Such data is a form of Activity Data, which can be defined as “the record of any user action that can be logged on a computer”. Meaning can be derived from Activity Data by querying it to reveal patterns and context, this is often referred to as Analytics. Activity Data can be shared as an Activity Stream, a list of recent activities performed by an individual. Activity Streams are often specific to a particular platform or application, e.g. facebook, however initiatives such as OpenSocial, ActivityStreams and Tin Can API have produced specifications and APIs to share Activity Data across platforms and applications.

While Activity Streams record the actions of individual users and their interactions with multiple resources and services, other specifications have been developed to record the actions of multiple users on individual resources. This data about how and in what context resources are used is often referred to as Paradata. Paradata complements formal metadata by providing an additional layer of contextual information about how resources are being used. A specification for recording and exchanging paradata has been developed by the Learning Registry, an open source content-distribution network for storing and sharing information about learning resources.

The briefing paper provides an overview of each of these approaches and specifications along with examples of implementations and links to further information.

The Cetis Activity Data and Paradata briefing paper written by Lorna M. Campbell and Phil Barker can be downloaded from the Cetis website here: http://publications.cetis.org.uk/2013/808

The Learning Registry: social networking for open educational resources?
Authors: Lorna M. Campbell, Phil Barker, CETIS; Sarah Currier, Nick Syrotiuk, Mimas,
Presenters: Lorna M. Campbell, Sarah Currier
Tuesday 26 March, 14:00-14:30, Room: B52
Full abstract here.

This presentation will reflect on CETIS’ involvement with the Learning Registry, JISC’s Learning Registry Node Experiment at Mimas (The JLeRN Experiment), and their potential application to OER initiatives. Initially funded by the US Departments of Education and Defense, the Learning Registry (LR) is an open source network for storing and distributing metadata and curriculum, activity and social usage data about learning resources across diverse educational systems. The JLeRN Experiment was commissioned by JISC to explore the affordances of the Learning Registry for the UK F/HE community within the context of the HEFCE funded UKOER programmes.

An overview of approaches to the description and discovery of Open Educational Resources
Authors: Phil Barker, Lorna M. Campbell and Martin Hawksey, CETIS
Presenter: Phil Barker
Tuesday 26 March, 14:30-15:00, Room: B52
Full abstract here.

This presentation will report and reflect on the innovative technical approaches adopted by UKOER projects to resource description, search engine optimisation and resource discovery. The HEFCE UKOER programmes ran for three years from 2009 – 2012 and funded a large number and variety of projects focused on releasing OERs and embedding open practice. The CETIS Innovation Support Centre was tasked by JISC with providing strategic advice, technical support and direction throughout the programme. One constant across the diverse UKOER projects was their desire to ensure the resources they released could be discovered by people who might benefit from them -i f no one can find an OER no one will use it. This presentation will focus on three specific approaches with potential to achieve this aim: search engine optimisation, embedding metadata in the form of schema.org microdata, and sharing “paradata” information about how resources are used.

Writing in Book Sprints
Authors: Phil Barker, Lorna M Campbell, Martin Hawksey, CETIS; Amber Thomas, University of Warwick.
Presenter: Phil Barker
Wednesday 27 March, 11:00-11:15, Room: A25
Full abstract here.

This lightning talk will outline a novel approach taken by JISC and CETIS to synthesise and disseminate the technical outputs and findings of three years of HEFCE funded UK OER Programmes. Rather than employing a consultant to produce a final synthesis report, the authors decided to undertake the task themselves by participating in a three-day book sprint facilitated by Adam Hyde of booksprints.net. Over the course of the three days the authors wrote and edited a complete draft of a 21,000 word book titled “Technology for Open Educational Resources: Into the Wild – Reflections of three years of the UK OER programmes”. While the authors all had considerable experience of the technical issues and challenges surfaced by the UK OER programmes, and had blogged extensively about these topics, it was a challenge to write a large coherent volume of text in such a short period. By employing the book sprint methodology and the Booktype open source book authoring platform the editorial team were able to rise to this challenge.

Secure data management service that allows states and districts to bring together and manage student and school data and connect it to learning tools used in classrooms.

