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
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.
A supporting presentation of this paper can be found at [HREF4].
From its very beginnings EdNA's trajectory was established as one which was conceived as "bottom up". Government-sponsored, yes; but network-driven. This fact, however, has not always been recognised from within the education sector and continues to be a key 'marketing' challenge.
In October 1994, the first stirrings within the Commonwealth Government toward an ‘EdNA’ first occurred. While the Keating government’s Creative Nation was occupying a fair bit of the media limelight at the time, and concerned more with the arts, there was still a considerable push for the earlier Hawke agenda, the Clever Country, with the potential economic boost that local multimedia development would bring, along with a recognition that information technology promised great things for education. More significant, however, was a report published by the Australian Science and Technology Council (ASTEC) titled ‘The Networked Nation’, which had been commissioned 12 months earlier in October 1993 by the then Minister for Science and Technology. Recommendation 1 from this document states:
ASTEC recommends that the Minister for Employment, Education and Training, in consultation with other relevant Ministers, initiate the establishment of a not-for-profit consortium, involving governments, telecommunications carriers, industry and the research and higher education communities, to provide a national information network for the research and higher education communities and the wider community. [HREF5]
In the Response to this report it was further stated:
The continuing development within AARNet, the development of other on-line service providers and various other Commonwealth, State and Territory initiatives, is giving rise to a dynamic “community of networks” through a bottom-up user-driven approach, which is responding to opportunities and the demands of particular sectors and communities. This community of networks is characterised by devolution of control, and leaves the way open for creative ideas to emerge from various communities of interest. Nevertheless, Internet will continue to be a key part of the national information services infrastructure. It would be unwise in such a climate to adopt a centralised approach, albeit one in which a range of interested parties are involved, to manage the development of “the national information network”. There is a risk that a centrally driven approach would result in the government being locked into inappropriate technologies or services, while the market moves in other directions. [HREF6]
It is certainly true that EdNA's initial collaboration took place at the highest governmental level through an agreement reached in mid 1995 by the Ministerial Council on Employment, Education, Training, and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA), a membership comprised of all Commonwealth, State and Territory Ministers for Education and Training. Of course, despite the "bottom-up" vision, this initial drive was certainly "top down". However, because of the public nature in which the bulk of education is traditionally conducted in Australia this high level foundation has been essential. Essential, but not sufficient – because EdNA's durability has also been ensured through other key factors such as a cascading effect involving collaborative and co-operative effort throughout and across all sectors involving formally nominated sectoral representatives as well as true "bottom-up" input from those active practitioners in each of the education sectors. This is an important point, because networks are not nurtured by decree. In many ways, engaging input and expertise from the practitioners of online culture within the education sector will be an ongoing measure of EdNA's success.
For anyone acquainted with the early days of EdNA, the 1995 push (initially promoted as AEN, the Australian Education Network) was geared also as an Internet connectivity initiative to encourage and enable the participation of schools and vocational education and training (VET) providers and to provide better linkage for these sectors with higher education than was possible through AARNet.
EdNA has shifted in its focus since then and is now more accurately characterised as a national framework for collaboration and co-operation throughout all levels of the Australian education community – from grass-roots teachers, students and community groups, to professional associations, sectoral advisory groups, and Ministerial committees. EdNA Online is itself a major outcome of this collaboration, providing linkages between schools, vocational education and training (VET), adult and community education (ACE), and higher education.
In mid 1995, the EdNA Reference Committee (ERC) was established by MCEETYA for the purposes of providing an appropriate forum for direction of the project and to feed back advice on policy matters. It has been chaired by the Commonwealth representative since then and membership of is drawn from representatives of all key stakeholders: Government and non-Government Schools (including representation from Catholic and Independent schools), Vocational Education and Training, Adult and Community Education (ACE), Higher Education and Department of Education nominees from each of the States and Territories. Currently, the ERC is providing advice to MCEETYA on the educational implications of the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) agenda for the 'information economy'. [HREF7]
Each sector has appointed Project Officers who work with advisory groups set up to represent the interests of their sector, with a particular focus on providing direction for the development of EdNA Online. They also attend ERC meetings (as observers).
