First up Scott Wilson (@scottbw) describing potential use of learning registry to bring together ‘paradata’ (activity/usage data) for ‘widgets’ (or apps) across different widget (app) stores – the idea that you could have the same app in different stores, and want to aggregate the reviews or ratings from each store. Put in bid to JISC under rapid innovation call for a project ‘SPAWS’…

Terry McAndrew (from JISC TechDis) – want to network experience with resources – identify accessible practice/purposes. Terry says most ‘OER Problems’ are social not technical. Asks – can we find learning registry output via Google?

Walt Grata showing tools that he has built on top of Learning Registry … (on github):

• ‘Landing pages’ for content – that can be indexed via Google (think this is new, and not up at github yet)
• Harvesting tool – to grab stuff from a node and put into another storage mechanism – e.g. couchdb,  postgresql, etc etc

Pat Lockley – slides

• Chrome plugin, code on github
• No-one will search outside Google – so take learning registry to Google. Chrome plugin finds all links on the page, and checks each one on the learning registry – and looks for some common attributes – like ‘title’ or ‘description’ etc. – and can then manipulate browser display to make use of this data.
• WordPress Widget  – code on github
• plugin for WordPress to display content from a learning registry (node) in a wordpress blog

Steven Cook – used Cake (PHP framework) to extract and ‘slice’ data from learning registry node. Also pulling data from other sources – like Topsy. Code on github. Talking about how can’t expect Learning Registry to do the hard work here – have to expect to pull out data, cache it, etc. Notes learning registry API isn’t completely RESTful (? not sure what the issues are) .

This session is really why I’ve come to the CETIS Conference (apart from the general opportunity to meet and chat to people which is also great) – it’s about “The Learning Registry” (@learningreg and http://learningregistry.org). The Learning Registry is not a destination – it’s about building infrastructure – and in some ways has both parallels and relevance to the work the Discovery programme is undertaking (which I’m involved in).

A simple use case for the learning registry is:

• Nasa publishes a physics video
• PBS posts a link to the video
• NSDL posts a link to the video
• A school uses the video in a course in their Moodle VLE

Each place/portals where the link is used or published only knows about use of their link or copy of the resource. So Learning Registry aims to support way of sharing this type of activity ‘in the open’ – so that this can be captured and reflected – the ‘social metadata timeline’ – Learning Registry is to provide infrastructure to support this. Learning Registry describes this type of activity/usage data associated with a resource ‘paradata’ – although learning registry learning registry doesn’t care what type of data it stores (as long as it can be expressed as JSON)

The learning registry is “an idea, a research project, an open source community project, a public social metadata distribution network’…

The guiding principles: be enabling, capability not solutions, no barrier entry, no single point of failure – everything distributed…

Not going to try to blog the technical architecture of.. but summary of APIs

• Distribute API – uses http POST. About copying data from one node to another – i.e. achieving the distributed part of the architecture
• Publish API – how you get stuff into a Learning Registry node (that is, you, the producer of information, publish it *to* the learning registry node) – uses http POST. Learning reg also supports SWORD for publishing data into a node
• Obtain API – getting data out of a learning registry node – uses http GET
• Harvest and OAI-PMH APIs – another way of getting stuff out of the node. Harvest returns JSON but supports OAI-PMH type actions. OAI-PMH also supported.

It is stressed that this is really a project at the start of its work – the way to engage and to find out how to do this stuff is to join the community – join the developer list etc. and raise issues, ask questions – this is part of the experiment and will inform the development.

JLern

JLern is the project to setup an experimental node in the UK – being run by Mimas.

2 kinds of nodes in the Learning Registry:

• Common node
• Gateway node

JLern have setup a ‘common node’ – this can support:

• Publish services
• Access services
• Distribution services (JLern now have a 2nd common node up and running to try these)
• ….

Common nodes can be part of ‘networks’. Networks can (only) be connected via ‘gateway nodes’

When networks are connected, this is called a ‘community’. A ‘network community’ is a collection of interconnected resource distribution networks. A resource network can only be a member of one community.

Now have published the JORUM metadata (via OAI-PMH) – so about 15k resources. Open University now looking at similar activity. Now Jorum exploring framework for capturing paradata about resources.

Gathering ideas and use cases now – e.g. see JLern challenge from dev8D http://dev8d.org/challenges/

The JLern ‘Alpha’ node is at alpha.mimas.ac.uk – you can authenticate using details given in this blog post http://jlernexperiment.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/alpha-node/.

As already mentioned they’ve harvested JORUM OAI-PMH data and published on JLern alpha node.

They now have ‘Beta’ node (this doesn’t represent a level of development – just naming convention I think) – this is running on Windows (Alpha is on Linux). Also planning a ‘Gamma’ node running on Amazon EC2.

JLern hackday held in January – write up at http://jlernexperiment.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/the-hackday-report-and-reflections/, and also a Java Library for interacting with Learning Registry nodes at https://github.com/navnorth/LRJavaLib .