I should confess that my interest in inBloom is purely on the technical side as it builds on two core technologies that CETIS has had some involvement with; the Learning Registry and the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative. The Reuter’s article provides a rather different perspective on the development however, describing the initiative as:

a $100 million database built to chart the academic paths of public school students from kindergarten through high school.

In operation just three months, the database already holds files on millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted. In some cases, the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school – even homework completion.

Local education officials retain legal control over their students’ information. But federal law allows them to share files in their portion of the database with private companies selling educational products and services.

When reported in these terms, it’s easy to understand why some parents have raised concerns about the initiative. The report goes on to say

Federal officials say the database project complies with privacy laws. Schools do not need parental consent to share student records with any “school official” who has a “legitimate educational interest,” according to the Department of Education. The department defines “school official” to include private companies hired by the school, so long as they use the data only for the purposes spelled out in their contracts.

The database also gives school administrators full control over student files, so they could choose to share test scores with a vendor but withhold social security numbers or disability records.

That’s hardly reassuring to many parents.

And for good measure they then quote a concerned parent saying

“Once this information gets out there, it’s going to be abused. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

Parents from New York, Louisiana, the Massachusetts chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and Parent-Teacher Association have also written to state officials “in protest” with the help of a civil liberties attorney in New York.

To be fair to Reuters it’s not all Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, the article also puts forward some of the potential benefits of the development as well as expressing the drawbacks and concerns. I certainly felt it was quite a balanced article that raised some valid issues.

It also clarified one issue that had rather puzzled me about the TechCrunch’s original report on inBloom which quoted Rupert Murdoch as saying:

“When it comes to K-12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.”

At the time I couldn’t see the connection between inBloom and Rupert Murdoch, and TechCrunch didn’t make it explicit, however Reuters explains that the inBloom technical infrastructure was built by Amplify Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corps. That explains that then.

Those of you who have been following the CETIS Analytics Series will be aware that such concerns about privacy, anonymity and large scale data integration and analysis initiatives are nothing new, however I thought this was an interesting example of the phenomenon.

It’s also worth adding that, as the parent of a primary school age child, it has never once occurred to me to enquire what kind of data the school records, who that data is shared with and in what form. To be honest I am pretty philosophical about these things. However it is interesting that people have a tendency not to ask questions about their data until a big / new / evil / transformative (delete according to preference) technology development like this comes along. So what do you think? Is it all FUD? Or is it time to get our tin hats out?

I’m still very interested to see if inBloom’s technical infrastructure and core technologies are up to the job, so I’ll continue to watch these developments with interest. And you never know, if my itchy nose gets the better of me I might even ask around to find out what happens to pupil data on this side of the pond.

Although it’s a bit early to start identifying specific technology trends across the programme, a few themes are already starting to emerge.

Unsurprisingly several projects mentioned that they were interested in using HTML5. Martin Hawksey who has been doing PROD calls with the OER RI projects to discuss and record their technical choices, noted that four out of eight projects already interviewed listed HTML5 among the technologies they plan to use; Bebop, Developing Linked Data Infrastructures for OER, SPINDLE, and Xenith. Synote Mobile also intend to use HTML5. It’ll be interesting to see if these intentions translate into implementation or whether any of these project go on to use alternative technologies.

Another broad theme that emerged was accessibility and widening access to open educational resources. Improving Accessibility to Mathematical Teaching resources is focused on making mathematics OERs fully accessible to visually impaired students, while two projects are aiming to make audio resources more accessible to a range of users. SPINDLE aims to increase OER discoverability by using linguistic analysis to generate keywords for enriching metadata, and the project also plans to investigate semi-automated generation of full-text transcripts. While Synote Mobile will make accessible, searchable, annotated recordings available on mobile devices.

There is also some interest across the programme in the Learning Registry development and the use of paradata. The SPAWS project plans to share paradata or usage data, such as reviews, ratings, and download stats, between widget stores and are currently developing recipes for paradata verbs which they hope to contribute to the Learning Registry Paradata Cookbook. And RIDLR will test the release and harvest of contextually rich paradata via the JLeRN Experiment to the Learning Registry.

