News Archive

The conference once again provided the opportunity for e-research practitioners from Australia and New Zealand, as well as international guests, to catch up with the latest trends and thinking in e-research. Beyond the three days of conference presentations, the conference also included a series of workshops, dealing with topics such as data mining, tools for the social sciences, project management, and using ARCS and ANDS services in research.

A major focus of this year's conference was data visualisation. There were several presentations on both innovative data visualisation approaches, and on the underlying theoretical issues in data visualisation. The conference also initiated an annual visualisation challenge, focussing on a particular theme. This year, inevitably, the theme was the financial markets.

For more information on two presentations at e-Research, go to the Link Affiliates blog to access:-

• The Visible Archive
• Danno online annotation tool

The IDEA10 Learning futures: technology challenges will focus on opportunities and challenges for the infrastructure necessary to support digital education. Events include:

• IDEALab - a technical workshop focusing on technical standards and innovation supporting interoperability of education systems
• Technology in Education Open Forum - focusing on opportunities and challenges for the infrastructure necessary to support digital education. Panel sessions will provide a voice to both technologists supporting learning and teachers using technology to enhance learning
• IMS GLC Learning Impact Awards - a showcase and judging of applications of technology to support learning. The awards are unique in recognising the use of technology in education. Winners of the Australian awards will automatically be entered in the 2010 international Learning Impact Awards to be held in California, USA.

IDEA10 is sure to be of interest to education managers and decision makers, as well as implementers, users, consumers, suppliers and vendors of information technology in Australian education. Further information:

• IDEA10 Website: http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/idea10/
• Email: ideaconference@usq.edu.au
• Contact: (+617) 4631 2444
• Don't forget to take advantage of the Early Bird Discount Rate

The IDEA series of events are sponsored by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) and the University of Southern Queensland (USQ).

E-portfolios are becoming increasingly popular around the world as a tool to enhance learning and assist with personal career development.

Presentations covered a wide range of topics including learner identity, the use of Web 2.0 functionality, regional e-portfolios and supporting communities of practice.

Plenary presentations were streamed live from VES09 and the recordings are now available online.

The VET E-portfolio Showcase was hosted by the VET sector's national e-learning strategy, the Australian Flexible Learning Framework (Framework). The Framework funds a national E-portfolio business activity, and also released the VET E-portfolio Roadmap earlier this year.

Australian entrants have had success for two years in a row on the international stage. Automatic entry into this global arena is guaranteed if a winner at the Australian regionals. Once again the LIAs will be showcased and judged according to specific criteria during the Technology in Education Open Forum at IDEA10, to be held in Melbourne, 10 - 12 March.

The IMS GLC Learning Impact Awards and Recognition Program recognizes outstanding applications of technology that address the most significant challenges facing the education community. The awards are unique for their recognition of the use of technology in context. Winners from prior years are ineligible. However, previous participants who did not finish in the top three are welcome to enter with a new submission or the same submission providing this has matured since last judged.

Submission information is located at the Australian Regional Finals page. For further information please send an email to: ideaconference@usq.edu.au. Don't forget, this is an opportunity as one of the top three Australian finalists to receive support to attend the international IMS GLC Learning Impact Awards in Long Beach, California, USA in 2010.

This newsletter informs about technical, standards and interoperability projects pertinent to education in Australia. It includes news items on local interoperability projects as well as summarising activity in international standards bodies relevant to education in Australia.

Subscription information is also available on the website and feedback is welcomed.

Part of Link Affiliates' involvement with e-research has been exploring Service Modelling, as a way of planning for the more efficient use of e-research infrastructure. To that end, the team will be giving a presentation at eResearch Australasia on how we have been modelling the integration of systems with each other as components, to promote service reuse and a more high-level view of service architecture in projects. We have already posted on what our modelling approach looks like at the Link Affiliates Blog. We will be illustrating our approach with our analysis of the Australian Women's Archives Project, hosted in the University of Melbourne's e-Scholarship Research Centre.

This activity is aimed at facilitating discovery and retrieval of learning content from repositories, by promoting standards profiles for searching and harvesting learning content, and learning content repositories. That leads to better use and reuse of available resources in the domain, and is one of the areas prioritised by the Digital Education Revolution.

Testing the proposed standards and profiles allows their continuing development to be informed by real-life usage, and identifies possible shortcomings in the standards models. This leads to more robust and usable standards for the community.

The areas of LODE work tested include:

• Profiling repository search fields to the metadata fields of primary interest in education;
• Service integration with learning management systems;
• Exchanging metadata about available learning resources;
• Organising metadata about multiple copies of learning resources, according to the metadata they have in common;
• Creating machine-readable collections of learning resources, and of protocols for interacting with them;
• Using machine-readable descriptions of collections to configure and update automatically federations of collections.

The testing work undertaken has been documented publicly at the project wiki, and is summarised in more detail at the Link Affiliates Blog.

