Engaging Users - Third Expert Workshop (WS 5.3)

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. The present workshop will focus on experiences of users and producers.

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 21^st 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 about new developments in their areas:

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.

This workshop concludes 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.

15 founding members and 5 associate members were represented. In addition 10 external experts participated – giving a total of 46 participants.

Astrid Leeb from EduHi welcomed all participants to Linz.

Leo Højsholt-Poulsen drew a line from the intentions of the network as described in the original Description of Work (DoW), which forms part of the contract with the EC. It is often helpful to look back and think about where are we now in the process, and how the initial issues have been represented in our work so far.

From the overall goal to improve the provision of and access to learning resources, we had the ambition to develop practical guidelines and recommendations on educational repositories, and to establish a lasting collegial network of European repository nodes and stakeholders.

The network’s main outputs should be a comprehensive website (www.edrene.org) with recommendations, documentation, templates, roadmaps and documents describing issues, state-of-the-art offering solutions. By doing so we trusted that existing repositories can cut some corners, and new repositories may have a less costly and much less complicated path in life.

The long list of issues (see presentation) represents the questions that we expected to address during the project period. Particular focus in the workshop series on engaging users and producers should be on how to establish a repository of learning resources together with producers and users, and optimising the number of titles and users. In doing so we would also look at the everyday organisation and management of a repository.

Consequently, during the strategic seminars and two first expert workshops on this theme some issues were prioritised.

The first strategic seminar prioritised three issues for the first workshop

• Ensuring ease of use (usability, wizards, help and support)
• Web 2.0 and repositories? (shared queries, social bookmarking, tagging…)
• My repository – the need for personalization (profiles, reviews, collections…)

These rather broad topics resulted in an agenda with a focus of the first workshop on the user interface of repositories, and exploring common design patterns of educational repositories.

The second strategic seminar and first expert workshop the then prioritised the issues

• My repository - the need for personalization (profiles; reviews; collections; automatic recommendations…)
• Building your own content from repository resources (allowing teachers to combine content from various producers)
• Analyzing repository use (statistics; identifying popular functions; interpreting search strings and results; user surveys; characterization of user types)
• Implementation of user generated metadata (evaluations; reviews; tagging; collaborative filtering; information on actual usage …)
• Ensuring ease of use (identifying/developing design patterns; usability; wizards …)
• (Central) services for curriculum mapping / vocabulary management
  - a mapping of status and strategies
• Community building in connection with educational repositories
  as a strong incentive for educators to share materials (more examples needed)

Eventually, the third strategic seminar and second workshop prioritised the issues

• Content/information could be presented based on user profiling and personalization.
  • Before the workshops the members should prepare user profiles of teachers with the relevant characteristics, e.g. front-runner (early adopters), normal teacher, etc.
• User involvement
  • Set up user groups and listen to their needs; let them influence the development; keep users as close as possible. Inspiration and experiences could be acquired by inviting teachers from the eduhi.at project to the final workshop. The teachers should present their needs and working practices regarding repositories.
• “Being where the customers are”:
  • What can we learn from social networks? How can repository content be present in social networks (to attract new and active users)? An expert of social networks could be invited to the workshop.
  • Investigate how repository functions could be used from within a VLE or other it-systems where the teacher has to be on a daily basis. Invite VLE-experts to explain and discuss their vision on 'user engagement'.
• How do we get users to come back, to stay and to use the repository? Can we learn from internet marketing? The differences in culture across Europe should be kept in mind. An expert could be invited.

Leo mentioned that the coordinator had searched around, in Europe and abroad, without finding the right relevant experts on social networks and internet marketing. He asked the members to help. Perhaps together we may find candidate speakers for the fourth strategic seminar.

At the previous seminars and workshops members and external experts have debated quite a substantial number of the original issues from the Description of Work and later on ranked by the members. We will continue to do so. At this final workshop the intention is to introduce input and every-day experiences from users and producers.

Leo Højsholt-Poulsen’s presentation
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/723.pptx

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Michael G. Wagner, MBA

Professor Wagner opened the workshop by speaking about (Media)-Education in the 21st Century. He quoted the author Henry Jenkins:

The education system is currently facing three fundamental challenges
– Media Convergence
– Participatory Culture
– Collective Intelligence

Media convergence (happens in your head, not your computer)
Participatory culture from Consumer to Prosumer (= Production consumer) – exemplified by YouTube, Wikipedia)

Collective intelligence (important with a group of individuals; e.g. Open Source) as fundamental challenges for the educational system

The challenges necessitate 11 core competences for students to have success in this new culture (se presentation).

