Digital Library and Digital Education in China

Greeting from the School of Computer Science at the ANU in Canberra, where Professor Zhendong Niu is visiting from Beijing Institute of Technology. One of his areas of interest is Digital Library and Digital Education. SOme projects of interest are the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, National Cultural Information Resource Sharing Project, China Academic Library Information System, National Foundation Education Grid (for k12 education resources for schools). The Professor also has an interest in legal portals.

What I found of most interest was work on integrating digital libraries with education. That may sound an obvious combination, but not much has been done in this area. The builders of document repositories work very separately from those of learning management systems. One aspect which doesn't arise as an issue is language; the software tools can work in Chinese and English, using the same ontology. An example is the Olympic Games (which BIT was involved in software for), the same concepts apply, even where different words are used in English and Chinese (I suggested using pictograms for the Beijing Olympics).

It was interesting to see the similarities with the issues of technology for education for China with the "Supermarket of E-learning" by China TV and India's use of satellite TV.

With the development of digital library, social networks, and user-generated content, need for trust and reputation models become prime. In this paper, we propose a user reputation model. As an encouraging and sanctioning mechanism, it has been applied to the DLDE (Digital Library and Digital Education) Learning 2.0 Community that is developed by our lab based on digital repositories management etc. The model combines user's individual activity analysis approach and collaborative activity analysis approach. Individual activity analysis approach is used to analyze the activities in which users participate individually and give its evaluation method. Collaborative activity analysis approach is used to analyze users' collaborative activities; three different categories of users' collaborative activities and corresponding evaluation methods were proposed in this paper. Experiments show that the proposed reputation model can accomplish the mission of encouraging good behaviors and differentiating the ability of students. Therefore it can fit well in our Community. ...
From: A User Reputation Model for Digital Library and Digital Education DLDE Learning 2.0 Community, Jin, F., Niu, Z., Zhang, Q., Lang, H., and Qin, K. 2008. , In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Asian Digital Libraries: Universal and Ubiquitous Access To information (Bali, Indonesia, December 02 - 05, 2008). G. Buchanan, M. Masoodian, and S. J. Cunningham, Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 5362. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 61-70. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89533-6_7