News Archive

• Are you developing educational technologies that are innovative?
• Would you like to have your projects showcased to a national and international audience?
• Can you demonstrate that your project has impacted on learning?

If you've answered yes to any of these questions, you may be interested in the 2011 Learning Impact Awards. The Learning Impact Awards recognise outstanding applications of technology to support education. The awards are unique for their recognition of the use of technology in a learning context. The awards are hosted by IMS Global; a non-profit member organization that strives to enable the growth and impact of learning technology in higher education, K-12, and corporate education worldwide.

In the last three years there has been an Australian Regional final where the top three entries have received support to enter the global event. News of any 2011 Australian event will be advertised once known.

Therefore, it is time to start thinking about, and developing what you can enter for LIA2011. For more information, contact Ashley Lourey on (07) 4631 2342, or via email at ashley.lourey@usq.edu.au. Entry criteria information may be found at: http://www.imsglobal.org/learningimpact2011/awards.html

They performed exceedingly well yet again against a strong international contingent. All three entries received awards for their applications of technology that address the significant challenges facing education, including:

1. Silver Award: Western Sydney Institute of TAFE's Mobilae - mobile learning, assessment and evidence gathering
2. Bronze Award: Tasmania Polytechnic and Skills Institute's Mobile Assessment and Online Recognition using QTI solutions
3. Bronze Award: Education Services Australia's Personal / Professional learning network

The Learning Impact Awards are designed to recognise the most impactful use of technology worldwide in support of learning. This unique program evaluates established, new, and research efforts in context at an implementing learning institution.

Further information on all the International Award recipients can be found at:
http://www.imsglobal.org/pressreleases/pr100524.html.

ADL have been pioneers in developing and disseminating e-learning content; but the way information is disseminated and consumed online has changed greatly, and the learning repository community acknowledges those changes. The summit sought to identify what the current business drivers and requirements are for repositories, and how to move repositories and repository federations forward to deal with them. There was high-level participation in the summit from several US government departments: sharing and discovering content across government portals more effectively is a priority for the administration.

Link Affiliates was invited to contribute a position paper to the summit; we argue in it for the need to open repositories up to the Open Web, working with it rather than in competition to it. We also emphasise that repositories should have a clear mandate and solve real problems in their domain; we discussed LORN as an example worth emulating. Work in registration of repositories and repository services, such as what IMS LODE has been doing, is highligted as enabling more flexible models of repository federation.

We have posted a summary of the summit's discussions, going through the major themes identified. Almost all of these themes are not specific to the US Department of Defense or even learning repositories: the summit gives a good overview of where repository and repository federation stands now, and what are the new challenges that they face.

We are currently in the process of collecting responses to two surveys, targeting VET teachers and IT technical staff. Both surveys are quick and easy, taking no more than 5-10 minutes to complete. If you are interesting in participating in these surveys, please click on the links below:

1. VET Teachers' survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FYSCFT7
2. VET IT staff survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HDWYVRX

If you have any further queries relating to the VET Toolkit survey, please contact Ashley Lourey on (07) 4631 2342, or ashley.lourey@usq.edu.au.

This year's IDEA10 series of events was hosted in Melbourne and included a host of national and international delegates discussing emerging technologies that are facing today's education sector. IDEA10 provided a unique forum where both educators and technologists were represented across the three sectors of education: schools, higher education and vocational learning.

'This is the only forum that I go to where each of the three education sectors are represented evenly and contributed across. For that alone there's a lot of value. The opportunity to share intellectual capital across those sectors and important areas is very valuable.' Rodney Spark - Executive Director, e-Works

The IDEA10 series of events started with IDEALab; a technical workshop focusing on technical standards and innovation supporting the interoperability of education systems. IDEALab featured members from the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) Association and SIF AU discussing the progress of implementing SIF within Australia. The afternoon session of IDEALab provided a briefing on the Digital Education Revolution (DER) Technical Standards project, also including a summary of recent international standards activities.