The major focus of the meeting was ongoing work on the IMS Common Cartridge specification for digital content packaging. Particular attention was given to how Common Cartridge integrates with two other major initiatives, responding to school sector needs:

• The development of Learning Tools Interoperability, as a way of sharing authenticated access to learning resources between the LMS and external sites (such as publishers).
• The increasing need for machine-readable curriculum outcomes as metadata for learning content, allowing discovery and planning for content to align closely with course planning.

There was an opportunity to further work on Learning Object Exchange and Discovery, and to evaluate the progress to date of learning object metadata schemes (LOM and ISO SC/36), and IMS Learning Design and its realisations.

Further details on the discussions held are available in the Link Affiliates blog.

The next quarterly meeting of IMS is scheduled for October, at the headquarters of Oracle near San Francisco. As usual, much of the meeting will be set aside for individual project groups to coordinate further activity. The public session on Thursday is dedicated to the enterprise integration of learning systems, and will cover Learning Tools Interoperability; the Learning Information Services specification for services exchanging student and course data; and the IMS recommendations for Service Oriented Architecture.

IDEA10 will focus on opportunities and challenges for the infrastructure necessary to support digital education. Events include:

• IDEA Lab - a technical workshop focusing on technical standards and innovation supporting interoperability of education systems.
• Technology in Education Open Forum - focusing on opportunities and challenges for the infrastructure necessary to support digital education. Panel sessions will provide a voice to both technologists supporting learning and teachers using technology to enhance learning.
• IMS GLC Learning Impact Awards - a showcase and judging of applications of technology to support learning. The awards are unique in recognising the use of technology in education. Winners of the Australian awards will automatically be entered in the 2010 international Learning Impact Awards, to be held in California, USA.

IDEA10 is sure to be of interest to education managers and decision makers, as well as implementers, users, consumers, suppliers and vendors of information technology in Australian education. Further information:

• IDEA10 Website: http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/idea10/
• Email: ideaconference@usq.edu.au
• Contact: (+617) 4631 2444

IDEA10 is supported by the University of Southern Queensland and the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

The USQ-Link Affiliates team has been contributing documentation and business analysis to the ANDS work, building on the work of the PILIN project and the PILIN ANDS Transition project. Identifier persistence depends on sound policy frameworks much more than on details of particular technologies. The documentation the team has been contributing are guides, helping to inform the research community about issues with persistent identifier management in general, and how best to come up with a policy framework for their project to safeguard the persistence of their identifiers.

ANDS Guides on identifier persistence for researchers is already available, at Awareness level and Working level. Expert level documentation is forthcoming.

The model aims to make the e-Framework's service-oriented approach to software design more comprehensive and comprehensible. The technical model also illustrates how the different e-Framework documentary design artefacts relate to the design of systems.

To validate the model in a variety of community contexts, feedback is being sought from people involved in innovation activity, software development, and service delivery. Access to the e-Framework Technical Model and related documents located here.

The Link Affiliates Team has made a significant contribution to the review of the model, contributing experience gained from the application of the e-Framework techniques and the development of e-Framework artefacts in projects such as FRED and PILIN. The Team is undertaking further validation of the e-Framework technical approach through its application documenting examples of e-Research applications. This work is funded by the Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII) as part of the Commonwealth Government's Backing Australia's Ability - An Innovation Action Plan for the Future (BAA)

A major output from SIEL will be a peer reviewed framework of Best Practice Areas for introducing first year students to online learning environments. Unsurprisingly, investigations to date have found that a focus on providing and developing technology is not enough to foster best practices in online education. E-learning environments need to be underpinned by the same principles of effective pedagogy and curriculum design as any other learning environment.

The detailed best practice framework is yet to be finalised, but the best practices are likely to cover:

• Assessment and communication of expectations
• Recruitment and advisement
• Learning and the learner
• Functional technology
• Technology literacy and support
• Non-technical online student support services
• Management

Supplementing the report, a paper presented at EDUCAUSE Australasia summarises emerging best practice on preparing first year students for adapting to university e-learning environments. The paper "E-learning and the First Year Experience: A Framework for Best Practice" was prepared by Prof. Kerri-Lee Krause from the Griffith Institute for Higher Education. Prof. Krause will also present a paper at the July HERDSA 2009 Conference which reports on a case study analysis of the views and experiences of academic staff teaching in online environments and examines the synergies between their responses and the draft framework.

The release of this paper reflects a growing interest in using SOA in education to manage and plan software both here in Australia and internationally. Much of the literature about SOA to date is aimed at the business world and doesn't address the specific requirements or challenges of education organisations. This I paper is aimed at facilitating greater discussion and adoption of SOA in education by contextualising it to the needs of education organisations. It includes a number of authentic education-specific scenarios including:

• Integration of enterprise applications
• Virtual desktop shared service
• Financial aid
• Learner centred e-portfolios

The paper has had active Australian input through the work of the Link Affiliates team and is recommended reading for anyone wanting to find out more about SOA or is considering a SOA implementation. IMS Global has also set up a forum to facilitate discussion on SOA in education.

