The Achievement Standards Network (ASN) is an open specification for the representation of educational expectations. The ASN specification provides for:
- the text of an educational expectation;
- rich metadata describing that expectation and its context; and
- a description of relationships between the expectation being described and other related expectations.
ASN uses Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI's) not GUID's, for identifying standards. ASN URI's can be resolved by both humans and machines over the web. The ASN:US repository of learning outcomes is the largest on the Semantic Web with over 4.4 million RDF triples and growing each day. The ASN open framework is also in use in Australia (ASN:AU).
The ASN is powered by these Semantic Web technologies:
ASN data was in the spotlight this week with the launch of the Learning Registry. The Learning Registry is a joint effort of the Department of Education and the Department of Defense, with support of the White House and numerous federal agencies, non-profit organizations, international organizations and private companies. The Learning Registry is creating a set of technical protocols as a platform for innovation by content authors and aggregators. Applications built to harness the power of harvesting and analyzing the Learning Registry data will allow educators to quickly find content specific to their unique needs.
ASN URI correlations were freely pushed out into the Learning Registry by both Agilix and NSDL to enhance resource discovery by standards. Steve Midgley (Deputy Director, Office of Educational Technology, U.S. Department of Education) highlighted some of these resources during his presentation through the use of a Google Chrome Extension.
For more information about this event including Steve Midgley's presentation see: http://www.learningregistry.org/news
For more information about JES & Co.'s involvement with the Learning Registry see: http://www.learningregistry.org/community/jesandco
Jeff Kahn has contributed a Java Swing control that can be used as a basis for picking ASN standards for content alignment. This code was showcased at the IMS Quarterly Meeting in Redmond, WA. The ASN Java Swing control was part of a demo by SoftChalk. You can read more about SoftChalks's ASN integration on SoftChalk's Blog.
Click here to download the ASN Java Swing control. There is also a short video you can watch that shows this code in action inside SoftChalk.
Thanks to Jeff and SoftChalk for making this code available to the ASN community!
Did you know that all ASN manifest files work out-of-the-box with Sencha's EXT JS library including: tree panels, checkbox trees and drag/drop trees? Well, they do! We use the Open Source version of EXT JS on this site when displaying standards. See http://asn.jesandco.org/resources/D2364040 for an example of our viewer. You can now download a sample ASN manifest viewer application here. Just upload to a server, unzip the files and point to the index.html file.
You can download ASN manifests by simply appending "_manifest.json" to any ASN Document URI. For example: http://asn.jesandco.org/resources/D2364040_manifest.json You will be prompted to download the manifest file in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.
If you have created applications that use ASN data and would like to share them with the ASN community Contact Us and we'll highlight them here.