Katrina Reyen from the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, Victoria officially opened the one-and-a-half day Technology in Open Education forum by emphasising the importance of digital education. Katrina touched on the need for educators to work with innovators and technologists to develop technology that improves pedagogy.

'One of the strengths of this conference is that it brings different types of people [educators, technologists] together to have conversations; people with different professional backgrounds, responsibilities and so forth.' Peter Croger - Croger Associates Pty Ltd

Following on from Katrina's presentation, a discussion panel featuring Andrew Douch, Dr. Shirley Reushle and Harriet Wakelam - educators from the schools, higher-education and VET sectors - provided a very engaging and interactive dialogue on the technologies that educators are looking for, and how these technologies not only have the ability to make the lives of teachers easier, but also enhance the overall learning process. Delegates were then involved in a productive Q&A session where the uses of Web 2.0 services within schools were discussed and certain duty-of-care responsibilities identified.

The remainder of the day followed the same theme; presentations by practitioners highlighting the latest developments in educational technology and responses by educators demonstrating how they are embracing them.

The final day of IDEA10 presented the overall theme of evolution in not only learning, but the technologies that support learning. The day opened with presentations from the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative and the IMS Global Learning Consortium identifying how technology is evolving to meet the changing needs of standards development. This was followed by a video presentation by Professor Gilly Salmon highlighting the major evolutionary changes in the learning process.

IDEA10 concluded with the announcement of the winners of the Australian Regional IMS Learning Impact Awards Finals. Details of all the winners can be found at:
http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/NewsArticle/LIA10_Winners_Announcement.html.

'How fascinating, interesting and valuable I've found this conference and the previous day. It's just been fantastic in terms of the depth and the challenge that's been involved in the time we've spent here.' Dr. Evan Arthur - Group Manager, Digital Education Group, Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR)

For further information on the IDEA10 series of events please visit:
http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/idea10/.

1. Winner - Tasmanian Polytechnic and Skills Institute: 'Mobile Assessment and Online Recognition using QTI solutions'
2. First Runner-up - Education Services Australia (ESA): 'Personal / Professional learning network'
3. Second Runner-up - Western Sydney Institute of TAFE: 'Mobilae - mobile learning, assessment and evidence gathering'

The three winners are now invited to showcase their entries at the Learning Impact 2010, to be held at Long Beach, California from 17 - 20 May 2010. This year's judging panel included:

• Dr. Rob Abel - CEO of IMS Global Learning Consortium
• Deborah Hamilton - Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR)
• Dr. Kathryn Moyle - University of Canberra
• Rodney Spark - Executive Director of e-Works
• Ross Treadwell - Education Works, Department of Education and Children's Services (DECS) South Australia

Alongside the top three Finalists, two Encouragement Awards were also given out to entries that demonstrated a high level of quality in addressing technology challenges facing education:

1. eMarking Assistant and the University of Southern Queensland - 'eMarking Assistant'
2. University of Southern Queensland - 'Adoption of Tablet and screencasting technologies for multi-modal education'

LIA10 Winners From left to right: Rodney Spark (Judge), Dr. Kathryn Moyle (Judge), Paul Wray (2nd Runner-up), Dr. Peter Evans (Encouragement Award), Dr. Birgit Loch (Encouragement Award), Peter Higgs (Winner), Dr. Rob Abel (Judge), Jerry Leeson (1st Runner-up and Peoples' Choice Award) and Ross Treadwell (Judge)

Delegates attending the IDEA10 series of events were also given the opportunity to vote for their favourite LIA entries during the LIA 'speed dating' event. This year's LIA Peoples' Choice was awarded to ESA's 'Personal / Professional learning network' entry.

Details of all of the Australian finalists may be found at:
http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/idea10/events/lia10.html

The LIAs and Recognition Program recognises outstanding applications of technology that address the most significant challenges facing education. The awards are unique for their recognition of the use of technology in context.

