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| TECHNICAL STANDARDS FOR THE DIGITAL EDUCATION REVOLUTION NEWSLETTER |
| February 2010: Issue 4 |
ITinteroperability is a newsletter aimed at informing you 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.
New editions of ITinteroperability are published once every two months.
If you wish to subscribe to this newsletter, please send a blank, plain text email to: join-itint@edna.edu.au
(94 KB)Australian News
IDEA10 & LIA Update
Nominations for the Australian Regional Finals of the IMS Global Learning Consortium Learning Impact Awards (LIA) (LIAs) closed on 15 February. These applications of technology address significant challenges facing education. Judging of the (LIAs) will again take place by a number of distinguished judges. This year's showcase will have the added bonus of being hosted by the IMS Chief Executive Officer, Rob Abel, who is visiting from the United States and will also be presenting at IDEA10 on Friday morning. Do not forget to register for the IDEA10 series of events to be held in Melbourne from Wednesday, 9 - 12 March 2010.
More information:
- Learning Impact Award Australian Regional Finals
- IDEA10 website with updated program
VET Sector projects
The Link Affiliates team participated in two VET sector projects in 2009:
- Trust Federations which examined where a "single sign-on" would simplify current processes and benefit users, and to look at specific applications that could benefit from "single sign-on"
- Verification of Learner Information that examined enabling electronic verification of educational qualifications, membership of professional associations or trade/occupational licensing information. Both projects produced reports that were well received by the VET community and will inform continued work in 2010.
More information:
Education Services Australia (ESA)
The new ministerially owned company, Education Services Australia (ESA) is the joining of Education.au and Curriculum Corporation, a merger at the direction of the Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs. The new company is due to come into existance during the first half of 2010. Recruitment is underway for a CEO.
More information:
Other
- Link Affiliates and SunGard HE held a webinar on February 9 2010, on Trends in Interoperability and Standards, which emphasis on current trends in the education sector. The slides from the presentation are available.
- An article on Open Standards by Ann Fitzgerald and Kylie Pappalardo explores the relationships between Standards Interoperability and Intellectual Property, and the difficulties in pinning down what it means for a standard to be "open".
- The NSW Centre for Learning Innovation (CLI) has launched a new blog on current activity and developments in e-learning standards.
International News
Learning and Technology World Forum: London January 2010
Following the first successful event in 2009, 72 national Ministers of Education, their retinues and over 700 invited educators and technologists met over 2 days. Forum themes were regeneration and recovery; skills/learning and preparing learners for a global society; all focussing on education and technology. The bias was towards early childhood, schools and VET although there was a HE presence.
The forum was opened by British PM Gordon Brown who launched a new scheme to fund computers and broad band access in disadvantaged households following some convincing evidence of the benefits.
Themes emerging from the forum included:
- A determination by countries to maintain high levels of investment in ICT's for learning despite the Global Financial Crisis.
- A strong view that the full benefits of ICT won't be realised until teacher's confidence and practice are enhanced. Teacher competency standards (e.g. UNESCO ICT Competency Framework) and drivers licences were regularly cited as priorities.
- Redesigning assessment to fit a 21st century skill set was seen as vital.
The UK was emphasising digital inclusion and engaging parents. The USA is looking to a national education technology plan, content interoperability standards and search, and effective benchmarks. Europe is very active in developing public private partnerships, classrooms of the future research and student engagement in maths and science.
There were some great presentations and workshops including an international collaboration on http://www.notschool.net; an analysis of the Korean and Finnish success stories and the challenges of education in Nepal.
Other key issues included:
- dealing with the 72 million young people who don't get any schooling
- low bandwidth
- institutional strengthening
News from Standards Bodies
IMS Global Learning Consortium
... creating standards for the development and adoption of technology-enhanced learning
- IMS recently called for participation in work on "Information Architecture for Outcomes-Based Learning: Enabling Large Scale Use of e-Portfolio for Education and Lifelong Learning" which is examining the question of "How can we enable institutions, teachers, and students to make the use of e-Portfolios as "easy" and "accepted" and "ubiquitous" as the current predominant practice of grade reports and test scores?"
- a video demonstrating the emerging Learner Information Services specification is now available online.
- This year's IMS Global Learning Impact meeting "Understanding and Harnessing the Next Generation of Technology to Transform the Educational Enterprise" is being held in Long Beach, California, USA, 17-20 May 2010.
More information:
OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards)
... driving the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society
The following new activities have been proposed:
- WS-Calendar. WS-Calendar will adapt existing calendaring specifications, such as iCalendar (IETF RFC 5545), for use in Web services. (Approved)
- Identity in the Clouds. This activity will work to harmonize definitions, terminologies, and vocabulary of Identity in the context of Cloud Computing. (Under review)
The following standards are entering public review:
- BPEL4People v. 1.1 and WS-HumanTask v. 1.1, specifying business processes involving human tasks. The BPEL4People update defines a new type of basic activity which uses human tasks as an implementation. The WS-HumanTask update introduces a coordination protocol to control autonomy and life cycle of service-enabled human tasks in an interoperable manner. (Feb 13).
- Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.2, Part 1: Introduction and OpenDocument Schema. A new version of the widely used open document format. (26 March)
- Content Management Interoperability Services, defining a web services interface to enable greater interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. (Feb 12)
More information:
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
... developing interoperable technologies
- The Web Accessibility Initiative has published a resource called "Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites". This new WAI resource guides you through telling organizations about accessibility barriers on their website.
- W3C has released a report examining "Access Control and Privacy Issues" based on a Workshop on Access Control Application Scenarios, held in Luxembourg in November 2009
- W3C has launched the RDFa Working Group, whose mission is to support the use of RDFa, a format for embedding structured data in Web documents.
- W3C is organizing a Workshop on the "Next Steps for RDF" around June 2010
More information:
Kuali Open Library Environment
- The Kuali foundation, which promotes open source administrative software in Higher Education, has just been awarded a $US 2.4 million grant by the Andrew Mellon foundation to develop open source library software. The goal is to enable better connectivity with other components of academic enterprise technologies, with software more responsive to academic library requirements, and less fraught with problems of vendor lock-in and interoperability. The Kuali OLE project will be developed a partnership of leading US research libraries, but it has attracted attention internationally as addressing a common concern in academic libraries. Kuali OLE will define common service standards for its services, which can be implemented openly; work over the next six months will concentrate on defining the common data model and core services to be prioritised.
More information:
About ITinteroperability
This newsletter is an output of the Technical Standards and Specifications: Development and Deployment for the Digital Education Revolution (DER) Project - funded by the Australian Government's Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR).
The Link Affiliates team who contribute to the newsletter are part of the Australian Digital Futures Institute (ADFI) at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ). To keep up to date with Link Affiliates activities go to:
Please send feedback and suggestions for news items to: linkaffiliates@usq.edu.au
Unless specifically indicated, the views expressed in this newsletter are the personal opinions of the contributors and may not represent the opinion of the University of Southern Queensland or any associated projects or funding bodies - please refer to the Policies/Disclaimers page.
