The blog title says Birmingham, but (as usual) XCRI has action across the country to report:

• Planning competence handling in Manchester
• Dicussing submitting XCRI to the e-Framework in Birmingham
• PDF transforms for printed prospectus in Fife

2006-05-05 Manchester

A very sunny Manchester played host to a meeting with Simon Grant and Ben Ryan to talk about development of the XCRI schema and opportunities for supporting lifelong learning by expressing curriculum content in terms of competencies required and acquired.

Detailed discussions over lunch helped us to agree that:

• XCRI should ideally be able to express curriculum content in terms of competencies required and acquired
• Competence was an appropriate common currency for expressing requirements for and outcomes of learning events, but stand-in, aggregate values were frequently used, such as A level points or accumulated credit values, which must also be represented to support existing practice
• Simon would examine the extent to which existing competence models in RCD, RDCEO and HR-XML were suited to the challenge of expressing curriculum content in terms of competencies required and acquired, and highlight opportunities for aligning XCRI with work from the e-Portfolio community in this area.
• Flexibility within the XCRI schema had enabled valid XML for diverse applications ranging from higher education module specifications to short courses in a Continuous Professional Development scheme; however, organisations may want to design out some of this flexibility to enforce local, more restrictive requirements for valid curriculum content. This introduces the possibility of institutional schema profiles - cut-down schema versions that fulfil the requirements of the institution yet still validate against the XCRI XML schema so that they can be handled by aggregators.
• Ben would report on the pros and cons of cut-down schema profiles using specific requirements for course and module information that had recently emerged at Manchester Metropolitan University.
• Ben would begin a process of documenting, reviewing and (where necessary and appropriate) re-factoring the XCRI schema for release 1.1

2006-05-09 Birmingham

Extension funding for XCRI makes provision for submitting it, as one of the Reference Models, to the emerging e-Framework, which is a joint initiative involving the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Australia's Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) to facilitate technical interoperability within and across education and research. A workshop at Edgbaston provided a good opportunity for the Reference Models to share progress and discuss actions required to transform existing activities and outputs into a format that would bring the e-Framework to life. The importance of common vocabulary for describing components within the framework was clear, but there was considerable debate about the extent to which this necessitated a domain-specific approach over work from bodies like the The Business Modeling and Integration Domain Task Force.

The event's clear focus on service-orientation raised important questions for XCRI about the framework services it would provide and how these should be articulated: from user or provider perspective.

• Is XCRI providing learning opportunity discovery services or should they be expressed as curriculum repository search services?

Whilst that example is more a request for guidelines on service naming, integration of XCRI with the Personal Learning Environment Reference Model software had raised more interesting questions about services not yet present:

• How does a learner move from discovery to application?
• What role will XCRI play in persisting detail necessary for records of achievement?
• What role will XCRI play in helping a learner navigate the space of available learning opportunities by only presenting those that are relevant and for which the learner comes close to meeting the entry requirements?
• What role will XCRI play in documenting learner trails, so that others may learn from pathways that anonymous forebears have taken through available curriculum in order to attain particular positions within a career map?

It was clear from the event that the XCRI and PLE Reference Models need to maintain close dialogue, and this event was only the first in a series organized by the JISC. Watch this space...

2006-05-09 Fife

The Adam Smith College in Fife is the third largest college in Scotland and the largest in central Scotland with approximately 20,000 students, more than 700 staff and offering more than 1000 different educational programmes covering a wide variety of vocational areas.

Web developer, Tavis Reddick, highlights how he and colleagues have been working with XCRI to progress the College's Marketing Information and Publishing System developments:

• Adam Smith are currently exploring the potential of importing XCRI XML into Adobe InDesign CS2 for their main prospectus. Tests are inconclusive as to how much automation of style can be achieved, but work is ongoing
• For more frequent and subsetted brochure output, the team have been looking at XSL-FO. An XSL stylesheet has been developed to produce a Formatting Objects file which is consumed by the FO Processor to produce a PDF document that follows the current brochure's table format. The FO Processor used is called NFop, which is a .NET port of Apache's FOP (Formatting Objects Processor). The plan eventually is to produce a fluid design that takes user preferences to determine body text size, etc for accessibility purposes. The following documents demonstrate the current approach:
  • Valid XCRI 1.0 XML for programmes in the Adam Smith brochure
  • XSL used to create the formatting objects consumed by the FO Processor to produce the PDF
  • PDF brochure that presents a table of available programmes