IBM award for FIT researchers' project

The Faculty of Information Technology's Associate Professor John Hurst and Dr Shonali Krishnaswamy have been awarded an IBM UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) award of $US21K for their project entitled "Enabling a Scalable and Intelligent Distributed Repository of Learning Objects".

The project is based upon work done by the Computing Education Research Group (CERG) in relation to the Platform Independent Agent-based Virtual Educational Environment (PIAVEE) project, which seeks to develop a learning management system that is "pedagogically agnostic" (forces no particular learning method), and provides support for multiple campus teaching.  Further information about CERG is available at http://cerg.infotech.monash.edu.au/

While focussed upon teaching, the system can be used in a wide range of collaborative contexts, and it is is these contexts that are to be addressed by the IBM project.  There is widespread recognition that proprietary, presentational document structures prevent the broader dissemination of knowledge, and in an effort to promote the use of open source software, IBM is sponsoring this bid to develop information architectures that focus upon content, not form.  Our project will develop the architecture of PIAVEE to support data mining within learning objects that follow no particular pedagogy or technology.