Learning architecture issues in indexing Australian education in a Web 2.0 world

As Australia's national ICT in education agency, education.au faces the challenge of indexing web resources, learning objects and teacher- created resources for optimum discoverability by students and educators across all sectors of Australian education. This paper provides an overview of current thinking about learning architectures, and raises questions about how educational institutions are managing the cloud of learning resources currently available. Particular issues include how to provide seamless access to the most relevant learning materials from the wide range of resource collections on offer; how to ensure Australian-specific vocabularies are used to describe curriculum resources and how to keep pace with terminology to describe the rapidly changing world of technology in education. As well as being concerned with traditional concepts of collections, cataloguing and copyright, information professionals in the education sector are now dealing with creation of metadata to describe new forms of learning including collaborative technologies, communities of practice and professional learning events. This paper reports on issues, strategies and a vision for learning architecture that incorporates the best of both worlds. [Author abstract]