For the last 10 years, education.au has been supporting the development of online community spaces for the education and training community through the edna project. For those of you who aren’t aware, education.au is a not for profit ICT agency owned by all Australia’s ministers for education and training. And the edna project is collaboratively funded by the states, territories and Commonwealth. Both, in my view, are great examples of cooperative federalism and the benefits of collaboration and cooperation.
Since edna began, we’ve used different generations of software solutions to deliver a ‘community’ service. At the moment we are using Moodle (open source) to deliver edna Groups, and Lyris (commercial and proprietary) to deliver email list services. education.au has also custom developed ‘me.edu.au’ which is a communities of practice/professional learning kind of environment for educators.
What we have noticed particularly in the last three years is that the education and training community is now embracing the potential of these communities to support their own learning and professional development, as well as to support their teaching practice. This is a cross-sectoral phenomena with school education and VET strong users of the services provided by edna.
It’s worth talking about edna - I sort of take it for granted as it’s been around 10 years now and is just an assumed part of my education landscape. But edna is something that all the ministers of education and training in the states and territories and Commonwealth (who jointly fund it) can be justifiably proud of. It has shown leadership in a whole range of ways over its 10 year history - it created an education metadata ’standard’ when metadata was unpopular and/or misunderstood, it harvested that metadata from state and territory jurisdictions and became an aggregator, it started delivering its services as RSS when RSS was all new and shiny so anyone could integrate the edna services into their own websites, it developed a distributed search of educational repositories (now available as open source as OpenDSM). It now provides podcasts, delivers mobile edna, and is trialling edna.tv. In many ways it has lead they way and has provided examples of how technology can support teaching and learning, and support teachers in any sector in their teaching practice.
For example, it provides the edna sandpit to enable educators to have a go at technologies that they may not have access to in their day-to-day environment so they can get a sense of whether they work and/or how they could work as teaching and learning tools. At the moment there’s stuff on podcasting, Live Classroom, and LAMS.
The other thing I value about edna is the collaboration on which it’s based. Wherever you go, whatever conference you’re at, someone has been involved with edna - on a reference committee, a friends-of-edna group, as part of the national consultation. It really is a community, and that community has shaped the services that are provided though ongoing consultation and feedback loops.
And that brings me to my main point: its leadership, in my view, has really been in the area of developing and maintaining communities. As a combination, edna Groups, edna lists and me.edu.au provide a range of services that can meet many of the online collaboration needs of both groups and individuals in the sector and help link them with each other, technologies and ideas. edna services are also free of advertising and without ‘undesirable elements’.
Obviously everyone finds the online space where they feel at home, and after 10 years, a lot of people have found it at edna. edna also runs a program of workshops each year and the 2008 program has just commenced.
Some stats
edna Groups
750 groups
18,235 members
me.edu.au
Communities of practice 308
Registered users of me.edu.au – 6079
edna Lists
750 lists
List members 98,225
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