e-Framework Update October 2007

News from the Initiative

The four e-Framework Initiative's partners — JISC, DEST, the New Zealand Ministry of Education and the SURFfoundation — will meet face to face in Wellington, New Zealand in early November to reflect on achievements so far and develop a common vision.

The expansion of the e-Framework Initiative has resulted in a number of organisational changes, such as establishing new governance entities and modifying some of our communication tools.

The new Management Group is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the initiative, implementing the decisions made by the Partners' Strategy Board and, where possible, co-ordinating each partner's work programmes with the initiative. The group is also overseeing the changes resulting from the new governance and principles, established in June, including the development of an e-Framework Charter document. Despite the challenges of working across time zones, the Management Group has developed ways of working together, aided by excellent relationships between the partners and creative use of available technologies.

An Editorial Team is now responsible for the website and is improving its content and navigation; watch for more website news in future newsletters.

In addition to the website, the initiative now has a community wiki as a discussion and working space to support implementers, contributors and other parties interested in the e-Framework. Here you can access guides to different aspects of the e-Framework, raise questions and share insights and expertise. You can provide and view valuable feedback on Service Usage Models and other components as they are being developed, and be alerted to changes whenever they are posted. To get started, go to: https://e-framework.usq.edu.au/users/wiki

Introducing New Zealand

Murray Leach is a senior manager in New Zealand's Ministry of Education with responsibility for developing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) strategies, frameworks and solutions that enable collaboration throughout the education sector. Murray is at the forefront of the New Zealand education sector's international ICT involvement, and is one of the representatives in the e-Framework Partners Group.

The other New Zealanders currently involved in the e-Framework are:

• Jonathan Shennan – e-Framework Partner, lead Enterprise Architect for the New Zealand education sector

• Sandy Britain – e-Framework Management Group, e-Learning Co-ordinator at Tairawhiti Polytechnic, seconded to the Ministry of Education

• Dean Carroll – e-Framework Communications Group, Acting Manager of the ICT Shared Sector Services at the Ministry of Education

• Carin Sundstedt – Advisor, e-Framework Communications Group, ICT Shared Sector Services at the Ministry of Education

The e-Framework will support key New Zealand strategic drivers, including:

Interoperability; Collaboration; Service-oriented approaches and Open standard-based solutions.

New Zealand is contributing to the e-Framework with an emphasis on work in the areas of administration and support and is developing SUMs in this area, including contributions to authentication and authorisation and Integrated services.

eFIG Process Review

The Editorial Team has been reviewing the e-Framework submissions process with a view to making it easier and more open. Potential contributors are now invited to add their project to the community wiki; community members can then collaborate with the project from day one, rather than waiting until results are published. In addition, the control processes on service expressions have been loosened in recognition of the fact that these are what are actually deployed. Guidance on the changes in the process, and how they affect contributors, will be released shortly.

Partners' News

New Expressions from New Zealand

The e-Framework Integrity Group (eFIG) has reviewed a number of service expressions that have been developed by the Ministry of Education in New Zealand. The expressions specialise in the 'alert' service genre. The Ministry of Education has also created a new 'audit' service genre; this describes services that check logged outputs against policies. Alongside this, the definitions of the 'alert' and 'logging' genres have been updated to reflect the work undertaken by the Ministry. The expressions can be found in the e-Framework Service Expression Registry at: www.e-framework.org/Default.aspx?tabid=899

The service genres can be found in the e-Framework Service Genre Registry at: www.e-framework.org/Default.aspx?tabid=655

DEST Funding for Institutional RQF Systems

Australia's Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) has announced grant allocations for the calendar years 2007 and 2008 for two schemes to assist eligible higher education providers in supporting the Research Quality Framework (RQF). The Implementation Assistance programme aims to help providers put into practice new data and reporting requirements for the RQF. The Australian Scheme for Higher Education Repositories (ASHER) programme supports the installation or upgrade of digital repositories for use in the RQF and provides technical and administrative advice for digital repositories: www.dest.gov.au/sectors/.../asher_and_iap.htm

JISC International Survey: Have Your Say

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) have commissioned Ipsos MORI, the independent research agency, to investigate the use of JISC services both within the UK and overseas. The information about who is using the services will be used to help improve them, and the research will also provide a detailed assessment of any potential opportunities to develop links internationally that would support UK education and research in the use of ICT.

