The evolving landscape of learning technology

This paper provides an overview of the current and emerging issues in learning technology research, concentrating on structural issues such as infrastructure, policy and organizational context. It updates the vision of technology outlined by Squires’ (1999) concept of peripatetic electronic teachers (PETs) where Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide an enabling medium to allow teachers to act as freelance agents in a virtual world and reflects to what extent this vision has been realized The paper begins with a survey of some of the key areas of ICT development and provides a contextualizing framework for the area in terms of external agendas and policy drivers. It then focuses upon learning technology developments which have occurred in the last five years in the UK and offers a number of alternative taxonomies to describe this. The paper concludes with a discussion of the issues which arise from this work

Open Educational Practices and Resources. OLCOS Roadmap 2012

As a Transversal Action under the European eLearning Programme, the Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project carries out a set of activities that aim at fostering the creation, sharing and re-use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in Europe and beyond.OER are understood to comprise content for teaching and learning, software-based tools and services, and licenses that allow for open development and re-use of content, tools and services.The OLCOS road mapping work was conducted to provide decision makers with an overview of current and likely future developments in OER and recommendations on how various challenges in OER could be addressed.While the results of the road mapping will provide some basis for policy and institutional planning, strategic leadership and decision making is needed for implementing measures that are likely to promote a further uptake of open educational practices and resources.OER are understood to be an important element of policies that want to leverage education and lifelong learning for the knowledge economy and society. However, OLCOS emphasises that it is crucial to also promote innovation and change in educational practices.In particular, OLCOS warns that delivering OER to the still dominant model of teachercentred knowledge transfer will have little effect on equipping teachers, students and workers with the competences, knowledge and skills to participate successfully in the knowledge economy and society.This report emphasises the need to foster open practices of teaching and learning that are informed by a competency-based educational framework. However, it is understood that a shift towards such practices will only happen in the longer term in a step-by-step process. Bringing about this shift will require targeted and sustained efforts by educational leaders at all levels

Projekt CALIBRATE Izmenjava in sodelovalna uporaba

One of the main issues that the European Union supports through the IST Programme is the exchange and collaborative use of learning resources. CALIBRATE (Calibrating eLearning in Schools) brings together eight European countries to carry out a multi-level project designed to support the collaborative use and exchange of learning resources in schools. Its main aim is to provide a brokerage system among national repositories of educational materials. This paper reports on the main goals of this project, which include developing an open-source technical architecture to support content exchange/collaboration between ministries of education and other owners of educational repositories, to develop a teaching toolbox that supports the collaborative use of learning resources, research and testing new approaches that can improve semantic interoperability related to the discovery and evaluation of learning resources. One relatively important issue developed through the project concerns the guidelines with which the metadata resources in the repositories should be equipped.We will report on two major guidelines the resources in CALIBRATE should follow. A number of practical examples of preliminary versions of tools will also be outlined.Izmenjava in sodelovalna uporaba učnih vsebin sta eni temeljnih vodil, ki ju podpira Evropska Unija skozi programe IST. Projekt CALIBRATE (Calibrating eLearning in Schools) povezuje osem evropvskih držav v večnivojskem projektu, katerega na- črt je podpreti sodelovalno uporabo in izmenjavo učnih gradiv v šolah.Njegov glavni cilj je pripraviti izmenjevalni sistem med nacionalnimi skladišči izobraževalnih gradiv. Članek poroča o glavnih ciljih projekta, med katerimi so razvoj odprtokodne arhitekture, ki bo podpriala izmenjavo/sodelovanje med ministrstvi za šolstvo in drugimi lastniki skladišč izobraževalnih gradiv, razvoj učne orodjarne, ki bo podpirala sodelovalno uporabo učnih gradiv, raziskave in preizkupanje novih postopkov na področ ju odkrivanja in ocenjevanja učnih vsebin. Eden od pomembnih rezultatov doseženih med projektom so smernice o tem, katere metapodatke naj imajo gradiva v skladiščih. Poročali bomo o dveh glavnih smernicah, ki naj jim gradiva v projektu CALIBRATE sledijo. Predstavili bomo tudi nekaj razvojnih različic orodij

