Gov 2.0 Summit 2010: Steve Midgley; "The Learning Registry..." Video Lecture | Understand Learning Registry: Online Teaching tool - IT & Software

okay thanks so I'm just going to run
through a
this thing on run through a set of
slides
maybe not
hmm well maybe I'll work with outside
we're working on a problem that
basically is defined as it was defined
by Google for us in a letter of month
and a half ago two months ago where they
wrote and said you know you guys have a
lot of great learning resources inside
the federal government along with a lot
of other resources but you know what we
can't find them and were google so that
that certainly was a helpful pointer
we'd already been trying to address this
problem but we have not addressed the
problem yet and with learning resources
they don't just exist inside the
department of education and in fact as
some of you may know the department
education doesn't actually produce all
that many learning resources itself
although we do some funding of that but
there are staggering amounts of
resources and materials that can be used
for learning all across the federal
government if you just think of the sort
of the big ones Smithsonian Library of
Congress national archives NASA
department of energy right the list goes
on and on but the okay this is working
now I guess I have to I'm worried I'm
going to break it there you go so it's
it's a jack-in-the-box
so this is some some of the sites that
that I mentioned there's just a pile of
them and they can be used for many
different purposes so Department of
Energy is working on a virtual learning
environment a full 3d world with assets
inside and training curriculum embedded
that can be entered in by someone who
wants to learn how to weatherize a house
for example and then monitored later to
and checked with the actual actual
physics models to see whether it has
been weatherize correctly by an
instructor and then those two people can
interact either in the virtual world or
elsewhere to discuss remedies and
additional learning so that's pretty
dramatically integrated structured
curriculum down to you know nASA has
this great photo of Neil Armstrong
landing on the moon and can I use that
for teaching 60s history can I use that
for teaching physics can I use that
teaching algebra you know the
possibilities are fairly open and a
digitized copy of the Constitution held
by naira what can you do with that well
you know there's a lot of things that
can be taught there and I should point
out that there are just a pile of
learning resources elsewhere around the
internet but they are very desperately
located hard to discover hard to
integrate so this is a problem that
Google hasn't solved in the larger space
not just in the federal space and i
think that there's some work that needs
to be done in order to support both
learning resources inside government and
learning resources outside this is just
an obligatory slide so you know who I am
I really do love the internet I think
it's great and I've been working with it
for a long time and I think that it can
help solve this problem and when I say
Internet of course with with honors to
Anderson Chris Andersen's recent article
and wired which had a radically
overblown title but actually a pretty
thoughtful text about the web is dead
the internet is not dead and the
internet in fact can solve a lot of
problems at the web can't solve and
that's something that we're thinking
about pretty hard so the real question
for us inside government is Cathedral a
bizarre right Enterprise engineering
versus the other thing whether it's open
closed whatever but are you designing
and structuring and building and
financing the whole thing in a big
Cathedral or are you dumping a bunch of
pieces together and letting different
parties
interoperate and fix and figure out the
right solution for themselves so build
it or let it build itself just by asking
that question you probably know what my
opinion is so this is a rough structure
of what we're talking about so this is
actually a pretty boring slide but it's
kind of important for me so if you look
at the federal learning resources at the
bottom then there's a sharing API or
network that's what we call the learning
registry and then on top of that there
are innovators publishers community
managers at builders lots and lots of
people who can make use of the stuff so
if we can make discoverable resources
inside the federal government we're not
talking about creating a search
interface yet another portal to come and
search our stuff we're talking about a
way to express this stuff out into your
stuff whether you're building a mobile
phone app or an online learning
repository or a whole virtual world you
know simulator whatever you're doing if
you need assets for that the federal
government ought to give you the ones
that it has so that's number one
obligation but I want to point out that
just with regard to interoperability
that's not enough that's that's not
enough to make this project I don't
think sufficiently interesting I think
it gets interesting when you look at it
this way which is anybody's learning
resource going through a common API and
the federal learning resources going
through the same common API and what
would that look like so now you can
start relying on the capi whether or not
it's federal resources or not and so the
question is what kind of partnership can
we get to to share and build resources
along those lines so my time is up so
that's the that's the pitch for you
thank you
you