Distilled into four guiding principles:

• There are no teachers, only learners
  • “How to teach yourself Japanese”
  • “How to network 8000 kids” – LAN parties (dream hack)
  • Due to participatory culture, expertise is distributed throughout the class room
• Factual knowledge is useless
  • “Not a competitive advantage” (Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business School) – example Open Courseware
  • Technology becomes invisible
• Standardized education is poor education
  • “The world is flat” – Thomas L. Friedman. Once it’s standardized it’s global (e.g. first line support, office support in India). Standardization -> Commoditization (it’s hard to standardize creativity)
  • “The wisdom of crowds” James Surowiecki. Diversity in the crowd is a prerequisite
• Non scholae, sed vitae discimus (We do not learn for the school, but for life)
  • Classroom didn’t change for a hundred years, compare that to a surgeons workplace
  • Homo Zappiens by Wim Veen illustrates the change in media consumption in/outside school – and the increasing difference
  • Changing teacher role – now more comparable to a guide getting mountain hikers to the top(everybody knows how to hike/walk but to reach the top it is a big advantage with a local guide)

Michael Wagner’s presentation
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/729.pdf
Se also: www.appliedgames.at

Jeffrey Earp, ITD-CNR

Share.TEC is a 3-year project (2008 to 2011) co-funded by the European Community’s eContentPlus programme. Share.TEC is 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 Share.TEC consortium comprises universities, research inst., schools of education, ed. technology developers and an educational publisher from a number of European countries.

It is obvious that both Share.TEC partners and EdReNe members will benefit from sharing experiences as many of the challenges on reusing and managing digital resources are the same.

To the TE community Share.TEC

1. Provides unified access to TE resources from established repositories and individual users (federated aggregation of metadata)
2. Offers specialized search functions and personalized, adaptive user tools
3. Supports TE communities based on sharing of resources and experiences

Share.TEC’s networking strategy:

• Build upon existing networks
• Federated aggregation of metadata – LRE/edurep/”central index” for TE resources
• Unified access to existing repositories; OAI-PMH
• LOM-based application profile; supplemented by classification by Teacher Education Ontology (LOM section 9-10)
• Engaging users:
  • Focus groups
  • Training sessions
  • User-stakeholder events
  • Personalised services
  • “give, take, use”

Jeffrey Earp’s presentation
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/741.ppt
See also www.share-tec.eu/

Astrid Leeb introduced the session with user experiences from Austrian educational repositories and schools.

Astrid Leeb, EduHi

Education Highway (EduHi) is an innovation centre for education and new technology. It aims to “Create innovative pedagogy by using innovative technology”.

The centre has moved from Internet provider to information provider to education provider. Now 1.700 Moodle instances are centrally hosted.

The centre now provides

• Internet access for schools
• Mail services for schools, teachers and pupils
• Webspaces
• Learning platforms and e-learning tools
• Communities

EduHi initiates and runs quite a number of services to the education community, among them the portals schule.at and eduhi.at, which are the largest German-language educational portals. The first subject portal was chemistry. The basis was chemistry’s risk of being merged with physics, which mobilized a chemistry community of practice. Both portals have focus on subject (e.g. English) not level of education, edited by 88 didactical experts. This is a major reason of their success, and they attract many users.

The features of the subject portals include subject specific categories, topics, didactics, curricula, full-text search, and specific features like radio and TV programs, calender (events, education and training, …), community, newsletter etc.

Astrid Leeb’s presentation
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/731.ppt
See also www.eduhi.at and www.schule.at

Practical Demonstration: Modern ways of geography teaching with GIS

Mag. Alfons Koller

gw.eduhi.at is the Austrian portal of Geography on the Web. It is a collection of links to Web-resources ordered by thematic aspects, regional aspects, and the demands of the curriculum.

Example content: List of radio and TV-programmes relating to subject. It has a monthly theme.

10-11 teachers work on the portal under Alfons Koller’s supervision. They consider it “their most important hobby”, with no clear indication of number of hours spent. No fees are involved. They are happy that they are provided with excellent technical help/surroundings …

GIS-examples include:

• Interactive election map; Diercke Welt Atlas (www.diercke.de/#, free online service)
• maps.doris.at (functionality scaled down from professional GIS-system; also available)
• Virtual Earth (bing.com/maps; easier interface than Google Maps, but also more limited possibilities.
• GIS Day 2009 (www.gisday.at) – students meet professional geographers
• Learning with GI - www.gi-forum.org
• www.iGuess.eu iGuess - Integrating GIS-use in ducation in several subjects.

Smartphone applications will gain speed in the near future; examples include:
Download OpenStreetMap to smartphone – offline applications; Wikipedia entries in vicinity.

Alfons Koller’s presentation
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/730.pdf

Practical Demonstration: Thematical E-Content for the English lesson

Mag. Walter Steinkogler

e.schule.at is the site of Austrian English teachers and the EFL/ESL site. To know more about “My users, the unknown species!” the organisers of the site conducted a survey “Who are our users, what are they looking for, which levels and schools – and does the portal support their needs?”

