INDIRE: who we are and what we do Agenzia Nazionale per lo Sviluppo dell’Autonomia Scolastica (former INDIRE) Silvia Panzavolta Antonella Turchi

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 Highlights INDIRE presentation INDIRE information systems –information architecture –knowledge management system –retrieval system / technologies –examples of educational repositories Research at INDIRE Digital right management policy

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 INDIRE is an autonomous national research institute supervised and financed by the Italian Ministry of Education. It is located in Florence with 18 regional offices all over Italy. The Institute’s main tasks are: - to provide students, teachers, scholars and decision makers with information about educational resources, projects and technologies in order to facilitate educational innovation and dissemination of best practices; - to manage e-learning environments for teachers and school personnel in-service training and initial training (until now, Indire has trained about 600,000 teachers through its e-learning platforms) ; - to promote teacher training on interactive whiteboards; - to administer the LLP programme; - to administer the alternating training system (documentation and management) and provide annual monitoring reports on the system’s state of the art; - to carry out research projects in the educational field; - to cooperate at European and international level with similar organizations. Indire… a short presentation

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June INDIRE journal “IR – Innovation and Research”

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 Type of users Teachers of every educational level and school type Head-teachers Decision makers Teachers trainers E-tutors University teachers School personnel School students University students Parents Other professionals working with the school

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 Type of information Bibliographic information (monographs and journal articles) Historic information (school archives) Research reports (INDIRE journal + university partners papers) Best practices of teachers (tacit knowledge) Educational policies (European networks) Conference proceedings International information (partnership with European Schoolnet and other European school networks, i.e. ENIS and e-twinning schools; researchers working for Indire at a distance) Educational material (LOs, exercises, images, ICT tools an tutorials) Documentation information

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 Flow of information & knowledge construction Top-down: the information is selected, collected and described by expert clearing houses (  BIBL repository) or by experts on the subject (  e- courses, articles). Then it is offered to the users. Bottom-up: the information/knowledge is selected, collected and described by users (mainly teachers), then it is judged by experts and afterwards it is offered to users (  GOLD, HANDITECNO repositories, community PUNTOEDU) Mixed: the information is selected, collected and described both by experts and users. Through a collaborative work it become shared knowledge (  EDULAB) and redirected to users. This modality is the most constructivist one.

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 Information/knowledge architecture Full-text databases (best practices, images, LOs) Bibliographic databases (offering services of Document Delivery) Structured environments without a repository but with a strong human interaction for retrieving/creating information and knowledge

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 Information description The majority of information is described through metadata All repositories have a subject indexing through either/and – a thesaurus (4 thesauri: EET, LRE, TESE, Youth literature thesaurus) –authority subject lists The metadata schema used are standard ones (or subset of them): –LOM for Learning Objects and assets –ISBD (International standard for bibliographic description)

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 Types of search Google-type: free search on semantically relevant fields Advanced search Search through authority files (i.e. titles, thematic areas, authors, publishers, keywords) Research on semantic web applications (ontology-based) is being carried out in order to build a bridge between natural and controlled languages. one prototype has been released in one of our portals, but semantics is very specific (disability)

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 THE GOLD Database on educational best practices, VIDEO repository

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 LRE descriptors The LRE thesaurus has been developed by INDIRE, initially in 5 languages. Now the thesaurus has 18 language versions. It is used in the largest EU repository (LRE portal) and by national repositories too (i.e. Ireland, Austria, Israel, Italy) THE GOLD Database on educational best practices,

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 The BIBL Database on bibliographic information on educational sciences, Document delivery service EET descriptors

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 The DIA Database (images for curriculum subject teaching), Google-style search Educational dossier concerning a selected amount of pictures (this is on marsupials)

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 The repository of AS – Abitare la Scuola (“Living at school”, best practices in school architecture and educational settings), Case studies

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 The database on disability information for special needs teachers, Consultant advice: teachers may ask questions about their difficulties with special needs students “Interactive” repository Semantic search facilities

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 One of the collaborative environments of Indire e-learning platforms: Edulab (Access with login and password). Virtual class, community, “Edulab” Work group Events, calendar, news, material sharing

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 One of the tools of the collaborative environments of Indire: Breeze meeting. Synchronous communication, desktop sharing and exchange among users

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 Technologies in INDIRE INDIRE databases support ISIS technologies and Microsoft SQL technologies Interoperability is an important objective for INDIRE. For example, recently the Italian Ministry of Culture has ruled out that school libraries should use the SBN system (that is the national library system software). Thus, INDIRE has studied a way to make the WINIRIDE software for school libraries interoperable with the Ministry SBN system. In other cases, Indire uses XML records to exchange data with other system (i.e. within the European context).

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 Research focuses in INDIRE E-environments: what factors have an impact on e-learners? What is important for maintaining a permanent community of practices? What kind of knowledge do Italian schools need? How can innovation be spread from school to school? Quality of the school system: how learning can be improved? How teachers can improve their professional competences? How can the school better cooperate with other schools and local agencies? Knowledge management and representation: what is knowledge for the educational system? How is it shared and created? What representation best fits the various users? How is it structured a KM system? What are the existing models for education KM systems? Languages/rhythm/time of the Internet: what languages for educational e-communities? How does the rhythm of learning change due to the Internet? Does the Web impose a new way of writing (web writing)? How does the reticular structure of the Web affect our way of speaking, thinking, communicating? How digital natives – the new Millennium learners – learn?

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 DRM policy Indire adopts an open-source policy, though sometimes services are not addressed to everyone but to specific communities (of teachers, students, etc.) who are identified by a specific profiling system; Indire is applying Creative Commons licenses to some of its objects in order to facilitate their re-use, i.e. digital assets (images) shared in the European LRE portal and educational best practices;

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 International projects & networks INDIRE, at the international level, is member of: the EUN Consortium the LRE group the Network 12 within the European Educational Research Association initiative INDIRE has also taken part in the following EU projects: ETB ( )[1], Celebrate ( )[2], eCOLOURS (2005)[3], Calibrate ( )[4], Eleonet ( )[5], MELT ( )[6], PERINE ( )[7], Pencil ( )[8], Molecole ( )[9], Aspect ( )[10], etc. just to mention some.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] [1][1] [2][2] [3][3] [4][4] [5][5] [6][6] [7][7] [8][8] [9][9] [10][10]

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 A short video about INDIRE… Video:

Silvia Panzavolta, Antonella Turchi - INDIRE - Italy 3rd Strategic Seminar, EdReNe project, Stockholm, June 3-4 Thank you for your attention! Silvia Panzavolta Antonella Turchi