I don’t know if this really counts as a theme, but it was also interesting to note that although the Rapid Innovation programme is very much focused on short term technical development, several of the projects discussed “soft” issues relating to the use of open technology. For example the aim of the Bebop project is to develop a WordPress plugin that can be used with BuddyPress to extend an individual’s profile to re-present resources that are held on other websites such as Slideshare, Jorum, etc. However Bebop’s Joss Winn added that by focusing on individual staff profiles they hope to encourage teachers to engage with using WordPress.

It’ll be interesting to see how these themes develop as the programme progresses and which other trends will emerge.

The recording of the OER RI catch up can be found here and Martin Hawksey’s aggregation of OER RI project feeds is here.

Oh and one last thing, great to hear that projects found the technical calls with Martin to be very useful, if you haven’t made a date to talk to him yet, drop him a mail now!

Working with the Learning Registry: Project Developers’ Workshop
Tuesday 13.30 – 14.30
Led by: Sarah Currier and Nick Syrotiuk

Sarah Currier and Nick Syrotiuk of Mimas’ JLeRN Experiment will be running a workshop which will share technical issues, requirements and solutions, and will help JLeRN and CETIS learn how to support projects with an interest in experimenting with the Learning Registry. As well as giving an update on Learning Registry specs, code and tools, Nick and Sarah will also provide an update on JLeRN’s latest technical developments, including the new Node Explorer. Projects will also have a chance to share plans and ideas for using the Learning Registry and paradata.

This workshop will be followed up on Wednesday by a hands-on hack session with JLeRN’s developer Nick Syrotiuk.

Target Audience: Developers and other technical folks working on projects (including OER3 and OER RI) interested in using the Learning Registry and/or working with the JLeRN Experiment. Other project staff also welcome!

Tags: #dev8ed, #jlern, #learningreg

Booktype
Tuesday 13.30 – 14.30
Led by: Adam Hyde

Booktype is an online book production software application developed by non-profit organization Sourcefabric. Booktype is 100% open source and is gathering a lot of interest, use, and following in the OER sector since its launch in February. Adam Hyde, Booktype’s project leader will be facilitating a workshop that will look at how this new software works for the user, trainer and developer. Booktype outputs to book formatted PDF, epub, mobi, PDF, .odt, templated HTML, print on demand services and ebook distribution channels. Booktype is federated and supports bi-directional text and equations, making it perfect for multi-language collaborative online textbook creation.

Target Audience: content creators and publishers of eBooks; OER projects with an interest in disseminating content as eBooks.

PublishOER: new business models for incorporating commercially published content into OER
Tuesday 14.30 – 15.30
Led by: James Outterside, Dan Plummer, Suzanne Hardy, Graham Isaacs, Raul Balesco

PublishOER is a JISC funded OER 3 project at Newcastle University, which is working with publishers to find new business models for enabling risk free incorporation of published materials into OER. The project is undertaking development work for centralising a business process for dealing with permissions requests to publishers, publishing to multiple publication formats from a single source, dealing with multiple licences, etc. Additional technical development work (SupOERGlue & RIDLR OERRI projects) is underway on Newcastle University’s novel Dynamic Learning Maps system, enabling the creation of resource mashups using OER bookmarking and OER Glue from within the learning environment and sharing of contextually rich curriculum related meta and paradata about learning resources via API/JLeRN to other users including publishers and HEIs.

The Newcastle team are interested in working with others including:

• Booktype: working with multiple publication formats
• University of Edinburgh: congruence between DLM (Newcastle) and COM:MAND (Edinburgh): curriculum mapping systems.
• Sharing resource meta/para/activity stream data.
• JLeRN /Learning Registry harvesting/syndication.
• Anyone interested in permissions management systems.
• Publishers and new publication business models. Solutions to dealing with multiple licences within ePub2 & 3 and other publication formats.

The team develops with Django and Python but are happy to work with developers using other languages.

Target audience: Administrators and developers from both HEIs and publishers.

Tags: #dev8ed, #publishoer

In addition to these workshops JLeRN, Booktype and PublishOEr will also be giving lightning talks on Tuesday morning at 10.30 when Dev8eD kicks off.