The survey takes less than 10 minutes to complete and JISC is interested in heading from as many visitors to their website as possible: www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2007/07/servicessurvey

Great Expectations of ICT …New Research on Attitudes of Universty Applicants

Prospective university students are 'digital natives' who use social networking sites regularly and are quickly able to perceive the potential benefits and limitations of new technologies in their social and academic lives, when presented with examples of their use.

This is the picture painted by the results of research published by JISC into the attitudes of 16–18-year-olds who are hoping to go to university. Commissioned by JISC and conducted by Ipsos MORI, the survey looked at the attitudes of over 500 young people using both quantitative and qualitative techniques: www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2007/09/expectations

Version 2 of the NORA Released

The Netherlands Government Reference Architecture (NORA), a service-oriented and semantic architecture, is part of the realisation of Dutch 'e-government', the ambition of which is to make the majority of government services available through the web, supporting easy access and enabling 'one-stop-shopping'.

The NORA 2.0 outlines the fundamental principles and themes that will support this 'client first' approach to e-government. The publication may be of interest to architects, technology professionals and project managers and EDP auditors. The NORA programme is part of the work of the ICTU foundation. Currently information about NORA is only available in Dutch: http://www.ictu.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=9&Itemid=31

3TU Project

Delft, Twente and Eindhoven, three Dutch technical universities (hence 3TU), have begun working more closely together and aim to form an international centre of excellence. They are motivated mainly by increased international competition in the research domain, and their co-operation is further stimulated by considerable financial government support.

In addition to combining their research efforts, the three institutions will begin integrating their teaching and learning through the newly established 3TU Graduate School.

The Digital Learning and Working Environment (DLWE) project aims to develop a service-oriented architecture for such a federated context. The project will be executed using the Archimate method, and modelled in BiZZdesign Architect. The outcomes will cover: models of the relevant teaching and learning processes; data used in the execution of these processes; functional service definitions for the compilation of a federated DLWE; and the standards and protocols required for service interactions. More information about this work will be made available as it progresses

Standards and Technical News

Evaluating the JISC Toolkit and Demonstrator Projects

Wilbert Kraan and Scott Wilson from JISC CETIS have reviewed the 22 JISC toolkit and 12 toolkit demonstrator projects completed to date. They found that a strong developer community is a vital part of sustaining and building on any individual toolkit or demonstrator project, and that these smaller projects were successful in building up open-source development capacity and service-oriented expertise in UK universities and colleges: www.elearning.ac.uk/features/toolkitsreview

Australia Adopts OASIS Standards to Streamline Financial Reporting

The Australian Government has launched the Standard Business Reporting (SBR) programme, a long-term initiative to save business time, money and frustration. SBR will explore the integration of the WS-BPEL, WS-Security, and UDDI and Tax XML OASIS Standards, as well as other specifications for Web services and financial reporting: www.treasurer.gov.au/tsr/content/pressreleases/2007/084.asp

SIFA-SCORM Announcement

The Schools Interoperability Framework Association (SIFA) and the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative have announced a formal partnership to develop and implement a new version of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) (R) into school software by enabling its use with the Schools Interoperability Framework Implementation Specification. For more information see: www.sifinfo.org/upload/news/3562E4_ADL and SIFA Press Release Final.pdf

NISO SUSHI Standard Approved

The National Information Standards Organisation (NISO) has approved the standard NISO Z39.93, the Standardised Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol: www.niso.org/standards

The SUSHI standard defines an automated request and response model for the harvesting of electronic resource usage data, utilising a web services framework that can replace the user-mediated collection of usage data reports. Designed to work with Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) reports, the protocol is also extensible to other types of usage reports. The accompanying schemas for the standard, currently at version 1.5, are available online. Additional information about the protocol, including background information, developers' toolkits, presentations, journal articles and a draft FAQ, are available from the SUSHI website: www.niso.org/committees/SUSHI/SUSHI_comm.html

IMS GLC Announces Common Cartridge Alliance

The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) recently announced the Common Cartridge (CC) Alliance to support community adoption of the Common Cartridge standard. The goals of the CC Alliance are to: encourage supply of CC-compatible products and services in the marketplace; facilitate adoption of CC products by a worldwide community of education and training organisations; and provide tools and content to enable interested organisations to develop CC-enabled products that meet the compliance requirements set out by the IMS GLC membership. For more information see: www.imsglobal.org/cc/alliance.html

Events and Reports

Summit on Innovation in Learning Technology

The New Zealand Ministry of Education is proud to be co-hosting the Summit on Innovation in Learning Technology with IMS Global.