The users were to fill an online questionnaire (limesurvey), and 124 provided complete answers.
71% of English teachers are female, and the vast majority are experienced teachers.
41% have less than one visit per month; 62% don’t use LMS (those that do use Moodle).

They look primarily for teaching ideas (95%), material for print (92%), interactive LOs for use in class (71%), material for private tuition/coaching (24%), didactics/methodology (61%). See presentation for further details.

Walter Steinkogler’s presentation
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/732.ppt
See also e.schule.at.

Practical Demonstration: Latin as modern language

Mag. Peter Glatz

www.lateinforum.at is a closed virtual community only for teachers of Latin – mirroring organizational structures (national, county, school, classroom, teacher/student).

Examples: 250 members of national community; 91 in Ober Österreich (10-20 added each year). It is still not easy to bring people in actively contributing. 80% of content is provided by three editors. Material from around 50 teachers constitutes the remaining 20%.

The fighting for the survival of the Classical subjects is an important driver/motivation.

www.euroclassica.eu hosts a European-wide community – primarily an organisational tool. Recently they launched Noricum Ripense Online, a didactic project of community and information building. It involves cooperation with museums (including rights to photograph all exhibitions). Learning materials produced by pupils – used by others prior to visit at museum.

Peter Glatz’ presentation
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/733.ppt
See also www.lateinforum.at, www.euroclassica.eu, latein.eduhi.at / latein.schule.at, l.eduhi.at / l.schule.at.

Migration - IT as support tool for migrants at Austrian schools

Barbara Bamberger, MAS, MSc

Barbara Bamberger introduced the learning resources MemoryLifter (Flash Cards for vocabulary training) and JClic.

Pilot studies have showed improved vocabularies after short periods of training.
Examples from upper secondary include (geography; MemoryLifter) and primary (JClic; flash card and grammar exercises).

MemoryLifter is a free virtual flashcard system, http://www.memorylifter.com/

JClic is a practical and free of charge authoring tool developed to design simple text exercises, assignments, riddles or puzzles. See http://clic.xtec.cat/en/jclic/ and http://virtuelleschule.bmukk.gv.at/fileadmin/folder/Folder_Basisinformationen/toolbox_EN.pdf

One of the developers of JClic, Francesc Busquets from XTEC, Barcelona, demonstrated it at the second EdReNe expert workshop.
See http://edrene.org/workshops/engagement/ws5-2.html.

The themes are being published at the Austrian school portal for daZ (German as second language) and intercultural learning daz.schule.at.

Mag. Wilfried Nagl, Education Board Upper Austria

“.from the sage at the stage to the guide at the side” describes very well the change of paradigm, the change of the teacher’s role. The learner in the centre, and the follows many different, individual learning paths. Some are based on e-learning, and Wilfried Nagl presented the learning pyramid.

Practical examples include concept mapping in language teaching (CMap Tools; http://cmap.ihmc.us).
From his own teaching Wilfried Nagl gave examples of concept mapping in brainstorming and in the development and presentation of concepts and ideas, and as a tool for text summaries.

Wilfred Nagl’s presentation
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/734.ppt

Practical demonstration of successful online tools: eduGenerator, Quiz-Tool

Astrid Leeb, EduHi

EduHi has published some very simple on-line tools, and the rapid uptake indicates that they have met user needs.
eduGenerator was used 70.000+ times during first month online (use has stabilized between 70-100.000).
See http://www.eduhi.at/material/edugenerator/.
It is a simple tool to produce: work plans (week, topic, group work,) for printing; certificates; name sheets (they found the tool by coincidence on business conference web site).

Conclusion: Paper is still important in the classroom (graphics produced from scratch – to clear copyright issues)

Quiz Tool (quiz.schule.at) “Who wants to be a millionaire?”
They have organised a contest in Upper Austria with high scores, finals etc. (heavily used outside school periods;-)

MR Dr. Reinhold Hawle, Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
www.bmukk.gv.at

Reinhold Hawle tried to be realistic about what percentage of teachers uses (most of) the offers shown this morning: Current estimate is around 15%. He mentioned www.virtuelleschule.at – with iClass mentioned as a successful international project.

Jens Viggo Moesmand, BFU

Jens Viggo Moesmand described the current Danish model of a national repository. The stakeholders are the publishers, the database owner, i.e. government, the teachers and other users (e.g. librarians). The mutual control is the responsibility of the publishers associations and the government.

The background was paper based catalogues with metadata extracts from a database, financed by the publishers. Then the Government decided to spend public money on a national web-repository, and all data was handed over from the old database.

Parallel to the national repository, there is also a legal contract between “all” publishers (i.e. association members) and nation-wide regional information services centres. At these pedagogical centres teachers can physically find the actual books (most of them) and other types of materials for education.

