Submission + - US Dept. of Education Announces Learning Registry (ed.gov) 1
eldavojohn writes: Plans have been unvieled for a Federal Learning Registry by the United States Department of Education that aims to unify all available federal sources of information under one registry. How would this affect you? From the article, 'Let's imagine you're a high school physics teacher or the head of an online learning company. In either case you might want to build a course on the early years of the US space program in way that integrates history, writing and physics. You might want to use resources that are available from the federal government in this work. In searching for those resources, you learn that each agency has its own repositories (often many of them) and you have to search each site to find the materials. Even internet search engines are of limited (though still significant) help. Finding the right information stored at these different agencies requires significant web research expertise. At this point today you might give up your search because it will take too much of your time to find the resources you need. The point of the Learning Registry to is make it much easier to find and access these federal assets.' The effort claims to have contacted the following about participation: NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, the Department of Energy, the DoD, the National Science Foundation, the White House, the FCC, NIST, the National Archives and Records Administration, the data.gov team, as well as both the Federal CIO and CTO. Of course, the Learning Registry faces the same issues most aggregating sites face like linking disparate meta-data, scalability (imagine what NASA could throw at them) and, like everything else today, tacking on collaboration tools. Hopefully the government follows through with this effort to bring us online learning tools that our tax dollars have already paid for and others find ways to leverage this.