Convening in Queenstown, New Zealand on 7–9 November, the summit will look at the profound effect technology is having on both teaching and learning. Aimed at education professionals, IT professionals, researchers, vendors and students, it will examine key trends in the use of technology to support education, and ask how technology can improve access to content and enhance interaction between students and teachers.

The summit also includes the New Zealand Learning Impact Awards. This year will mark the first time the New Zealand Ministry of Education has hosted this prestigious event. Finalists are selected based on evaluation factors including improvement in learner achievement, ease of adoption, cost and value, accessibility, and use of interoperable standards.

More information on the programme is available at: www.imsglobal.org/NZmeeting2007.html

ALT-C 2007

Every year the International Conference of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT-C) held in the UK, provides a snapshot of learning technology developments in the UK higher and further education sectors. The focus of this year's conference, 'Beyond control, learning technology for the social network generation', was clearly on the learner as the use of social software continues to rise.

Delegates spent three days, 4–6 September, on the University of Nottingham campus discussing the impact of Web 2.0 technologies and globalisation: www.elearning.ac.uk/news_folder/altc2007

All-Hands Meeting

The UK e-science All Hands Meeting (AHM) was also held in Nottingham, on 10–13 September this year. The event provided a forum for discussion and demonstration of a broad range of e-science projects from all disciplines and featured many excellent opportunities for networking through presentations by researchers who are active in e-science projects, poster sessions and workshops. There were presentations from a number of invited keynote speakers involved in leading Grid and e-science activities worldwide.

Presentations and information about the event can be found at: www.allhands.org.uk/conference/index.cfm

SUMs Workshop (Australia and New Zealand)

On 4–5 October Australian and New Zealand Service Usage Model (SUM) developers held a workshop in Melbourne to exchange ideas and plan future directions. The focus was on the DEST and JISC initiatives on access management, enterprise architectures, repositories, student data, research data and e-portfolio systems. Following the workshop the outcomes were presented at the IDEA 2007 conference in Brisbane. Highlights of the workshop, outcomes and further discussions can be found on the e-Framework wiki under 'Workshops':
https://e-framework.usq.edu.au/users/wiki/DiscussionWorkshops

IDEA 2007

Presentations are now available from the successful IDEA 2007 series of events held in Brisbane from 8–11 October 2007. Wednesday 10 October focused on frameworks. The morning session of the Technology in Education Open Forum highlighted a range of national and international frameworks and included a presentation by Murray Leach on domain mapping and the e-Framework in New Zealand. A workshop entitled 'The e-Framework in Action', showcasing Australian projects using the e-Framework to document and plan service-oriented approaches to infrastructure deployment, was held in the afternoon.

Presentations from all IDEA 2007 events can be found on the IDEA website: www.linkaffiliates.net.au/idea2007

In Their Own Words

A new JISC publication looking at e-learning, its benefits, possibilities and challenges from the perspective of the learner is available. In Their Own Words includes video case studies of five learner 'voices', a CD-ROM with original reports, a series of short guides summarising key messages for different sectors and pull-out information sheets.

Part of a two-phase strand of JISC's e-Learning programme on 'Learner Experiences of e-Learning', the publication synthesises material gathered during the first phase of activities, providing striking insights into the ways in which digital learners use technologies for learning: www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2007/09/voices

Interoperability Standards in Australia

The Australian Information and Communications Technology in Education Committee (AICTEC) has released a research report entitled 'Interoperability Standards Across the Australian Education and Training Sector'. The report was prepared by Croger Associates Pty Ltd and focuses on cross-sectoral collaboration on ICT interoperability in education and training: www.aictec.edu.au/aictec/go/pid/13

Last updated October 2007