The owner of the national repository (the government), also engages users of learning materials, museums and other developers of learning resources. The owner thus helps market the resources by organizing conferences and fairs, and advertising in relevant papers and at Google.

Publishers’ motivations are both commercial and altruistic. The repository promotes sales. The IT side of publishers’’ marketing strategies include the Internet( general as in Google and specific as in Repository) and they compete by their Homepage. The bottom line is that income is a precondition.

He reflected on The Smiley Syndrome – evaluations. How can an evaluation be ”proactive” and retrospective, and should it be done by all users or by professionals? In a social networking environment you may question the evaluators’ qualifications and horizon. A “professional” review may be an important quality assurance. However, the reviewer may lack time and have limited practical experience with the product and insufficient theoretical knowledge. There is still no guarantee against bias, and publishers may not have appeal possibilities. A good review must describe the product’s practical value in different educational situations.

Jens Viggo Moesmand’s presentation
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/743.ppt

Thomas Wilckens, Teaterforlaget

Thomas Wilckens did a presentation on the special IPR issues connected with the school play as a learning resource – linking it to the general thinking prevalent among many publishers concerning the need to protect content in order to survive commercially.
The presentation included some of the international treaties regulating copyright across borders and touched upon how awareness raising activities specifically targeting teachers are highly relevant.

Thomas Wilcken’s presentation:
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/

New initiatives: Wikiwijs (central) and VO-content (bottom-up)

Leonie Verhoeff, Kennisnet

Kennisnet has developed new components to the EduRep service:
A syndication component (a middle layer) where the user meets a search box enabling him to select the collection (from the many repositories connected to EduRep) to search for resources. The component is also available as a Sharepoint web part.

Social metadata Broker (like Zoover – Holiday Reviews)
With this system user generated content is being created by users adding tags, ratings and reviews to learning material. The extra metadata is supposed to make it easier for colleagues to find the most useful learning objects. The tools are currently being tested in a number of pilots.

Wikiwijs is a national Dutch initiative, supported by the minister of education. It comes out of the new Dutch policy of "schoolbooks for free, Dec. 2008" (as from school year 2009-2010 school books would be supplied free of charge throughout secondary education)

The aim is to stimulate development and use of Open Educational Resources (OER), and to improve access to both open and closed digital learning materials, supporting teachers in arranging their own learning materials and professionalization, and increasing teacher involvement in development and use of OER.

Wikiwijs will extend options for customized education and increase quality of education through more flexible and up-to-date learning materials.

It will be an open, internet-based platform, where teachers can find, download, (further) develop and share educational resources. It will contain both free content and paid content. The whole project is based on open source software, open content and open standards.

Wikiwijs is inspired by the idea of wikis: collaborative developing of content. Educational resources are developed by teachers, for teachers. Teachers can freely use anything they find in the Wikiwijs repository in their classrooms. The scope is the whole Dutch educational system: from primary school up to the universities.

The Wikiwijs platform is available for limited online use during the trial phase with public launch on 15 December 2009. See http://wikiwijs.nl/sector/.

Leonie Verhoff’s presentation
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/738.ppt

Karl Wimmer, educa.ch

Educa.ch tries to be where the users are. Their two main trials in this domain are an integration of the Swiss Digital School Library in their learning management system educanet² (www.educanet2.ch/) and close and intensive cooperation with schools. The Library is currently being implemented into educanet2 and will go public at the end of the year. The second trial is more an idea. They have just started and do not have many concrete experiences yet.

The Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education (EDK) gave the mandate to develop the Digital School Library. The mandate emphasizes „eContent“ as a strategic domain and pinpoints three goals to achieve.

The goals are the same as those of other educational repositories (but this does not necessarily make it easier to ‘interpret’ and actually implement them):

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

   

  The first goal is to give access to the learning and teaching resources. They developed the Library also as a tool to discover and display some resources similar to the ones that the user actually searches for.

  It is not that simple to distinguish good resources from bad ones, and it is almost impossible to furnish a kind of label for good resources. They are now proposing a solution using the slogan "We take everything but not from everyone.“. Each description of a resource names the provider of the resource and the institution who selected and described it for the Library.

  The 26 curricula in Switzerland (one for each canton) make it impossible to link a resource to the learning objective in one curriculum. Accordingly the approach is linking the resources to competences and map them to the curricula (a model developed by Frans van Asche from European Schoolnet).

The goals, the definition and the lifecycle form the background of educanet‘s trials to be where the users are.

The very basic principles of the workflow for the cataloguing are the four phases selecting, describing, validating and publishing:

Accuracy of content and use in a pedagogical-didactic context 1. Select ->
Description of the content, Pedagogical Description, and Bibliographic Description
2. Describe ->
Followed by
3. Validate -> 4. Publishing

The second trial to be where the users are focuses on the environment of the individual user: His school. It is essential not only to consider the user, but also the school who is his organizational frame. If you introduce a complex tool as the Library, you have not only to develop the individual skills of the users, you have also to adapt the organizational environment of the tool and the users.

