiatives in relation to educational repositories, and shared her visions for the schools and repository tools of the future.

Will Ellis and Andrew Kitchen presented Becta’s vision and first concrete steps of implementation on a new Resource Discovery System that is to pool a number of previous projects and components, and provide coordinated answers to many questions which previously have been dealt with in a more fragmented approach.

Standards strategies are important. A closer link between standards developers from universities and standardisation bodies, and publishers’ everyday needs must be given more attention. Becta has commissioned a project to work with content suppliers and VLE providers to define a specification for content packaging. They want to ensure that content developers use a consistent technical specification so that the content they produce can work in all VLEs.

In a group session members were asked to think of which standard has had the greatest impact on educational repository use so far, and describe why. They should also describe what they considered the most important barrier to remove within this area (and an approach for doing it!).

The workshop concluded the series relating to Repository strategies. The proceeding from the three workshops will serve as the primary source of input for the forthcoming thematic synthesis report on this issue.
http://edrene.org/workshops/repositories/ws3-3.html
http://edrene.org/workshops/repositories/ws3-2.html
http://edrene.org/workshops/repositories/ws3-1.html

took place in Linz, Austria, on the 18th – 20th November 2009

After Astrid Leeb’s warm welcome to Linz, Leo Højsholt-Poulsen drew a line from the intentions of the network as described in the original proposal to where we are now at the entry to the third and final expert workshop in this series.

We still have the ambition to debate the many prioritised issues, and from this develop practical guidelines and recommendations on educational repositories. And we still aim to establish a lasting collegial network of European repository nodes and stakeholders.

Professor Michael Wagner opened the workshop by speaking about (Media)-Education in the 21st Century. He mentioned that the education system is currently facing three fundamental challenges: Media Convergence, Participatory Culture and Collective Intelligence. The challenges necessitate core competences for students to have success in this new culture, distilled into four guiding principles for the school of the 21st century:

• There are no teachers, only learners
• Factual knowledge is useless
• Standardized education is poor education
• Non scholae, sed vitae discimus (We do not learn for the school, but for life)

Jeffrey Earp introduced the Share.TEC 3-year project devoted to fostering a stronger digital culture in the Teacher Education (TE) field and to supporting the development of a Europe-wide perspective among those working in and with the TE community. The mission of the project is to support innovation in the Teacher Education field by facilitating access to digital resources, sharing of reuse experiences, and development of teacher education expertise across national boundaries.

The core session was user experiences from Austrian educational repositories and schools. EduHi had invited a number of expert teachers, and they gave concrete examples of success stories in Austria: from an introduction to subject oriented portals for teachers in Austria and experiences from using them in the subjects Geography, English, and Latin; to other challenges for schools like supporting migrants at Austrian schools, individualisation of learning and practical demonstration of successful online tools.

The producers’ perspective was introduced by Jens Viggo Moesmand, who described the model of the Danish national repository of learning resources and the producers’ motives to make an agreement with the government on running this service. Further on, Thomas Wilckens put IPR into a theatrical context.

Leonie Verhoeff and Karl Wimmer reported that in the Netherlands, EduRep has introduced a syndication component, which is a middle layer from where the users select a particular repository among the various repositories connected to EduRep, and a Social metadata Broker enabling users to give feedback to the usefulness of a given resource.

Also recently the Ministry of Education has launched the Wikiwijs, an open, internet-based platform, where teachers can find, download, (further) develop and share educational resources.

In Switzerland educa.ch has launched the Swiss Digital School Library to help teachers:

• searching, finding and discovering digital learning and teaching resources
• securing the quality of digital teaching and learning resources
• linking electronic teaching and learning resources to curriculum

The project is at its initial implementation stage with many questions, but also with some solutions that colleagues may learn from.

Andrew Kitchen informed the members that the common file format for interactive whiteboards has now been defined. All ten of the major IWB vendors have signed up to support the creation of the format. After having completed the delivery of the file format and accompanying software the project is now moving into an adoption phase. Becta expects to be able to proactively support the adoption of the common file format with a couple of early implementing vendors in the new year.

The group sessions discussed and gave input to the pending thematic synthesis reports on the four themes of EdReNe (repository strategies, engaging users and producers, standards and interoperability, and rights issues) and the final recommendations for repositories of educational content.

The intrinsic motivation among members to continue to work together and exchange experiences after the initial project finishes is strong. The members have agreed on a sustainability model of shared responsibility, with two seminars per year. One member hosts an event, and the participants cover their own travel and subsistence costs. UNI•C will host the first post-project seminar in October 2010.

The workshop concluded the series relating to Engaging users and producers. The proceedings from the three workshops will serve as the primary source of input for the forthcoming thematic synthesis report on this issue.
http://edrene.org/workshops/engagement/ws5-3.html
http://edrene.org/workshops/engagement/ws5-2.html
http://edrene.org/workshops/engagement/ws5-1.html