Well, not quite. Phil and I do have one or two thoughts and reflections on the session. There still seems to be growing interest and enthusiasm in the UK ed tech community (if such a thing exists) for both the Learning Registry development in the US and the JLeRN Experiment at Mimas. However in some instances the interest and expectations are a little way head of the actual projects themselves. So it perhaps bears repeating at this stage that the Learning Registry is still very much under development. As a result the technical documentation may be a little raw, and although tools are starting to be developed, it may not be immediately obvious where to find them or figure out how they fit together. Having said that, there is a small but growing pool of keen developers working and experimenting with the Learning Registry so expertise growing.

That cautionary note aside one of the really interesting things about the Learning Registry is that people are already coming up with a wide range of potential use cases. As Sarah’s conference summary shows we had Terry McAndrew of TechDis suggesting that Learning Registry nodes could be used for capturing accessibility data about resources, Scott Wilson of CETIS and the University of Bolton thought the LR would be useful for sharing user ratings between distributed widget stores, a group from the Open University of Catalunya were interested in the possibility of using the LR as a decentralised way of sharing LTI information and Suzanne Hardy of the University of Newcastle was keen to see what might happen if Dynamic Learning Maps data was fed into an LR node.

Paradata is a topic that also appears to get people rather over excitable. Some people, me included, are enthusiastic about the potential ability to capture all kinds of activity data about how teachers and learners use and interact with resources. Others seem inclined to write paradata off as unnecessary coinage. “Why bother to develop yet another metadata standard?” is a question I’ve already heard a couple of times. Bearing this in mind it was very useful to have Learning Registry developer Walt Grata over from the US to remind us that although there is indeed a Learning Registry paradata specification, it is not mandated, and that users can express their data any way they want, as long as it’s a string and as long as it’s JSON.

We’re aware that the JLeRN Experiment were hoping to get a strong steer from the conference session as to where they should go next and I had hoped to round off this post with a few ideas that Phil and I had prioritised out of the many discussed. However Phil and I have completely failed to come to any kind of agreement on this so that will have to be another blog post for another day!

Finally we’d like to thank all those who contributed to a the Learning Registry Session at CETIS12 and in particular our speakers; Stephen Cook, Sarah Currier, Walt Grata, Bharti Gupta, Pat Lockley, Terry McAndrew, Nick Syrotiuk and Scott Wilson. Many thanks also to Dan Rehak for providing his slides and for allowing Phil to impersonate him!

The Learning Registry

The Learning Registry – main web page.

Learning Registry Collaborate Google Group – “If you are interested in integrating, developing applications, working with Paradata… using the Learning Registry to make awesome things happen, then this is the Google Group for you. This list is suited to projects we’re working now, for Plugfest and any collaborative effort involving the Learning Registry.”

Learning Registry General Google Group – for general discussion and announcements.

Learning Registry Developer Google Group – the core technical developers list.

The Learning Registry Technical Guides – page linking to all the technical documentation.

Learning Registry Quick Reference Guide – “The purpose of this document is to provide a brief reference to the principal data structures and services that typical users of the Learning Registry will most frequently interact with.”

Learning Registry in 20 Minutes or Less – “This document will get you rolling with creating, uploading, downloading, and verifying envelopes in and out of Learning Registry server.”

Paradata in 20 MInutes or Less – “The goal of this document is to get you booted up using paradata in 20 minutes or less.”

Learning Registry Technical Specification V.0.5x.x – the top level of the Learning Registry Technical Specification.

Paradata Specification V1.0 – the formal Learning Registry paradata specifiction

Learning Registry Github Code Repository

Learning Registry Browser – demonstration term explorer.

Blog Posts

The Learning Registry: “Social Networking for Metadata” – an introduction to the Learning Registry by ADL Senior Technical Advisor Dan Rehak.

The Learning registry Plugfest: Report and Developments – does what it says on the tin! A report from the June 2011 plugfest by the University of Oxford’s Pat Lockley.

The Learning Registry: Rough Guide for Contributors – by CETIS’ R. John robertson.

Open Educational Resources Timeline – a post by Lou McGill looking at JISC and CETIS involvement in educational resource initiatives over time.

The JLeRN Experiment

JLeRN Experiment – main project blog.

JISC Learning Registry Node Experiment – CETIS blog post introducing JLeRN project.

JLeRN Alpha Node – LR test node running on Ubuntu.