Schools in Switzerland are overwhelmed with new themes, duties and responsibilities. Therefore the introduction of the Library will only be successful if it neither increase the workload of the teachers, nor change everything the teachers use without bringing some added values, and thirdly should not generate higher costs. Because of this the second trial is to fostering the collaboration among teachers, and offering the Library as a collaboration-tool to the school.

Karl Wimmer’s presentation
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/737.pptx

Peter Claxton, SMART

Peter Claxton gave a short demo of the free online notebook viewer app:
http://express.smarttech.com/. Further info on SMART Exchange -
http://exchange.smarttech.com/:

API can be provided to repositories for e.g. preview facilities.
Common File Format support is planned for 2010.
Probably SMART Exchange is to allow OAI-PMH harvesting to expose content in other repositories.

Andrew Kitchen, Becta

The common file format (CFF) has now been defined. A viewer is available from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iwbcff/.

[Update by November 24th 2010 from Andrew Kitchen:].

Aspects important to the project so far:

• Becta funded a large and very successful IWB procurement for schools several years ago.
• During the course of this and further school purchases many have ended up with multiple vendor solutions.
• Multiple vendor solutions have resulted in very limited interoperability options as most vendors export their files in formats such as flash embedded within HTML or other similar ways. We don’t deem this as true interoperability for reuse and so forth.
• It is apparent that a large proportion of teachers using IWBs within the classroom use it in rather limited or basic ways, sometimes only as a projector. This doesn’t use much of the rich set of tools available within the IWB vendor software to create innovative and engaging learning resources. They are also somewhat stifled in terms of sharing resources created in the vender software, at this basic level of use, as it isn’t sharable unless the other person has the same software.
• There is a set of common functionality shared between the majority of IWB vendor software implementations. The CFF is based upon this set of common functionality features.
• All 10 of the major IWB vendors have signed up to support the creation of the CFF, including the likes of SMART, Promethean, RM and Cambridge-Hitachi.
• We are aware that some of the vendors are already implementing or have the implementation planned within their future development schedules.
• In order to encourage and lessen the burden of implementation we have funded the creation of a persistence library, written in C, to deal with all saving and loading of CFF files. This library will be offered under a FreeBSD license so that anyone can use it.
• In order to test and view the features of a CFF file we have funded the creation of a viewer application. This application will enable a CFF file to be loaded and displayed, using limited functionality, though the file cannot be edited and saved.
• The viewer application will enable developers to export CFF files from their own proprietary software solution, load in the viewer, ‘save as’ the file to a new document file name, and compare the new file with their exported file for purposes of test analysis.
• The viewer will be released under a LGPL license and is not intended to be used actively in the classroom, rather at home for quick sample viewing or for testing only. Vendor solutions should be used in the classroom.

Becta has now released the persistence library and ‘Boardviewer’ (cff viewer application). These pieces of software is available from Becta’s Sourceforge website, together with various documents about the software and the project: http://iwbcff.sourceforge.net/.

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.

Now we have the specification, software and supporting documentation we would be delighted to work further with any network members to promote the adoption of the format so that those outside of the UK can benefit from the hard work we have put into this project. If you feel you would like to explore how we can work together on this side of the project do let me know. I’d also be happy for this information to be passed onto your colleagues if they are interested.

Another update will be available in the new year, with reference to vendor software CFF support.

Leo Højsholt-Poulsen, UNI•C

Leo Højsholt-Poulsen encouraged all members to either submit or publish available information about educational repositories and EdReNe. UNI•C my put it on the EdReNe site, and members may make references to edrene.org from their sites. Also update ‘Current status of educational repositories in member countries’.

Regarding financial statements, next time by May 1st 2010 we mean business as this will be the final statement. He asked members to report all cost up to now and invoice UNI•C NOW, So we know the balance by January 1st 2010. Also prepare – and submit - your financial statement for a check.

From the Dutch workshop (incl.) and on UNI-C will pay all conference fees for all members – from UNI-C’s budget. For the Barcelona seminar UNI-C will pay travel and subsistence for 1 representative of associate members.

Regarding the EdReNe white paper it was decided to ask Jim Henderson of Learning and teaching Scotland to finish it with the assistance of Alison Hudson of IML.

UNI•C had circulated a memo with Becta’s proposal to all EdReNe members, and a survey was conducted. Based on the survey results the members approved the model suggested by Becta with initially two annual seminars. The model also introduces a distribution of responsibilities, all members share the responsibility of sustaining the network, and the difference between founding members and associated members will no longer exist. UNI•C will host the first seminar (after May 1st 2010 where the project funding finishes) in Ocotber 2010, and Becta or Kennisnet will host the next in Spring 2011. All members will cover their own travel and subsistence.

