It’s time to revisit my 2003 utopian vision for Australian education - that is, the idea of an interoperability framework and a ‘functional module bank’ for the education sector that I presented at the 2003 Adelaide educause conference. With discussion swishing around a digital education revolution it’s worth thinking about the kinds of insfrastructure we need to move forward.
In the paper I argue that we need an interoperablity framework for technology in the education space - the interoperablity framework standards should apply to open source products we use, and any products we purchase from a commercial vendor.
The idea of the interoperability framework has been picked up by the international e-framework initiative (I’m not suggesting I’m the only one who had the idea about the need for interoperability…). The e-framework initiative includes Australia (through DEEWR, formerly DEST), the UK (through JISC), NZ (through their Ministry of Education) and the Netherlands (through the SURF Foundation). It is already being successfully used - a few case studies have been published on the project website.
The other good thing in the e-framework project is that it is being applied to both teaching and research environments as part of an integrated project, instead of ‘teaching’ and ‘research’ being considered as separate silos.
I also argued for the development of a ‘functional module bank’ where modules of functionality - developed within that interoperability framework - could be developed, lodged, shared, repurposed, redeveloped and recontributed. Many open source products enable developers to provide their own code or modules back into the community and/or to contribute to the software’s future roadmap. The uptake of the e-framework, to some small extent at least and which will grow over time, is supporting this concept through the sharing and/or reuse of SUMs (service usage models).
Some very useful (and now widely used) open source products have been developed in the last several years, many of which were specifically developed for the education sector: Moodle, elgg, Sakai, Shibboleth, Drupal, LAMS, DSpace, Fedora are just a few. These open source products have an active developer community, a development/feature roadmap, and some kind of management structure through a foundation or project team - that is, they have a future. These active open source communities have the potential to be an important element in a ‘functional module bank’ concept.
education.au has worked extensively with Drupal software over the last 12 months as we work with the Carrick Institute and its stakeholders to build the Carrick Exchange. Our work has involved developing new Drupal modules and customising others. As the project matures education.au will share those modules and code with the Drupal development community which will enable that work to be used by others in the education and training community.
education.au has also been developing some software that it is providing as open source - accessED which provides a method for checking the accessibility of web pages, and OpenDSM which provides an open source distributed search manager to enable simultaneous searching of multiple repositories. These two free services also contribute to the bank of material available for use and reuse.
The benefits of implementing the e-framework concept, and in the idea of the shared module bank, are both financial and social. The potential reduction of duplication of effort has the capacity to save money. Reuse and sharing of existing development efforts will reduce implementation costs, and potentially reduce the time it takes to deliver a solution, also saving money.
The social benefit to our community is derived through innovation built on a shared (international) knowledge base that delivers high quality solutions supporting the delivery of a top class education service.
Post a Comment