While collaboration involving a diverse mix of stakeholders is one of the defining features of EdNA its co-ordination has also been critical to its success. Consultation and collaboration are all very well but ultimately go nowhere without goals and a coordinated approach. So while co-ordination occurs throughout the whole formal structure involving the ERC, advisory groups and sectoral forums, overall management of the process is effected by a small non-profit company, Education.Au Limited, based in Adelaide and jointly owned by the Ministers of Education. Its Board meets regularly and recommends actions to the Ministers. The ERC, in turn, provides advice to this Board on direction of the ongoing development of EdNA Online.
EdNA is significant in Australian education for many reasons. First and foremost, the scale and scope of the collaboration is unprecedented in this country in the education sector. Secondly, it would most likely not exist without the World Wide Web. But why collaborate? Why bother? In short, the compelling answer to these questions lies in a value-added mix of 'self-interest' and 'common good'.
Self-interest has many facets. For each of the Ministers, the obvious first consideration is how expenditure can be optimised. Duplication of effort was recognised early in EdNA's development as a very real outcome to avoid. Somehow, the scramble within governments, industry and education to respond meaningfully to the challenges of the digital revolution had to be streamlined. Responding to the challenge was perceived (rightly) as an expensive exercise. For industry, the response translated into ‘re-engineering’ - freeing money from salaries and production lines, inventory and delivery systems to computerise manual functions and building global corporations on the strength of improved communications systems. It has also led to accelerating growth in e-commerce. But for education systems, like other human services, there is less flexibility - particularly when grounded in government service delivery and public funding.
The avenues to educational change that have hitherto been successful in Australia may not, however, be adequate to the challenges unleashed by digitisation. Governments in Australia (as elsewhere) are confronted with enormous costs to move education systems into electronic networked environments. Schools in particular, have had only limited capital expenditure in the last two decades. Their buildings are not flexible nor easily redesigned. Recurrent funding is tied to salary expenditure. Location is inconveniently dictated by population location rather than by building and infrastructure availability (Mason & Dellit, 1998: 488). Limiting duplication of effort on this front will most certainly be a big winner for governments.
As a concept, 'collaboration' has a semantic bias toward co-operative endeavour, but in practice there is an upside and downside to this process. The downside is that the extent of consultation prior to action can result in untimely responses. The upside, however, when things go right, far outweighs this in terms of the aggregation of value-add. A corollory of both sides of the process is that through economic pressures there is a certain component of necessity, that is, of being 'compelled to collaborate' (Mason, 1998: 585; Bond and Thompson, 1996: v).
With regard to 'common good' EdNA Online visibly demonstrates that the aggregation of resources and effort results in a product that is mutually beneficial. While each State Department of Education has pursued differing approaches to ramping up online culture, within EdNA there is a sound basis and commitment to contributing to this process.
In the span of only a few years, during which the Web has achieved dominance in data communications traffic, the network of stakeholders involved has successfully utilised some key characteristics of the Web. One of the key foundations of EdNA Online has been to function as a prime entry point specialising in quality Australian online educational content. Increasingly, as the nature of information services develops, EdNA is evolving interactive services and spaces which are developed for a wide range of individuals and groups engaged in educational pursuits. For example, in the schools sector, teachers, principals, and school communities, interact online sharing information to develop their own best practice in the usage of online technologies for education.
The EdNA initiative has confirmed the amount of work required to build communities online (Dyson 1997: 31). Education in Australia is proving to be a good incubating environment for this. Although Australia's federation, in which States are major funders of school education, a consistent set of educational values is shared across the nation and to a large extent between sectors. There is a history of 'public good' enterprise in education that supports collaborative endeavour. There is also a tradition, especially in smaller States and Territories, of co-operation between education sectors. From an historical perspective, Australian egalitarian values make it easy to construct frameworks for collaboration in the public domain in order to improve educational participation or to extend educational benefits. Educational policy in Australia has taken account of communities not easily served by education service nor by communications technology - Australia certainly has the established lead in global terms with regard to its history of distance education provision. The importance of these cultural factors should not be underestimated in online community building (Spender 1995). Weight of public opinion makes it easier to secure government support and to legitimise the commitment of educational leaders to ventures which are hard to argue in terms of outputs within one period of government office.
