A range of server side components based on the following open source tools and standards:
The fundamental aim is to provide an architecture to allow teacher and learner-controlled materials to be shared, and to ‘grow context’ with sharing. In the case of learners the idea is to allow work that has been commented on, or even assessed, to be indexed as ‘tertiary courseware’, and shared with other learners. In the case of teachers the vicarious materials can be case studies of teaching approaches. Both raise the need for a managed system, which allows distributed resources to be submitted, searched and retrieved, based on standardized meta-data. Extensibility is a key issue, in that it should be possible for new resource types to be added and shared within the learning community. This will be realized by providing a managed meta-data server, which will contain the schemas for the sharable resources, which are then distributed amongst the community. It is intended to use the emerging grid based tools to allow users to host their own resource repositories, which are then made available for others users to access and share.
Michael Gardner
Email: mgardner@essex.ac.uk
Institution: Chimera, The University of Essex
Address: Adastral Park, Ipswich, IP5 3RE, UK