A panoramic view on metadata application profiles of the last decade

This paper describes a study developed with the goal to understand the panorama of the metadata Application Profiles (AP): (i) what AP have been developed so far; (ii) what type of institutions have developed these AP; (iii) what are the application domains of these AP; (iv) what are the Metadata Schemes (MS) used by these AP; (v) what application domains have been producing MS; (vi) what are the Syntax Encoding Schemes (SES) and the Vocabulary Encoding Schemes (VES) used by these AP; and finally (vii) if these AP have followed the Singapore Framework (SF). We found (i) 74 AP; (ii) the AP are mostly developed by the scientific community, (iii) the ‘Learning Objects’ domain is the most intensive producer; (iv) Dublin Core metadata vocabularies are the most used and are being used in all domains of application and IEEE LOM is the second most used but only inside the ‘Learning Objects’ application domain; (v) the most intensive producer of MS is the domain of ‘Libraries and Repositories’; (vi) 13 distinct SES and 90 distinct VES were used; (vi) five of the 74 AP found follow the SF.This work is sponsored by FEDER funds through the Competitivity Factors Operational Programme (COMPETE) and by National funds through Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) within the scope of the project: FCOMP01-0124-FFEDER-022674.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Changing Practice in a National Legal Deposit Library

This two-part essay considers how digital culture has influenced ideas about permanence and looks at the change in collecting practice in a legal deposit library. The author asks: how is the idea of permanence, understood in cultural heritage terms, influencing digital culture and thus digital technology? The first part of the essay touches upon the concepts associated with permanence, digital culture, digital technology, social change, and cultural institutions, in relation to collecting digital cultural material. The second part of this essay focuses on the change in collecting practice of the Alexander Turnbull Library (Turnbull Library) at the National Library of New Zealand in developing its heritage collection of electronically published material with the benefit of legal deposit, with a particular focus on the change in practice to include the collection of online publications

Ecology of social search for learning resources

Vuorikari, R., & Koper, R. (2009). Ecology of social search for learning resources. Campus-Wide Information Systems, 26(4), 272-286.Purpose: This paper deals with user-generated Interest indicators (ratings, bookmarks and tags). We answer two research questions: can search strategies based on Social Information Retrieval (SIR) make the discovery of learning resources more efficient for users, and can Community search help users discover a wider variety of cross-boundary resources. By cross-boundary we mean that the user and resource come from different countries and that the language of the resource is different from that of the user’s mother tongue. Design: We focus on a portal that access a federation of multilingual learning resource repositories. We collect users’ attentional metadata based on a server-side logging scheme and use this empirical data to answer two hypotheses. Findings: The search-play-annotation ratio is more efficient with Social Information Retrieval strategies, but Community browsing alone does not help users to discover more cross-boundary resources. Practical implications: By social tagging and bookmarking resources from a variety of repositories, users create underlying connections between resources that otherwise do not cross-reference, for example, via hyperlinks. This is important for bringing them under the umbrella of SIR methods. Future studies should include testing wider range of SIR methods to leverage these user-made connections between resources that originate from a number of countries and are in a variety of languages. Originality: The use of attentional metadata to model the ecology of social search adds value to the actors of learning object economy, e.g. educational institutions, digital libraries and their managers, content providers, policy makers, educators and learners

Enabling states, capitalising enterprise and confronting the social: issues and implications in researching contemporary social capital and enterprise

A key feature of late capitalism continues to be a complex reworking of previous approaches to the relationship between the state and business. This significant shift in the interplay between the public and private sectors has generated such developments as the privatisation of many services formerly provided by government and the growth of not-for-profit organisations seeking to fill gaps in service provision. These changes are highly significant for every citizen and community member and for all stakeholders. This first chapter in this book encapsulates these complex developments in terms of debates about the enabling imperatives of the contemporary state, the character of the intersection between capital and enterprise, and a timely confrontation of what is understood by “the social” in current discourses, policies and strategies. In presenting this distillation, the authors introduce the subsequent chapters in the book in terms of how each chapter, including this one, contributes new insights to the broader project of eliciting the issues and implications attendant on researching contemporary social capital and social enterprise. This project is crucial if we are to understand the ways in which social capital and social enterprise can work sustainably and transformatively with variously marginalised and vulnerable groups in our societies. It is vital also for understanding the ways that such work is constrained and limited in its effectiveness