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Attending: Joel Farrell, chair; Panos Bamidis, James Fiore, Steve Kinney, Dan Rehak, Carl Singer, Valerie Smothers
mEducator Overview
Panos introduced himself. He is from Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece, and he is coordinating the meducator European grant with 13 partners. The work started last year. They are now finishing year 1 of 3.
Joel added that at the recent MedBiquitous conference Panos won an award for his contributions to MedBiquitous. He is an important member of the MedBiquitous community.
Panos explained that mEducator is a best practice network for repurposing and sharing content. They are interested in multiple types of content. Everyone develops their own now; they want to enable inter institutional communication and provide mechanisms to discover, and retrieve educational content. They are targeting academics. They have many types of content (lecture notes, virtual patients, osce forms, wikis, forums, user generated content). They want to reuse and repurpose this content. There are different types of repurposing: changing content, language, culture, pedagogical approach, educational level, discipline or profession, content type, different technology, scope/purpose.
Panos added they also want to see the repurposing history of the object, including the associations to other objects. They are starting with standards including healthcare lom and see how different content types fit in. There are different mechanisms for sharing, including Web mash ups, federated search, and semantic Web services. They are looking into IP and ownership issues and plan to use creative commons as much as possible. They aim to have been OER approach. He added that they do allow associated members.
They have created an editor for healthcare lom that is available on their website. They have a tool that enables repurpose them of serious games. Finally, they have the metamorphosis test that environment, which allows testing of repurposing actions. Once you login, you can link two different partners, link objects together, show associations among objects, etc. Data can be extracted as XML file.
Over the next few months people play with mechanisms that allow for sharing, including Web 2.0 mechanisms. They're also working on search via semantic Web services based on existing architecture developed by one of the partners.
They are iterating on their existing metadata schema and plan to see how much of healthcare lom can be used. They will test, evaluate in practice, and provide guidelines.
Joel commented that he was very interested in the metamorphosis system and its use of social networking. He asked how we get to that site.
Panos commented that over the next couple weeks the link will be on front page. For now it can be accessed through: http://metamorphosis.med.duth.gr
The Healthcare lom edito is also available onliner: http://kedip.med.auth.gr/healthcarelomeditor
Joel asked if there are any other standards the group is thinking of using, such a semantic Web service standards.
Panos replied that they have made a review of what standards exist and how different standards can link to the work they are doing. Some work involves recent standards. There is not a wide usage of other standards. They want to look into further, to see how they can exploit other standards. To date they haven’t utilized things like snomed ct, bet they are now allowing links to such standards. They have not tried to link it all together yet. Panos expressed concern that complex standards may pose difficulties to end users. Describing resources needs to be a convenient and user friendly process.
Dan asked Panos to you share the Metadata architecture image. He asked how their work related to icooper and aspect? Both are best practice projects.
Panos replied that they haven’t done a lot of work on federated search yet. One solution they will develop is based on architecture developed in the Lisa project. That allows description in different way and enables federated search.
Panos agreed to send Valerie a file to distribute that explains the relevance of each standard.
They have also planned to collaborate with groups like MedBiquitous so this work can influence MedBiquitous standards. Tomorrow he and his colleagues will participate in a Learning Objects Working Group call. A model that can allow communication with Medbiquitous.
Joel commented that he would be trying metamorphisis and offered to provide feedback.
Panos commented that Valerie can share the annual report as well, which is on the mEducator website. Valerie commented their web services requirements, currently under development, would be of particular interest to this committee. Panos replied that two prototypes would be made available at the end of the year.