The strength of the O.K.I. specifications, particularly the Repository OSID, is beginning to manifest an informal yet growing network effect as the number of repositories, content providers and consumers, and large education initiatives embrace OSIDs. In fact, the informal discovery of the Mellon Funded Sophie Project (http://www.sophieproject.org/) and its search webservice to content repositories covered by OSID implementations made the case for moving forward with Apple Education's plans to begin opening its Apple Learning Interchange (ALI).
At the upcoming OpeniWorld conference (www.openiworld.org) Apple Education will showcase a proof-of-concept implementation using the O.K.I. Repository OSID specification to normalize federated content discovery across heterogeneous content repositories and providers. Leveraging external content provides richer resources to the ALI community, and in turn provides an opportunity for ALI users to make their content more broadly discoverable.
ALI is a global, free social networking and content sharing service for educators hosted by Apple Education. Originally designed in 1999 as a repository for education "exhibits" published by select content providers, the new ALI 2.0 is completely redesigned and re-architected to foster collaboration between community members, social networking across common interests, and content portability with mobile devices. ALI embraces the open exchange and reuse of education content within its community through Creative Commons licensing tags.
Over the years, education content contributed by ALI members, institutions, and select content providers has lead to a growing and vibrant community. The recently added social networking features bring Web 2.0 functionality so ad-hoc groups can form around content and topics of interest. ALI also supports managing personal and group collections of content found within the system.
Recently, Apple Education began considering how best to open ALI up in terms of the content its community members could discover and use, and how ALI contributors could "write once" in ALI but be discoverable outside ALI. How could ALI be more social and its content networked outside its walled-garden?
The basic problem is content federation, but due diligence showed no easy answer. Do we settle on a single integration method, or collection of methods, and dictate that others support our decision? Was there a clearly leading standard to settle on? The number of competing standards for meta-data, communication protocols, query structures and languages, etc., all pointed to resource intensive processes of research, persuasion, and implementation.
There has to be a better way.
The strength of the O.K.I. specifications, particularly the Repository OSID, is beginning to manifest an informal yet growing network effect as the number of repositories, content providers and consumers, and large education initiatives embrace OSIDs. In fact, the informal discovery of the Mellon Funded Sophie Project (http://www.sophieproject.org/) and its search webservice to content repositories covered by OSID implementations made the case for moving forward with Apple Education's plans to begin opening ALI.
Apple Education will showcase a proof-of-concept implementation using the O.K.I. Repository OSID specification to normalize federated content discovery across heterogeneous content repositories and providers. Leveraging external content provides richer resources to the ALI community, and in turn provides an opportunity for ALI users to make their content more broadly discoverable.
The showcase will also highlight ALI's:
- Creation/Import/Export of LOMs through Studywiz (a third party K-12 LMS) installations
- User-created and 'mashed' content through the iTunes/media-browser bridge
- Creative-commons filters
- Personal and group collections management in ALI
Open Knowledge Initiative
http://plectrudis.mit.edu/okicommunity/article.php/20070802114512300