Welcome to the website for the new CoSN K-12 Open Technologies Leadership Initiative.

The goal of this Web site is to help educators and technologists with the planning, evaluation, decision-making, and implementation processes associated with adopting Open Technologies in K-12.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include consensus-driven working groups, global conferences and workshops, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices.

In service to the community of organizations and individuals enhancing learning worldwide, IMS/GLC is a global, nonprofit, member organization that provides leadership in shaping and growing the learning industry through community development of standards, promotion of high impact innovation, and research into best practices. IMS includes more than 50 Contributing Members and affiliates. These members come from every sector of the global learning community. They include hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, publishers, government agencies, systems integrators, multimedia content providers, and other consortia. IMS provides a neutral forum in which members work together to advocate the use of technology to support and transform education and learning.

Creative Commons interviews ISKME Founder and OER Commons Creator Lisa Petrides. The interview covers open educational resources and current policy issues.

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) is an independent, nonprofit educational research think tank that conducts social science research, develops tools and resources, and facilitates community-building to help educational institutions increase capacity to collect and share information. ISKME is also maintaining the excellent OER Commons Web site (www.oercommons.org). Please visit ISKME Web site to learn more about this Institute and discover its papers and publications.

MELT (a Metadata Ecology for Learning and Teaching) is a 27-month Content Enrichment project supported by the European Commission's eContentplus Programme. Starting in October 2006, it brings together 17 public and private sector content partners. The project’s coordinator is European Schoolnet (EUN), a unique non-profit consortium of 28 Ministries of Education in Europe, which provides major European education portals for teaching, learning and collaboration and which leads the way in bringing about change in schooling through the use of new technology.

A key aim in MELT is particularly to enrich educational content with metadata that reflects the actual use of each resource by teachers and pupils in a variety of learning contexts. The MELT project is also designed to both raise the awareness of teachers across Europe on the need for accurate tagging of resources and to provide a user-friendly system that motivates teachers to quickly and easily add metadata to resources that they have both used and created.

The Information for Development Program is taking the initiative to assess the state of ICT applications in education in Africa and has contracted with the Commonwealth of Learning to undertake a survey that will address the following general questions for all countries on the African continent: How are ICTs currently being used in the education sector in Africa, and what are the strategies and policies related to this use? What are the common challenges and constraints faced by African countries in this area? What is actually happening on the ground, and to what extent are donors involved?

The UK Web Focus blog provides reflections on use of the Web and Web 2.0 in higher education.