The evolving story of EdNA is one where diverse 'communities of practice' (educational, bureaucratic, technical, political, online, ...) all come together with a common interest in value-added services for education (Mason, 1998; Wenger, 1998). EdNA’s conscious community building has been based on the identification of specific 'communities of need' within education and the tailoring of services to these needs. There is recognition that user groups are flexibly and endlessly re-formed with individual users belonging to several groups, sometimes simultaneously. Many users of EdNA Online are busy and often have poor access to modems, bandwidth and online services. To this end, recent development of the EdNA Online homepage has led to clustered, immediately relevant information in readily updatable cells.
A series of ‘push’ services tailored to the needs of specific groups are also being implemented. What’s New, for example, targets librarians, teachers and trainers using resource based learning techniques and student counsellors. It also supports a calendar of sites to support events frequently celebrated in the education sector, such as Human Rights Day, NAIDOC Week, World Environment Day and Mathematics Month. News and Views targets leaders and administrators in all education sectors and provides coverage of the release of government documents, education items in the news and education issues being discussed internationally. The more specific early childhood service is in response to interest from that particular group of practitioners across sectors and is being explored as a model for other highly specific services. To support users who rely on the search function the EdNA Search API allows institutions or groups to embed the EdNA search engine in their own webpages.
Of course, catering to user needs is an obvious strategy for effective delivery of a service - 'monitoring and user evaluation' is itself an ongoing project co-ordinated by Education.Au. For EdNA, value-adding to user needs is also recognised as a sound strategy and providing linkages bewteen related projects and online resources is one method.
Like most online directories, various pathways for information retrieval and resource discovery have been established for EdNA Online. Some iterations of these pathways have not been successful. However, a project initiated late in 1998 has enabled a major overhaul of both the technical architecture and the user interface. For well over 12 months stakeholders expressed the desire to move toward an integrated browse and search capability but progressing this was consistently thwarted by a complex back-end technical architecture. In the initial stages of development (1996-1997), for example, the dynamic rendering of the category tree from information held in the database clearly had some advantages. In fact, the EdNA Directory Service, as it was called when first configured, was the first such database-driven website in this country and very much state-of-the-art. But as the database of resources grew it became very clear that such processes of dynamically displaying a category tree were ultimately a disincentive for users to explore to any depth through the browse option because of excessive processing time and drill-down. Adopting the concept of providing a 'multiplicity of pathways' (see below) based on an integrated browse-search approach has enabled a more modular architecture to be developed. Essential to this project has been a major effort at reconceptualising some 'first principles' associated with an information and services model, now referred to as the EdNA Online Data Model, where resource discovery can be situated within a context of other processes. One major revelation in this process has been the pivotal role that semantics (in the form of a controlled vocabulary) plays and that classifying or indexing information for Web delivery has particular requirements.
EdNA Online currently features 8,000+ evaluated items, enriched by metadata [HREF8] for the purposes of ensuring quality content is delivered. Linked to these items is a further 235,000 indexed items. Significant in this process has been an approach which seeks to identify quality rather than employ censorship. That's not to say that unsuitable content that may somehow be unknowingly linked is not then deleted. The focus on quality has been an important mechanism for achieving visible 'added value'.
A key strategy to the gathering, organising and retrieving of material has been the formalisation of the EdNA Metadata Standard, which is based upon the Dublin Core with nine further elements defined for specific use. The EdNA elements will be supporting the reconfiguration of the EdNA search engine and the harvesting of resources from authorised sites.
