EduTone Learning Community

Last week we formed a new non-profit (501c3) organization called "EduTone Learning Community", or ELC for short. We will soon have a new website for this "global" community: www.edutone.org.

The goal of ELC is to foster collaboration amongst educational organizations across the world!

As I said in my last week's blog: ecosystems and communities grow together and serve each other. As we grow the ecosystem with more applications, content and services, we are actually creating a catalyst to grow the community surrounding this ecosystem. Every new service component will attract new members in the community, and every new member in the community will eventually add new services to the ecosystem. So in essence, all we need is just a couple of services along with a few end-user members of these services to 'seed' the ecosystem along with its initial community! Wow ... that is easy! NOT!!

In reality, ecosystems require an infrastructure that sustains them. They need energy to fuel them. They wait for catalysts to initiate their growth. They are organized, yet they are random. They are not predictive. They are alive ... and always evolving!

The EduTone Learning Community will have an ecosystem of services, known as the EduTone Ecosystem, supported and integrated via the EduTone Xchange. In other words, the EduTone Xchange serves as the infrastructure for the EduTone Ecosystem.

So what's in the EduTone Ecosystem? Well ... that is a great question! We integrated a few community-centric and learning-oriented services to get it started - however this is not an extensive list ... so keep your eyes on this space as the EduTone Ecosystem evolves:

Sakai: A Collaboraive Learning Envoironment (CLE) (www.sakai.org);

Fedora: A Flexible and Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (www.fedora.info);

School MATRIX: A web-based fully-integrated school management system that inludes SIS, Assessment, Curriculum & Instructional management, Special Education, Professional Development, and many other applications (www.schoolmatrix.com);

Content Channels: Lots of Free and For-Fee K-12 content channels from both non-profit and commercial organizations;

CEEDS Channels: The Consortium of Educational Enterprise Data System (CEEDS) is soliciting vendors to offer their web-based applications to serve the Californian K-12 school market, there are many vendors who are currently lined-up to join the CEEDS Ecosystem (www.ceeds.org);

Many of these services in today's blog will be launched soon ... in case some of the above mentioned URL's are still not LIVE yet.

The community will be sharing a very large respository of assets: They will share content, software, ideas, best practices, requirements, people, resources, and many other by-products and derived services.

I am excited about the future! Many of these technologies are either free or very affordable. Many of them will be deployed quickly without too many barriers. People will help each other. The community will grow quickly. Private-Public partnerships will increase in volume and will be more influential in technology adoption and selection decisions. The K-12 educational organizations will not be as fragmented as they are today.

The EduTone Learning Community will evolve quickly and will be energized by its members' need for effective and affordable solutions.