LAMS and the LAMS Community - Macquarie University & LAMS Foundation was the winner of a Gold Award. LAMS is a Learning Design system adopted around the world in over 80 countries, and translated into 27 languages. LAMS provides educators with a visual drag-and-drop environment for authoring and sharing Learning Designs, together with a Learning environment for deployment with students, and a teacher Monitoring environment for tracking student progress. LAMS is freely available as open source software.

Complementing LAMS is the LAMS Community, a global community website for 3600+ educators sharing 300+ LAMS Learning Designs and 3800+ discussion forum postings about implementing LAMS.

Scootle [Video] - The Learning Federation won a Bronze Award. Scootle is a secure online teaching and learning environment providing access to all Le@rning Federation digital curriculum content. It enables users to easily find the digital resources in direct relationship to curriculum. The process of finding and selecting resources is underpinned by the automated Schools Online Thesaurus, an agreed Australian and New Zealand vocabulary of curriculum topics and terms, which relates those terms to refine the teacher's process of selection.

Scootle was designed and developed for teacher education students and teachers to access and use the national digital resources. It is used by teachers and students.

QTImPlayer [Video] - Tasmanian Polytechnic was voted the best Mobile System. The QTImPlayer facilitates work place assessment. A portable device is loaded with a QTI assessment application for performing on site assessment. The assessment tools may include Observation Checklists, Testimonials and Oral Questions. Oral questions can include short answer, long answer and multiple choice formats. Once an assessment has been completed the QTImPlayer creates a 'zip' archive that contains a content package with the assessment files and various media files including audio, photos and videos of the assessment that can be uploaded as evidence. This package is sent via email to the assessor or student administration.

The LIAs is a prestigious global event and demonstrates that Australia is at the forefront of using standards to develop technology that improves the quality of learning. The LIAs are unique in that they recognize the use of technology in context. Nominations include not only information about the technology but how it is used by an educational or training organization. In addition, the entries are evaluated according to eight criteria of impact, including improving access to learning, improving affordability of learning, and improving the quality of learning.

The full list of winners can be found in the IMS Press Release.

The three Australian entrants were selected from eleven nominees at the Regional Finals as part of IDEA 2008, an event supported by the Australian Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations, the University of Southern Queensland, the State Government of Victoria and IMS GLC.

Out of the 38 international Learning Impact finalists, three of these are from Australia and were the top finalists in the Australian Regional Finals held as part of IDEA 2008 in Melbourne:

• LAMS and the LAMS Community - Macquarie University & LAMS Foundation
• Scootle - Curriculum Corporation - The Le@rning Federation
• QTImPlayer - TAFE Tasmania

In addition, two of the LIA finalists are presenting at the LIA conference:

• Scootle: Focused collaboration, personalisation and assessment. Presenter - Preety Agarwal, Senior Manager Information Systems, The Le@rning Federation, Melbourne, Australia
• Making it Easy to Implement Advanced Pedagogy Online. Presenter - Professor James Dalziel, Director, Macquarie E-Learning Centre Of Excellence (MELCOE) Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Good luck to the Australian entries and wishing the same success as our 2008 entries.

Throughout 2008, members of the PILIN project met teams working on persistent identifier infrastructure for US (Handle), UK (RIDIR) and European (CLARIN, EPICUR, SURFshare) initiatives. The teams had fruitful discussions, finding they had much to learn from each other, and much in common. PILIN work is continuing to be cited in work by international initiatives, such as the NESTOR project and DOI:
http://colab.mpdl.mpg.de/mediawiki/images/0/08/ESci08_Sem_1_nestor_requirements_PIDs_Ludwig.pdf

The international initiatives have been particularly impressed with the PILIN project's guidelines for managing information using persistent identifiers. Rather than building yet another persistent identifier system, the PILIN project took a "back to first principles" approach to thinking about managing information using persistent identifiers. The project asked fundamental questions such as "What is an identifier", "What things should be identified", and "How long should something be identified?" By answering these questions the project was able to develop practical guidance to help communities manage information using persistent identifiers, independently of particular technologies or policy domains, through a policy-driven service-oriented approach.

Despite using different identifier technologies (Handle, URN, Name-to- Thing), the common ground between the international initiatives was surprising. All of the initiatives proposed identifier infrastructures that decentralised responsibility for maintaining identifiers, but centralised identifier resolution and other identifier functionality as services. Communications continue between the Link Affiliates team that managed PILIN and these international initiatives in terms of information and ideas sharing. New work building on PILIN is also underway, with project members engaging with the OASIS XRI Technical Committee and the Australian National Data Service. The PILIN project is widely regarded as being at the forefront of global developments, validating the hard work put in by the PILIN team over the past two years.

The outputs of the PILIN project are available online at: http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/pilin2/

This includes a number of interesting documents including the following which has been included for the January 2009 D-Lib magazine issue:
Nicholas, N, Ward, N & Blinco, K 2008, A Policy Checklist for Enabling Persistence of Identifiers, D-Lib magazine, 15.1/1 January 2009
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january09/nicholas/01nicholas.html