In the very early days of EdNA a Media Release from the Minister’s Office dated 6 April 1995 it stated:
The first phase of the network, which will start this year, will develop a directory of educational services and an interactive electronic message system that can be accessed at affordable rates by students and teachers from education institutions and the home, regardless of location. (Crean, 1995)
More recently, Senator Richard Alston says in the first paragraph of his Foreword to ‘A Strategic Framework for the Information Economy’ released in December 1998:
An exciting aspect of this information revolution is the potential for enhanced social interaction and community participation.
Further, on page 11 of this document, under discussion on strategic priority number two (Education and Training):
Online technologies, in themselves, will be an important tool in the cost effective provision of education and training. They offer the potential to transform the ways in which teaching and learning occur. For rural and remote Australia, online technologies offer a unique opportunity to address educational disadvantage stemming from the tyranny of distance. Not only do they facilitate communication between the student and the learning institution; they also enhance interaction between the students themselves, allowing them to share their ideas and work on group projects. [HREF9]
EdNA Online continues to develop interactive services beyond the initial implementation of majordomo-based discussion lists. Beyond the basics that would be expected of most websites, of providing a mechanism for feedback or contact, EdNA Online also currently provides an opportunity for users to Suggest Items for inclusion in the searchable collection and a Noticeboards service which enables specific user groups to construct their own 'noticeboard' (for example, a collaborative curriculum project in schools).
From research conducted three decades ago Philips proposes the concept of 'participant structure' to analyse patterns of behaviour and interaction of Indian and non-Indian children in educational settings. He concluded that for successful interaction to take place, the way the interaction is structured must be congruent with the socio-cultural backgrounds of the participants. In the case of Australia, while it is characterised as a multi-cultural society, the overall framework is shared across sectors and between States and Territories (Philips, 1972: 370). There is ample potential to develop innovative interactive services on EdNA Online which are firmly based within the strong foundations of community. Current development work has this as a key consideration.
Generally, it is a shared wish of stakeholders to achieve a 'best-fit' between the national collaborative framework and the system implementation and to build on the foundations established over the last few years. Ongoing developmental projects are guided by key technical principles of scalability, open component-ware and interoperability. Principles of engagement, network facilitation, and equity of access continue to guide the evolution of the collaborative framework. By late 1998 it was recognised that existing services available through EdNA Online could be broadened to include other services and some effort has been put toward this task. But the hype of the new is not the only driver. A number of key stakeholders have driven projects which have strengthened the resource discovery foundations of the service and brought longstanding projects from 'on the table' to fruition. Thus, in this respect, agreed standards and the implementation of metadata has ensured the collection and retrieval of quality content. Likewise, the implementation of partially automated collection (or 'harvesting') tools has been facilitated by particular user needs.
In all developmental projects associated with EdNA Online in the past as well as currently underway adding of value is a common feature. This dimension to the EdNA collaboration is recognised as a win-win strategy. At the same time it can be seen as an intrinsic opportunity that exists in any network, online or otherwise. In acting on this recognition through implementing a range of strategic initiatives, EdNA can be seen as developing a framework for lifelong learning support. This is, and will be, an ongoing balancing act between implementing enabling technologies and actually enabling their usage for maximum benefit.
The following discussion focusses on two main development projects: Harvesting and Pathways.
From about mid 1997 stakeholders recognised that EdNA Online needed to be supported by more efficient processes to collect items and improve the search results. As a result, the EdNA Online Harvesting project was initiated. In summary, the project aims to harvest quality resources from 'registered partners' who expose collections of their own resources. Such exposure will result in these resources being accessed from the EdNA database via browsing or searching. Browsable status depends on presence of EDNA.Categories metadata. In the first instance of this project, Harvest Control Lists determine the resources that can be harvested according to a set of agreed rules determined by representatives of all EdNA stakeholders. The Harvesting project is viewed as an efficient mechanism for the speedy creation of items directly from documents owned by registered partners or from their own repositories of items which they consider would also be of national relevance through inclusion in EdNA. However, this semi-automated process is not seen as a complete replacement of manual activity. Both manual and automated activities are viewed as value-added processes.