IMS Global Learning is a nonprofit member organization that strives to enable the growth and impact of learning technology in higher education, K-12, and corporate education worldwide. IMS GLC members are leading corporations, higher education institutions, school districts and government organizations worldwide that are enabling the future of education by developing interoperability standards and adoption practices for educational and learning technology. IMS GLC also sponsors Learning Impact: a global awards program and conference that recognizes the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability and quality.

The survey shows where consensus has emerged in the field on what e-research infrastructure is needed (advice, digitisation, automatic data collection, visualisation). It also shows where different disciplines have different takes on which infrastructure is more important (persistent identifiers, metadata creation and discovery).

The awards are unique for their recognition of the use of technology in context. The top three Australian finalists will receive support to attend the international IMS GLC Learning Impact Awards in Long Beach, California from 17-20 May 2010.

We would like to congratulate the following 9 successful Australian entrants who are in the running to be one of the top three Australian finalists - judging will take place at the IDEA10 series of events to be held in Melbourne from 10 - 12 March:

1. University of South Australia: Improving learning outcomes in a diverse student population
2. Education Services Australia: Thesaurus-enhanced vocabulary switching and faceted search in an education portal
3. Western Sydney Institute of TAFE: Mobilae - mobile learning, assessment and evidence gathering
4. Education.au limited: Personal / Professional learning network
5. Tasmanian Polytechnic and Skills Institute: Mobile Assessment and Online Recognition using QTI solutions
6. University of Southern Queensland: Adoption of Tablet and screencasting technologies for multi-modal education at the University of Southern Queensland
7. WestOne Services: WestOne Resource Development Framework
8. Studentnet: Nextmail advanced collaboration
9. eMarking Assistant and the University of Southern Queensland: eMarking Assistant: helping teachers provide quality feedback on electronic assignments and use electronic marking rubrics

Details on each of the LIA entries may be found on our website.

Of interest is the recently published The Learning Impact 2010 Report: High Value Projects that Leading Institutions, Schools, and Governments are Implementing to Improve Access and Affordability to High Quality Educational Experiences from the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC). This is an analysis of three years of regional and global competitions. IMS Global Learning is a global, nonprofit, member organization that strives to enable the growth and impact of learning technology in the education and corporate learning sectors worldwide.

The paper aims to help bring clarity to the vocabulary debates from which the field has suffered, and summaries the modelling work the USQ-Link Affiliates team undertook during the PILIN project.

IDEA10 is for the whole education sector including schools, vocational and tertiary institutions. It is an initiative of the Link Affiliates Team based at the University of Southern Queensland and is supported by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) and IMS GLC Global.

The themes for IDEA10 include:

• Learning impact of technology
• Technology supported learning innovation
• Interoperability and technical standards

IDEA10 is taking place at The Sebel and Citigate Albert Park Melbourne from 10-12 March 2010.

By attending this complimentary one hour webinar you will:

• Learn how standards and interoperability guidelines inform good practice, drive savings and improve business agility
• Hear about the latest open and service oriented approaches
• See about how organisations such as yours can improve their service delivery

Please join us on Tuesday, February 9th 2010 at 2pm AEDT.

It will do so by centrally registering national registries of research data, and the service points for interacting with those registries. Clients can then be configured automatically to search across all registered service points: the registries are formed into an ad hoc federation, which can be used by aggregators, mash-ups and portals, to improve access to scientific resources.

The GRI partners met in November in Canberra for a two-day workshop, to lay out a programme for a common operational understanding of the Initiative, to establish shared governance, and to outline the range of services to be offered. Link Affiliates were invited to act as rapporteur for the meeting. The meeting outcomes are summarised on the GRI website (PDF); we have also summarised the meeting on our blog.

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.

This paper reports on the modelling of service infrastructure for building repository federations in education, as was undertaken in the FRED Project in 2007, and which has also been applied to various registries in the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative.