Australia to Join JES & Co.'s Achievement Standards Network

WASHINGTON, November 19 - At the annual National Science Distributed Learning conference sponsored
by the National Science Foundation (NSF), participants learned how JES &
Co.'s Achievement Standards Network (ASN) framework is being used by
Australia's Curriculum Corporation in an effort to link educational resource
data globally. Representing Australia's nationally funded Le@rning Federation
Initiative was Jillian Dellit, for 9 years Director of The Le@rning
Federation Secretariat. Diny Golder, the executive director of JES & Co., the
home of the ASN, has been working with Ms. Dellit for over 10 years in an
effort to launch an international exchange of learning resources,
discoverable by learning objective or achievement standards. Stuart Sutton,
the lead scientist for the ASN project, has worked closely with Curriculum
Corporation's Steve Sunter and Les Kneebone to align Australia's rich
educational vocabularies to existing ASN properties.

Presented to the National Science Distributed Learning community was a
demonstration of the ASN configurable Resource Description Editor (RDE)
developed in cooperation with Zepheira that has been configured to meet
Australia's unique educational needs. Many in the area of education
publishing are familiar with resource metadata, but the notion of richly
describing learning goals is fairly new. The ASN is both an open source
framework for the description and encoding of achievement standards and an
open resource, Web-accessible repository of all historical and current U.S.
K-12 standards. The ASN was partially funded at its start by NSF through its
National Science Digital Library (NSDL) initiative. The repository of U.S.
K-12 standards has APIs that enable cataloging tools to link to the
repository in order to search, browse and assign identifiers (URI) for
fine-grained achievement assertions to learning resources. All identifiers so
assigned are then resolvable over the Web, yielding related metadata and the
text of the achievement assertion identified. Ms. Dellit explained to the
audience the opportunities in the current Australian context and the ways in
which the ASN will leverage some of the Australian digital resource work of
the last decade.

To quote Sutton, "The configurable RDE is the first complete RDF editor
architecture for the description of entities and the relationships among
those entities in a way that supports Linked Data and Semantic Web goals by
catalogers and metadata generators without the need for those people to
understand XML or RDF." JES & Co. plans on joining the Linked Data community
with a focus on CyberLearning; a networked world of open source standards,
digital tools, services and resources. International collaboration is
providing a stimulus and an incentive to reap the benefits of CyberLearning.
For more information, contact Bruce Walker at BruceW@JESandCo.Org.

Diny Golder of JES & Co., +1-520-907-1177, dinyg at jesandco.org