JLeRN Hackday – issues identified at the January 2012 project hackday.

One of the aims of the day was to attempt to scope some usecases for the JLeRN Experiment, while the technical developers were discussing the implementation of the node and exploring potential development projects. We didn’t exactly come up with usecases per se, but we did discuss a wide range of issues. JLeRN are limited in what they can do by the relatively short timescale of the project, so the list below represents issues we would like to see addressed in the longer term.

Accessibility

The Learning Registry (LR) could provide a valuable opportunity to gather accessibility stories. For example it could enable a partially-sighted user to find resources that had been used by other partially-sighted users. But accessibility information is complex, how could it be captured and fed into the LR? Is this really a user profiling issue? If so, what are the implications for data privacy? If you are recording usage data you need to notify users what you are doing.

Capturing, Inputting and Accessing Paradata

We need to consider how systems generate paradata, how that information can be captured and fed back to the LR. The Dynamic Learning Maps curricular mapping system generates huge amounts of data from each course; this could be a valuable source of paradata. Course blogs can also generate more subjective paradata.

A desktop widget or browser plugin with a simple interface, that captures information about users, resources, content, context of use, etc would be very useful. Users need simplified services to get data in and out of the LR.

Once systems can input paradata, what will they get back from the LR? We need to produce concrete usecases that demonstrate what users can do with the paradata they generate and input. And we need to start defining the structure of the paradata for various usecases.

There are good reasons why the concept of “actor” has been kept simple in the LR spec but we may need to have a closer look at the relationship between actors and paradata.

De-duplication is going to become a serious issue and it’s unclear how this will be addressed. Data will need to be normalised. Will the Learning Registry team in the US deal with the big global problems of de-duplication and identifiers? This would leave developers to deal with smaller issues. If the de-duplication issue was sorted it would be easy to write server side javascripts.

Setting Up and Running a Node

It’s difficult for developers to find the information they need in order to set up a node as it tends to be buried in the LR mailing lists. The relevant information isn’t easily accessible at present. The “20 minute” guides are simple to read but complex to implement. It’s also difficult to find the tools that already exist. Developers and users need simple tools and services and simplified APIs for brokerage services.

Is it likely that HE users will want to build their own nodes? What is the business model for running a node? Running a node is a cost. Institutions are unlikely to be able to capitalise on running a node, however they could capitalise by building services on top of the node. Nodes run as services are likely to be a more attractive option.

Suggestions for JISC

It would be very useful if JISC funded a series of simple tools to get data into and out of JLeRN. Something similar to the SWORD demonstrators would be helpful.

Fund a tool aimed at learning technologists and launch it at ALT-C for delegates to take back to their institutions and use.

A simple “accessibility like” button would be a good idea. This could possibly be a challenge for the forthcoming DevEd event.

Nodes essentially have to be sustainable services but the current funding model doesn’t allow for that. Funding tends to focus on innovation rather than sustainable services. Six months is not really long enough for JLeRN to show what can really be done. Three years would be better.

With thanks to…

Sarah Currier (MIMAS), Suzanne Hardy (University of Newcastle), Terry McAndrew (University of Leeds), Julian Tenney (University of Nottingham), Scott Wilson (University of Bolton).

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!

Formal educational metadata standards have gone some way to addressing this problem, but it has proved to be extremely difficult to capture the educational characteristics of resources and the nuances of educational context within the constraints of a formal metadata standard. Indeed it is notoriously difficult to formally describe what a learning resource is, never mind how and by whom it may be used. Despite the not inconsiderable effort that has gone into the development of formal metadata standards, data models, bindings, application profiles and crosswalks the ability to quickly and easily find educational resources that match a specific educational context, competency level or pedagogic style has remained something of a holy grail.

A new approach to this problem is currently being explored by the Learning Registry, an innovative project being led and funded by the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Defense. In a guest blog post for CETIS in March this year ADL Senior Technical Advisor Dan Rehak explained that the Learning Registry intends to offer an alternative approach to learning resource discovery, sharing and usage tracking by prioritising sharing of second-party usage data and analytics over first party metadata.

