Carrick Exchange
About the Carrick Exchange
education.au is undertaking the technical development of an exciting new set of online services for the Australian higher education sector - the Carrick Exchange.
The Carrick Exchange is an initiative of the Carrick Institute. It will provide learning and teaching resources and functions to support communication and collaboration across the national and international higher education sector.
Who is the Carrick Exchange for?
The Carrick Exchange is for those who teach, manage and lead learning and teaching in Australian higher education.What is the Carrick Exchange for?
It's a hub for the exchange of ideas about teaching practice in the higher education sector. It's not just about access to quality teaching resources, it's about connecting people with people, and providing opportunities to share knowledge, experience, and know-how, and to contribute to the shared Carrick Exchange knowledge store.
It's a space where you can share the wealth of your personal experiences of teaching students with different needs and in various contexts. You will be able to contribute, discuss and debate, as well as to search and browse.
What's interesting about the development process?
Scenarios
As a way of kickstarting the development process, a set of scenarios was developed to imagine what kinds of services academics might need, use or require to support their teaching and learning practice. The final scenarios selected as the basis for the development of a demonstrator were based around:
- Contribution and sharing
- Social networking
- Supporting pedagogy
- Search
- National authentication
Each scenario explored the kinds of tools, services and interactions an academic may benefit from in an Carrick Exchange environment.
The scenarios and the demonstrator were then presented to a higher education Think Tank event in September 2006. Reaction was generally positive with many participants instantly envisaging the benefits a system like the proposed Carrick Exchange could provide.
The demonstrator is available for review at http://rindemo.educationau.edu.au/ and will be of most interest if used in conjunction with the associated Think Tank document.
If you have comments or feedback about the Carrick Exchange development please send them to us.
What were the services envisaged?
The focus of the Carrick Exchange online services is to provide academics, and those that work in teaching and learning, with services that enable them to communicate, collaborate, network, develop communities of practice, and share resources.
Contribute
The Carrick Exchange online services provide the opportunity to contribute contextual material around resources. That is, the Carrick Exchange is not a resource repository as such, it brokers information from a variety of sources, and enables its members to rate resources, comment on them, and save them to their own personal MyExchange area, to a group, and to the Exchange itself.
Personal and professional networks
Registered members of the Exchange are able to create personal and professional networks with other registered users and to share information about good quality teaching and learning resources, and best practice teaching strategies and approaches.
The Exchange supports people in the academic community in their teaching and learning practice.
In summary the services that will be provided through the Carrick Exchange will include the following:
Social networking services
- Adding colleagues to your network
- Bookmarking resources
- Providing comments and ratings to resources
- Instant messaging
- Social tagging of resources
- Tag clouds, personal tagging
Groups
- Ability to establish a group
- Add, delete and manage members
- Share, upload and download documents
- Email and instant messaging
- Set preferences
- Shared calendar
- Forums
MyExchange
- Ability to bookmark resources to your MyExchange
- View your interactions with the Carrick Exchange
- Personalise MyExchange
And of course there is a repository component for storage of the content, and a search function which include the capacity to search internally and to also search quality external repositories.
Infrastructure issues
There are some major issues under consideration by education.au as part of the development of the Carrick Exchange:
- Metadata
- Digital rights management
- National authentication for the higher education sector
- Selection of development approach
These issues are discussed further on other pages in this case study.
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