Currently, work is progressing on the implementation of harvesting items based on documents which contain embedded metadata. This process uses the Netscape Compass Server robot to 'index' documents that are specifically referenced by Harvest Control Lists on each registered partner's Web site. It also follows hyperlinks from a nominated starting point. In each case, the metadata is extracted from the documents and stored in the Compass Server database. From there, the relevant information is extracted from the Compass Server database and is used to update the EdNA Online database of items according to the appropriate rules. This is an automatic update of the EdNA database which parallels the steps that are followed when an administrator manually enters or modifies an EdNA item. The rules used to update the database have needed to consider the situations where items have been previously manually entered into the database and where future maintenance is to be handled almost exclusively through the automated process. This has involved some lengthy analysis in order that the outcome is truly provided a service and not imposing extra workload.
During the next phase of the harvesting project an efficient mechanism for harvesting detached metadata (from other repositories) will be initiated. Given that there has been much effort expended in building other repositories then this seems to be the most sensible approach, but it does raise additional issues such as handling of the same item being submitted from multiple organisations. Consideration of this issue continues. It is likely that other organisations will be requested to 'expose' the relevant information from their own repositories in a standard format, such as that Resource Description Framework (RDF), in order that they can be accessed through the same Compass Server robot mechanisms.
During 1997, the Schools sector commissioned an independent study on interface issues for EdNA. It was conducted by the Hiser Group and was later known as the Hiser Report. One of the recommendations of this report is that a special interface that appeals to younger users would be a valuable approach. This project became known as EchidNA. Based on an analysis of the data model, EchidNA can now be considered as an alternate pathway through the category structure. Since the Hiser report was first released, however, the rigidity of the hierarchically branched category structure has revealed more problems for ongoing development. While browsing is a powerful mechanism for unsophisticated users to discover information, the current categories are structured to a pre-determined tree structure representing only one possible view of the information. Following the Hiser Report and discussions relating to an up-to-date data model, stakeholders have come to the view that there is a need for alternate pathways - that is, a multiplicity of entry points into relevant information.
By examining the categories and improving the driving algorithm behind the scenes this can be achieved. Essentially, the development of a controlled vocabulary which can produce a leaner collection of 'master categories' is seen as the next goal from which the required flexibility can be engineered. Thus, for example, a possible master category could be 'organisation': categories such as 'higher education', 'VET institutes', 'schools', 'educational professional bodies' would naturally belong to this. Groups of categories would typically be orthogonal to each other (there being no dependencies of meaning between groups). Through this process each master category would be implemented as a particular metadata element or, more likely, through qualifications of existing elements. Each of these would then contain values selected from a specific, limited controlled vocabulary. Determining which items are displayed at the leaf node of a particular branch of the category tree is, then, a matter of selecting (probably through the search mechanisms) those which contain the appropriate values in specifically nominated metadata fields. This opens the opportunity for a much tighter integration between the browse and search functions, as they are really about the same process in terms of user needs. This approach also provides significantly increased flexibility in the design of the category tree, as the tree, or paths to particular items in an information zone, can be amended without having to change the metadata associated with each document. This can, in turn, be extended to defining other pathways to information with the possibility of users being able to develop their own pathways and store them on EdNA for later use of for referral to other users.
Built into any network is the assumption that the units, nodes or individuals belonging to the network will derive sufficient benefit from being a member of a common interest community to confirm and encourage their input. The funders of EdNA are governments and the networking partners mostly Education authorities or departments, the major education providers of education in Australia. All are short of funding and labour. Therefore EdNA Online must be efficient and demonstrate the benefits of networked activity. This requires highly effective administration and robust, adaptable technology. It assumes a high level of commitment from all network members as well as considerable negotiation and communication skills. EdNA Online demonstrates some ways in which the Australian Education community is particularly well-placed to utilise the networking model.
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Jon Mason, Jillian Dellit, Graham Adcock, Albert Ip © 1999. The authors assign to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web.
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