Jon Mason, Education.Au Limited [HREF1], 178 Fullarton Road, Dulwich, SA 5065, Australia. jmason@educationau.edu.au
Jillian Dellit, Education.Au Limited, 178 Fullarton Road, Dulwich, SA 5065, Australia. jdellit@educationau.edu.au
Graham Adcock, GEA.COM, PO Box 721, Jamison Centre, ACT 2614, Australia. graham@gea.com.au
Albert Ip, EdNA Team, Department of Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. 3053, Australia. a.ip@meu.unimelb.edu.au
EdNA, History of EdNA, Education, Networking, Value-Add, Information Infrastructure, Metadata, Online Communities
The origins and development of Education Network Australia (EdNA) provide an outstanding example of intersecting communities of interest aggregating as a 'meta-network' through a range of formal collaborative structures. The shape of this collaboration has been well served to date by the architecture of the Web itself. This harmonisation is no accident, because to a large degree EdNA's endeavour has been to maximise the potential of the Web for education in Australia.
Discussion in this paper is mainly focussed on EdNA Online [HREF2], a website initially implemented as a directory service but now providing a wider range of services and recognised worldwide for its breadth of implementation [HREF3]. The educational communities which come together and collaborate to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes take place within a variety of domains and are aimed at stimulating and encouraging the value of information and communications technologies to their constituents, Australia’s education and training communities. Significantly, much of this collaboration is facilitated by services provided via EdNA Online. Through the achievement of common outcomes, a value-adding to established networks takes place. At the same time, the online practices involved act as building blocks of the new information infrastructure by facilitating the formation of new networks. In the ongoing development of EdNA itself, value-adding propagates through the aggregation of the linkages within its constituent existing networks.
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