Wednesday, November 13, 2002

I'm focused on collecting repositories that contain materials in English, but this ambitious Dutch project reported by Stephen Downes in OL Daily is worth thinking about; even though there are no resources at the site, the planned scope of the project is impressive--it illustrates the magnitude of learning repository efforts around the world. ___ DARE: a New Age in the Provision of Academic Information. From the press release: "DARE (Digital Academic Repositories) is modernising the management of Dutch academic information by putting an infrastructure system in place and providing advanced services for the digital recording, accessing, storage and distribution of the Dutch academic output." All Dutch universities will participate in making their research output digitally accessible in an Open Archives Initiative compliant form. By Press Release, Surf Foundation, November 11, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 4:06:32 PM    COMMENT []

Intersections and Differences The exploration of higher education resources online leads through several fascinating domains of development and inquiry including course repositories, instructional repositories, learning object repositories, digital libraries, open source software, metadata standards, and educational technology. Sometimes the different terms are used with the same meaning (e.g. "instructional repositories," "learning object repositories," and "digital libraries"); in other discussions these terms have different meanings. The target user groups for repositories can also vary: from K-12, to CC, to undergraduate, to graduate, plus corporate training, certificate training, and general adult learning. An additional complexity is added by the different developments in different countries (US, UK, Australia, Canada, to mention just a few of the English-speaking countries). All of these directions of development make for interesting, puzzling, and challenging intersections and differences, especially for anyone trying to guide instructors to resources and trying to assist instructors to make good use of the resources that they locate. 3:54:24 PM    COMMENT []