In the survey, which is available to members in the Members Zone, members have come up with many themes to be addressed by electronic communication and at future events.

The members did not make any decision about membership fees.

Leo Højsholt-Poulsen’s presentation:
https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/724.pptx

Participants were split into groups and asked to provide input for the upcoming thematic synthesis report on engaging users and producers. Edited versions of these discussions will provide important input for the upcoming thematic synthesis report. The three groups were split, in order to focus on i) Content providers, ii) Users (teachers/pupils) and iii) Repository functionality.

The discussion is summarized below.

Engagement with content providers
The term Content Providers does not describe a homogeneous group. It will have many quite distinct groups which in themselves may or may not be homogenous. However, it is more than likely that the sub groups will display unifying traits. This lack of homogeneity does have implications for the development of policies aimed at engaging content providers with repositories.

While it is not in the interest of the repository owner to have too many different policies for managing engagement with content owners, it can be useful to consider the following three broad categories of providers when formulating policies.

1. User Generated Content: this is content which has been generated by teachers or other professionals engaged in the education process. The features of this content are that it is generally small in scale, and scope is concentrated on specific learning outcomes and is likely to contain deliberate or inadvertent infringements of IPR.
2. Public Service Content: this is content which has been created by public service agencies including government departments, public service broadcasters, museum and libraries. Its scale is often large although the scope may be focused by public policies, broadcast planning or collection protocols. It is often of very high quality and is invariably free of any IPR infringement.
3. Commercial Content: that is content which has been created for the specific purpose of creating a financial or non-financial return to the author. It will have all IPR cleared and the author or publisher will accept liability for any inadvertent infringement. The scale and scope of this content ranges from single learning objects to major coverage of large parts of a curriculum.

It is important to bear in mind that the world of commercial publishing has been revolutionized in the past decade. It is now possible using the technology for an author to become a publisher of his or her own work without significant investment. This is particularly so in relation to digital content. As repository owners are likely to be dealing with the publishing side of commercial content providers, they need to be aware of the size of enterprise they are engaging with may affect their engagement strategy.

Commercial Content Providers
While it may be true that professional publishers will at times be altruistic, their prime motivation for making their content visible through an educational repository is likely to be to increase profitability through reducing costs, increasing sales, or better both. However it is not a simple cause and effect relationship. It is much more complex.

Any provider of commercial content needs to be able to see clearly, whether or not the potential benefits of associating with the repository will outweigh the up-front costs. These costs may include converting existing metadata associated with their products in their catalogue (paper or electronic) to the format required by the repository. The commercial content supplier may also already have an existing website with an e-commerce portal which may need to be modified.

The owner of the educational repository who wishes to engage with commercial publishers and persuade them to deposit information about content for sale (paper or electronic), may wish to consider the following points when evolving an engagement strategy:

1. The repository owner needs to demonstrate clearly how participation in the repository can lead to greater sales or reduced costs.
2. It may be appropriate for centrally funded repositories to consider meeting all or part of the up-front costs which would be incurred by commercial content providers.
3. The metadata requirements should not add additional cost and it may be pertinent to include a “folksonomy” or some mechanism which can be used for keyword searching.
4. Consideration needs to be given to how a resource will be purchased by the user. This may be the integration of an e-commerce portal into the repository, or it may be more appropriate simply to re-direct prospective purchases to the publishers own portal.
5. A key issue for commercial publishers is protecting the IPR of the Rights Holders, so consideration will need to be given to how the repository owner will assist in protecting IPR. This may include such techniques as preventing copying of any sample material displayed on repository records, or building in some form of rights tracking mechanism.
6. While the legal context of IPR is different across the member states within the EU, it may be appropriate for repository owners to consider indemnifying themselves against IPR infringement by the users of the repository.
7. Providers of commercial content are more than likely to create content to very high visual and technical standards and may not be happy with their content being displayed alongside user generated content with much lower visual and technical standards in search results. In addition, it may not be appropriate in a search result page to have commercial content which carries a charge displayed alongside user generated content which does not carry a charge. For these reasons it may be more appropriate for commercial content to be displayed on a separate results page or indeed in a separate repository. This is the approach developed by Glow in Scotland with the Glow Showcase www.showcase.glowscotland.org.uk
8. Repository owners should consider how they will market the repository to commercial content providers. This might take the form attending specialist events such as publishing trade fairs (e.g. Frankfurt Book Fair) or education exhibitions (e.g. BETT in London).
9. Repository owners should consider how they will market a repository to the education community. Commercial content providers who may have invested significant amounts in setting up and maintaining information on their content within a repository will wish to be assured that there is a strategy in place for growing the repository in terms of users and amount of content held.
10. It may be pertinent for owners of repositories where significant amounts of commercial content are held to consider including value-added services to the suppliers of commercial content. These might include:
    1. support for marketing direct to specific groups of users,
    2. integrating a sales platform or e-commerce portal within the repository,
    3. identifying gaps in the provision of content or making specified metrics available in order to permit the generation of market intelligence,
    4. support to the commercial provider with the logistics of form-filling, supplying the appropriate metadata or maintaining the currency of the information.
11. Finally it may be appropriate for a repository owner to bear in mind the requirements of EU competition regulation and legislation