Dan set out the Learning Registry’s use case as follows:

“Let’s assume you found several animations on orbital mechanics. Can you tell which of these are right for your students (without having to preview each)? Is there any information about who else has used them and how effective they were? How can you provide your feedback about the resources you used, both to other teachers and to the organizations that published or curated them? Is there any way to aggregate this feedback to improve discoverability?

The Learning Registry is defining and building an infrastructure to help answer these questions. It provides a means for anyone to ‘publish’ information about learning resources. Beyond metadata and descriptions, this information includes usage data, feedback, rankings, likes, etc.; we call this ‘paradata’”

Paradata is essentially a stream of activity data about a learning resource that effectively provides a dynamic timeline of how that resource has been used. As more usage data is collaboratively gathered and published the paradata timeline grows and evolves, amplifying the available knowledge about what educational resources are effective in which learning contexts. The Learning Registry team refer to this approach as “social networking for metadata”.

The Learning Registry itself is not a search engine, a repository, or a registry in the conventional sense. Instead the project aims to produce a core transport network infrastructure and will rely on the community to develop their own discovery tools and services, such as search engines, community portals, recommender systems, on top of this infrastructure. Dan commented; “We assume some smart people will do some interesting (and unanticipated) things with the timeline data stream.”

The Learning Registry infrastructure is built on couchDb, a noSQL style “document oriented database” providing a RESTful JSON API. The initial Learning Registry development implementation, or node, is available as an Amazon Machine Instance, hosted on Amazon EC2. This enables anyone to set up their own node on the Amazon cloud quickly and easily. As CouchDb is a cross-platform application, nodes can be run on most systems (e.g. Windows, Mac, Linux). The Learning Registry plan to produce zero-config installers to simplify the process of adding nodes to the network with the aim that developers should be able to set up their own node within a day. These nodes will form a decentralised network with each participant configuring their own rules regarding access permissions and what data they gather and share.

Although the Learning Registry will encourage users to produce their own tools and services on top of the network of nodes, the development team have defined a small set of non-core APIs for integration with existing edge services, e.g. SWORD for repository publishing and OAI-PMH for harvesting from the network to local stores.

A key feature of the Learning Registry is that it is metadata agnostic; it will accept legacy metadata in any format and will not attempt to harmonise the metadata it consumes. The team have also developed a specification for sharing and exchanging paradata which is inspired by the Activity Steams format.

As a leading innovator in digital infrastructure for resource discovery JISC have followed the development of the Learning Registry with interest, and in keeping with our remit as a JISC Innovation Support Centre CETIS have fostered a strategic working relationship with the Learning Registry team. In addition to maintaining a watching brief on the project, participating in the technical development working group, and submitting position papers to the Learning Registry summit, CETIS have also liaised directly with the project’s developers and technical advisor and communicated relevant strategic and technical developments back to JISC and the community. The Learning Registry team have also engaged closely with the JISC, CETIS and the UK technical development community by participating in two DevCSI hackdays, contributing to several CETIS events, and attending a number of JISC strategic planning meetings.

JISC have now extended this innovative collaboration with the announcement that they will fund the development of a Learning Registry test node, the first to be developed outwith the US. The node will be developed at MIMAS with input and support from JISC CETIS.

In a press release JISC’s Amber Thomas commented,

“This international collaboration will see us contributing the UK’s expertise to the Learning Registry. We are working with Mimas and JISC Cetis to support the Registry’s vision of gathering together the conversations, ratings, recommendations and usage data around digital content.”

And Steve Midgley, Deputy Director, Office of Education Technology at the US Department of Education added,

“I am greatly encouraged by the collaboration and opportunity presented by our work with JISC on the Learning Registry.”

The Learning Registry project has already generated considerable interest in the UK. We believe that technical developers, infrastructure managers and resource providers will have much to learn from the JISC Learning Registry test node development and we hope that ultimately educational communities in both the US and the UK will benefit from this innovative project.

Further Reading

• The Learning Registry: Social Networking for Metadata by Dan Rehak, ADL.
• The Learning Registry Plugfest: Report and Developments by Pat Lockley, University of Oxford.
• The Learning Registry in 20 minutes or less.
• Paradata in 20 minutes or less.
• Paradata Specification, Version 1 (JSON schema).
• Resource Data Data Model: Learning Registry Technical Specification V RM:0.49.0.