Depts. of Education, Defense Launch Learning Registry

 The U.S. Departments of Education and Defense have launched a new joint project, the Learning Registry, a technology that aims to facilitate the aggregation and sharing of educational resources across multiple learning portals and websites.

The Learning Registry is not a website or a destination in itself, but rather an open source infrastructure that can be installed on any existing learning resource portal--like the PBS orNational Science Digital Library websites--to help aggregate a variety of educational content and user data across participating sites. The project was designed so that both commercial and public sector partners could freely take part.

"The Learning Registry stitches these systems together, so educators are supported by an interconnected 'fabric' of teaching and learning communities," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a statement announcing the launch. "As states move forward with implementing the common core standards, this type of sharing will become even more powerful."

Content uploaded to the registry--current partners include NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress--can be "tagged" by subject area and filtered to individual partner sites, allowing NSDL, for example, to archive and display only science-related resources, and OER Commons to omit resources that are not open source.