At the end of the analysis, the engagement by owners of commercial content with educational repositories in the public sector is unlikely to be for the same reasons as for the owners of user generated or public service content. Owners of educational repositories in the public sector may need to evaluate carefully whether or not the features they may need to implement in order to engage with owners of commercial content are such that they compromise the essential ethics of public service.

Discussion summarized below.

Motivations and incentives
Increase in teachers’ understanding and use of Learning Platforms and Web 2.0 social tagging tools e.g Del.icio.us, Facebook.

Solutions that provide complete service which include training and support (often found through educational portals) - access to specialist training and supplementary guidance

An opportunity to become part of a meaningful professional community which may involve dialogue with other professionals in the field and ‘experts’ in didactics and pedagogical issues

Knowing that your contribution to a community is valued (could be by adding a resource or taking part in a discussion)

Easy access to high quality resources which improve the quality of the learning activity can be used in different learning contexts

Identifying the added value of the repository over and above other options such as Google

Links to the local curriculum

Access to complete lesson plans

Quality assurance

Saving time, not wasting time, finding what you need easily and having access to a personal clipboard (good interface design to useful resources combined in combination with useful tools)

Critical mass – in terms of resources, activity and community

Strategies and incentives to engage and retain users
Indire, the national institute supervised by the ministry of education in Italy, offer extensive face to face support and dialogue with respected professionals and experts in the field e.g. professional community, which includes expertise in didactics and pedagogical issues and the use of multimedia.

Indire also offer a step by step support process to improve the quality of uploaded materials and develop teacher skills and competence. The first step encourages teachers to upload material. The second step involves pedagogical experts and also involves increasing the use of multimedia in the content. If material is considered to be valuable and innovative the teachers are paid to carry out extra work. Teachers improve digital skills, digital competences and becoming familiar with language associated with new technologies.

Britannica – think that traditional marketing doesn’t work so staff are employed to work in schools with teachers.

SMART run content creation seminars.

Tiger Leap (Estonia) - building an environment in Elgg to bring together repositories, users and support. They see social networking as offering a way of engaging and retaining users.

Examples of success
Realizing that many teachers now understand the value of using a Learning Platform, Britannica changed the way that they delivered their product. The main focus became the delivery method. They have high quality content and a good interface and now offer training and supplementary guides i.e. training built around the use of learning platforms and the development of lesson plans.

lektion.se (Sweden) Even though the repository mainly consist of pdf resources it is seen to be successful because it’s made by teachers for teachers. Teachers control their own environment and no demands are made.

New York Times Provides lesson plans and discussion topics for investigation.

Challenges
How to get pupils and students using repositories?

Failures
In the Netherlands a repository with links to teaching material and resources added by teachers and librarians was not being used in secondary education and vocational training. While the repository was popular in primary education, Google was preferred in secondary education and vocational training. The repository developers are thus focusing on primary education.

Repositories based on external links are of little value and are problematic in terms of maintenance.

If quality does not meet the initial expectation, users will not return.

Barriers
The barriers identified could be described as generic and related to the use if ICT in general. For example the following barriers were identified:

• Lack of skills in relation to using learning environments and web-based tools
• Access to computers
• Connectivity and band width
• Administration (login?) and access
• Lack of support from the head teacher is also seen to be significant.

Keywords for a “repository wish list” and important (future) trends are listed below.

What do you consider the most important overall trends and tendencies, important current/future challenges (examples: community building; customization and personalization; integration with other systems/services (repository federation, LMS, content authoring tools,)

• Opportunity/challenge to look at the issue of providing smaller repositories with the option to feed into larger systems w/o needing to develop all of the items below.
• Move away from the idea of all things to all men, instead look at content only/metadata and work with other specialists for personalization features, purchasing, etc.
• TREND iGoogle type service --- where all widgets are integrated for social networking sites. Need to be able to facilitate what’s in your repository OUT to others. Then they will do the work to integrate your data into their gadgets/widgets. Netvibes = brings all your web-lifes together. Repositories could make their data available to such services thereby allowing personalization to be done, but it’s being done by others not by the repository owner.
• User generated data (social metadata like tags, etc) --- where would this be stored? Who owns this? Is it ok to not have it attached to the resource
• Cooperation between LMS and repositories. Interoperation possible but it actually involves bespoke dev for each of the LMS systems.
• Interface testing – generally speaking, usability is not being done with real users. Need to ensure that the last step of delivering to users is considered more and that interfaces are tested and revised so that they are easy to use.

