EU: OPEN SCIENCE RESOURCES (OSR)
ICT (3)
From 07/2009 to 04/2012Staff: Marlen Goldschmidt
In an era where science education inadequacy in formal and informal contexts is becoming an increasingly challenging issue, harvesting the potential of digital science education repositories appears as a very attractive alternative. However, an impressive abundance of high quality digital content that is available in European repositories remains largely unexploited due to a number of barriers such as: the lack of interoperability standards between repositories, the inefficiency of current content organization and metadata structures as well as multi-lingual issues. The OpenScienceResources (OSR) project suggests a coordinated solution at European level in order to overcome the aforementioned barriers. To implement the OSR vision, the consortium brings together a balanced mix of high quality science museums and science centers, pedagogues, educational technologists, metadata experts, user groups and standardization bodies. The envisaged solution consists of the following steps: a) study the state-of-the-art in metadata ontological approaches coupling them with modern social tagging and folksonomies, b) design a set of "proof-of-concept" experiments to try out the different theoretical approaches that will be developed and implement them in the OSR Portal, c) extensively validate the proposed approaches in real- life usage contexts employing the user groups represented in the consortium, e) document the whole process, disseminate the results, cluster with similar initiatives and stakeholders and, through the significant networking capacity of the OSR consortium, work towards a pan-European digital educational content standard.
Homepage: http://www.openscienceresources.eu/