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Tom Worthington With Tom Worthington FACS, Visiting Fellow, Department of Computer Science, Australian National University

Education Network Australia - Educational Stuff on The Web, 26 June 2002

EdNA (Education Network Australia) Online is an national education and training project collaboratively funded by the state, territory and Commonwealth education ministries:

EdNA Online is a service that aims to support and promote the benefits of the Internet for learning, education and training in Australia. It is organised around Australian curriculum, its tools are free to Australian educators, and it is funded by the bodies responsible for education provision in Australia - all Australian governments. As an information service, EdNA Online provides two key functions: a directory about education and training in Australia [and] a database of web-based resources useful for teaching and learning...

From: About EdNA Online, Education Network, 2001


Edna Covers:

  1. School Education: Curriculum support resources, collaborative online projects and professional development information.
  2. Higher Education: Sector information, research, teaching and learning resources.
  3. Vocational Education & Training: Learning resources, organisations, networks, learning materials.
  4. Adult Community Education: Sector information, organisations, networks, learning materials.
  5. Education & Training Providers: Lists of schools, TAFEs, universities and other providers.
  6. International Education: Study in Australia, What are the requirments, courses available.

But they also send out regular list of web sites on particular topics.

Edna has a search facility for finding education materials. While it can be as easy to use as a web search engine, there is a sophisticated "metadata" system underneath.

Metadata is information about information and is structured in a manner that facilitates the management, discovery and retrieval of resources on the World Wide Web. Metadata standards have been developed to support both machine interoperability (information exchange) and targeted resource discovery by human users of the Web. Metadata standards for the Internet are an attempt to bridge the gap between the comprehensive cataloguing which is done by professionals in the library context, and the free-for-all of document creation on the Web. In particular, these metadata standards allow creators of documents and managers of resource collections to describe resources in a detailed manner facilitating targeted queries by search engines. A metadata record typically consists of a set of elements (or fields) which describe in detail the content of the resource, its intellectual property rights, and its 'instantiation' (date created, for example). From:EdNA Metadata Homepage

Jenny Millea is Information Manager at EdNA Online and is in Canberra to talk about metadata, the semantic web and resource discovery with various organisations. She is the guest at drinks 5:00 pm Thursday, 27 June 2002.

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