[LINK] Broadband for a Broad Land

[Tom Worthington]

ARTHUR,Evan (Dr) wrote:
> ... standards for reporting data ...
> http://www.sifinfo.org/au/
> The Australian Government is funding this activity. ...

The Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) (previously called the
Schools Interoperability Framework), is a set of XML specifications for
defining educational data and a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
interface for kindergarten to grade 12 schools (k12). A SIF
Implementation Specification (Australia) (Version 1.0, November 20,
2009) has been produced:
<http://specification.sifassociation.org/Implementation/AU/1.0/>.

The Australian Government is also funding activity on e-Portfolios for
vocational (VET E-portfolio Roadmap) and higher education (Australian
ePortfolio Project). I realise it is hard enough to get universities and
TAFEs to agree on standards, but is there any work on getting the
schools and higher education to use the same standards for reporting?

SIF appears to be a standard for real time exchange of data between
applications. This appears to be about administrative management of
schools and students (that is recording, monitoring and reporting
student progress). As an example, one of the SIF certified software
products is Blackboard Connect 1.0 . This is used for schools to
communicate to parents
<http://www.blackboard.com/Solutions-by-Market/K-12/Blackboard-Connect-for-K12/Overview.aspx>.

SIF appears to be separate from the actual delivery of education, for
which there are separate technical standards for content. An example is
the IMS Global Learning Consortium's Common Cartridge (CC) standard and
Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM):
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2008/09/common-cartridge-standard-for-e.html>.
These are

There is also the IEEE 1484.12.1 – 2002 Standard for Learning Object
Metadata, which I managed to get my name in, just by voting for. ;-)

While SIF will be useful, particularly if already implemented in
software products purchased by Australian schools, it will not in itself
significantly improve education. SIF is mostly about better
administration, not education.

Investment in the use of IT for education and training teachers in its 
use is likely to have much more effect in producing the Federal 
Government's desired "Education Revolution".

More links at:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/01/systems-interoperability-framework-for.html>


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra