JISC/CNI 08: Infrastructure to Support Research and Learning

Cyberinfrastructure and Cyberlearning: Cliff Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)

This looks at issues from a US perspective
NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure/Office of Educational Resources
How can we leverage these two funding streams?

Technology enabled education reaches beyond traditional models, not only for adult education, but also to supplement e.g schools. Museums have moved into this in an aggressive way. Platform for advancing relationships between professional & amateur science. The massive data resources can be used for teaching.

Spent far too long creating information objects/courses which cannot be sustained, either because of platform obsolescence or funding. Need platforms which last for a decade at least. Data deluge also applies to learning systems, about how the students are interacting with them; new tools are developed in some areas. Privacy issue is a caution on this e.g cannot build recommenders without user history; but learning systems can be open to abuse. How much privacy should users have? Would this impact on projects such as the digital lives project?

Report recommendations re openness – default should be skewed towards openness
4-5 weeks due