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The path forward- taking strides not small steps! January 22, 2009

Posted by ajackl in Education, Educational Technology, Enterprise Architecture, Schools Interoperability Framework, SIF.
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I have been thinking about what we will use the economic stimulus package for.  Particularly the parts impacting education.

I am going to not address tools that would be purchased singly by a teacher or school, but, rather, enterprise solutions- with economies of scale- that would be implemented at the district or state level.

Here is my initial list.   I hope you are listening Arne Duncan!!! 🙂

1. Flexible, SIF-enabled, unit-record-level(student, staff, course/section, building, district),  data quality-enforcing data collection systems.

2.  Semantically-tagged, multi-purpose, longitudinal, flexibly periodic, data storage

3. Enterprise Directory-enabled Portal solutions that provide authorization down to the parent, student, teacher level and provide security for both access to applications and resources but also constrict viewing parameters on reports.   Centralized management and indentity services but decentralized control

4. Inside these portal solutions Communities of Practice (data providers, teachers, families, program providors),  with collaboration and file sharing capabilities as well as access to reports designed specifically for them, and workflow tailored for them.

5. Learning Standards Repository and National Data Model and NCES Handbooks all available in referencible form and allowing free access to the date through a variety of APIs.

6.  Working with SIF and PESC and others to construct Transcript standards  and templates for the whole country

7. Mature the SCED specification to include elementary school and more metadata.

8. Mature the SIF specification to provide more value and out of the box interoperability to systems all through pk12.

9.  Provide Best Practices for maturing systems that are not driven by a single solution-providor but by healthy, standards-linked functionality.

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The SIFA Annual Meeting January 20, 2009

Posted by ajackl in Educational Technology, Schools Interoperability Framework, SIF.
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So- I just spent four wonderful days in pre-Inaugural Washington DC.   As usual we had the SIF Association‘s annual meeting, held elections, had board meetings, and generally planned, specc’d, and kibitzed.

We did quite a bit of good work resolving some technical issues with the XML Schema of version 2.3 of the SIF Specification release that is now finally coming close to release.  We also dealt with some of the details of re-designing processes and growth as the organization continues to grow and add new staff (7 now) and new members.   We are close to compiling all the charters that will define the scope of the Columbus release.

It was exciting to welcome Kevin Harrison from Virginia, David Holt from Wyoming, and Matt Howard of eTech Ohio as new members to the Tech Board, and Mark Reichert from CPSI, Ann Savino from eSchoolData, and Jason Wrage (albeit  temporarily) as new members of the Board of Directors.

Looks like Andy Elmhorst of EduStructures and myself are still the co-chairs of the Technical Board.

And so it begins…. January 20, 2009

Posted by ajackl in General.
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I will be using this blog for professional blogging and blogging about all aspects of education- from k12 to educational technology architecture to education  standards to transformational education.

I don’t know yet what I am going to say!