Suggestions to facilitate more efficient cooperation between repository owners

• Move towards shared repositories. So share your development code with other repository owners. In time that will develop the technology running the repository and improve it. Will facilitate interoperability. But often new versions are required as older versions
• Legal statements are very important when cooperating with other repositories. To ensure protection of every party’s interested are catered and that all is fair.

A wish list for repository functionality – building upon the list of design patterns from first workshop (E=essential; I=important)

Repository homepage

• Up-front value proposition --- E
• What's new --- I
• Most xx boxes --- I
• Search on homepage ---- E

About Us
It is very important to have About Us information visible and easily accessible to users. It should show info on what the repository is about and how it works. In case people want to get in touch or want to work with you, the info is readily available.

Navigation

• Searching --- E
  • Simple search form
  • Search results page
  • Advanced search
  • No results page
  • Search within results / Search filters
• Faceted search – I
  • Links to categories as well as to the individual results in order to
  • Filter search– combining free text search with advanced search w faceted options to allow users narrow their results. not really advanced search
  • Search correction
• RSS your search results --- I contextually dependent search results
• Sorting functionality – E – and multiple ways of sorting/ranking the results should be possible
• Browsing
  • Ways to organize content
  • Category pages /Thematic browsing --- E

Resource description page

Rate a resource

• Actual Description/Abstract-- I
• Reviews/comments/discussion -- I
• Related content
• Tagging
• Add to favourites
• Share with a friend
• Copyright information /IPR
• Popularity
• PRICE - E
• Branding if you are using content from a variety of producers -- E
• Validation/accreditation – I
• Contextual text from users on how they’ve used it. It augments the rating system.

Collecting resources (temporarily)

• Favourites / Print basket / Shopping cart / Wish list
• Search history
• Saved searches
• Add to a list, but with the option to compile and display in bibliographic format or layout format (doc or PDF) -- I

Keep users updated

In the second group session participants were asked to initiate the discussion on recommendations from the network to be presented at the final strategic seminar.

Keywords from the discussion following the group presentations are listed below, and will form the basis of further discussion on which solid recommendations can be agreed upon.

Engaging users and producers
Keep it simple.
No teacher left behind approach to training.
Listen to the users.
If you want the producers, get the users!
Find the ‘killer app.’
Producers: a guideline for private and public producers to encourage their engagement with educational repository owners
Users: Appropriate support (interface design, tools, face to face support). And who provides face to face support? Possibly agencies?
Ensure quality of resources, and critical mass in terms resources and community

Rights issues
There needs to be recognition that this is a highly complex area that doesn’t have a simple solution.
Licensing needs to be simplified possibly through the development of a standardized set of licences.
This needs to be addressed at an EU level.
An idea worth exploring could be a Central Agency to harvest taxes, track usage and manage payment.
Educational use need to be given more rights than "normal use"
Increase awareness of rights, and seek a common simple language about rights and a clear set (small number) of information about rights (protection and usage)

Standards and interoperability
A coordinated approach to international interoperability standards should be an objective.
There need to be mechanisms in place to support such a coordinator approach.
We have common standards for metadata but we haven't really implemented any common packaging standard
We need to increase the awareness of using common packaging and interoperability standards

Repository strategies
Keep it simple - meet the needs of the user, build on their existing habits and behaviour, don’t expect them to be super-users (overnight)
Repositories don't stand alone
Repository strategies should include consideration of the following:
Needs of teachers and students
Support for teachers
Relate to context and curriculum
Developmental - not an end in itself
Involves a range of expertise and different stakeholders
Support for user generated content

The evaluation was an informal 10 minute discussion in plenum. Comments included:

• Important and valuable to have presentations from “real teachers”
• Perhaps shorten some presentations, leaving more room for informal discussions on “un-conferencing” activities – will be important to strengthen online cooperation as well
• Nice surroundings and organization of the workshop – thanks to our Austrian hosts

Rosa Maria Gomez of CNDP suggested taking a user perspective as starting point for summarizing EdReNe work.
Alison Hudson suggested asking an EDEN representative to speak and introduce EDEN’s annual conference. EdReNe should also submit a paper to and attend the EDEN conference.

Jim Henderson suggested: Strategy for influencing IPR legislation – needs unified strategy from education stakeholders (to match rights holder associations).

Brian Hudson suggested that EdReNe encourages institutions as associate members (e.g. universities – with teacher training). Also relevant projects may be members, e.g. Share.TEC and Driver (www.driver-repository.eu) should be invited.