The Learning Registry: capturing conversations about learning resources

Facilitators: Phil Barker and Lorna Campbell

JISC is supporting the participation of UK HE in the Learning Registry, a global experiment to find out how the social activity around online educational content can be captured and fed back to users, creators and publishers. The Learning Registry is funded by the US Department of Education and provides an infrastructure built on CouchDB (a document oriented database that supports replication across a network) for gathering together information about learning resources. The information in question is not just conventional structured metadata but also the conversations, ratings, recommendations and usage data around digital content--such data is known in this context as "paradata".

The Learning Registry itself is not a search engine, a repository, or a registry in the conventional sense. Some basic protocols, formats and policies governing the sharing of data are specified, though in many cases these are neutral leaving the implementer free to choose, for example, what format to use. The Learning Registry does not provide user-facing services such as search nor does it specify how such services should be built, the hope and expectation is that some smart people will do some interesting (and unanticipated) things with the data. The aim of this session will be to highlight and inform some of these smart people about the UK HE's involvement in the Learning Registry. We will hear more about the participation JISC is supporting, and discuss services that might be built using it, what data people might provide or want to use, and how they could do so.

Learning Registry Links and Resources - a CETIS blog post linking to useful resources including the Learning Registry Google Groups and technical documentation and the JLeRN Experiment blog and alpha node.

Programme
Presentations Discussion
 * Overview of the aims, technology and specification used by the Learning Registry (Phil Barker)
 * Why are CETIS and JISC interested in the Learning Registry (Lorna Campbell)
 * About the JLeRN Experiment at Mimas (JLeRN Team)JLeRN blog post and slides

"Show and tell"
 * A series of short presentations from people who have already created or who have ideas for tools, applications, services that feed into or feed off the Learning Registry.


 * Scott Wilson (CETIS / Bolton University)
 * Scott proposed that educational widget stores could share information such as reviews, ratings, number of downloads so that information about a widget that happened to be in more than one store reflected its use from all stores not just one.


 * Terry McAndrew (TechDis)
 * Terry described the possible use of the learning registry to share information about the accessibility implications of resources, for example how a resource had been used to meet some accessibility related requirement.


 * Walt Grata (Learning registry)
 * Walt presented on two things he has been working on. A harvesting tool that can be used to download content from any registry node for local processing and "landing pages", representations of registry content that are indexable by google.


 * Pat Lockley (Oxford University)
 * Pat talked about a chrome extension he has written that enhances Google search results pages with information from the learning registry about the resources that appear on the page, and a WordPress plugin that displays content from the learning registry in a blog Pat's slides


 * Steven Cook (Mimas / Jorum)
 * Steven described the creation of a CakePHP DataSource for the Learning registry API which would facilitate access to data in a node by a PHP application.

Wrap-up and discussion: what next?

Summaries and reflections
Sarah Currier has written a full summary of the session on her JLeRN Blog (from where much of the summary of element of this page was lifted).

Lorna has a summary of our reflections arising from the session on her CETIS blog