Towards the end of last year we reported that JISC had approved funding for the development of an experimental Learning Registry node here in the UK, the first node of its kind to be developed outwith the US. The JLeRN Experiment, which is being undertaken by Mimas at the University of Manchester, with input from CETIS and JISC, launched in early December. The JLeRN team is being led by Sarah Currier with the technical development being undertaken by Nick Syrotiuk and Bharti Gupta.

JLeRN / UK Contributors Learning Registry Hackday

The aim of this proof of concept project is to explore the practicalities of configuring and running a Learning Registry node and to explore the practicalities of getting data in and out of the network. The team are actively seeking any technical developers who would like to experiment with the node and, in order to facilitate this collaboration, CETIS and JLeRN are hosting a technical development day in Manchester on the 23rd of January. This event is aimed at developers contributing (or intending to contribute) data to the Learning Registry or hoping to build services based on the data it provides access to.

If you are interested in attending this event, you can register here. If you’re hoping to come along please also add a note to this Google Doc about what you’re doing, or hoping to do, and any of the issues you’ve encountered so far. If you can’t come along but are interested, please comment / leave a note as well.

JLeRN Blog

The JLeRN Experiment team have a blog (jlernexperiment.wordpress.com) up and running which they will use to disseminate regular progress reports, or as Sarah explained:

“to share all of our adventures, mis-steps, solutions, and creative ideas while working on the Learning Registry. It’s open notebook science in action!”

And the team have already been as good as their word. Nick has written a post on the Node of Mimas, a test node he installed on “a spare machine (he) had lying around” along with samples of the JSON documents the node outputs to illustrate what Learning Registry data looks like. And Bharti has posted a note on Some more exploring… which mentions the challenges of establishing a test node on a Windows Server 2008 machine and issues with getting Nginx setup correctly.

In parallel with the JLeRN experiment, CETIS will also continue to maintain a watching brief on the Learning Registry initiative in the US and will post updates of relevant developments on the CETIS blogs, so watch this space!