Building an education infrastructure for allied health

COMMENTARY This article discusses the emerging education information infrastructure. It uses a five-part framework (aggregating, organizing, using, tool building, and policy making) to describe this infrastructure, then uses the same framework to argue for a tightly coupled education information infrastructure specifically for allied health. This tightly coupled education resource would allow educators, allied health professionals, and the general public to gain improved access to education resources on the Internet through metadata and digital reference services. Specific benefits of the building effort are discussed. J Allied Health. 2003; 32:32-37. MUCH WORK HAS BEEN done to exploit emerging Internet and digital technologies for education. This loosely coupled combination of websites, software, and services has been promoted as a means to improve how teaching and learning are conducted in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education. Although there is some conflicting evidence as to the effectiveness of this emerging education information infrastructure (EII), development and investment in it continues at a breakneck pace.1-5 Efforts in the construction of this infrastructure have taken several forms. The first is the creation of standards for education objects and services.6-8 The second is the development of targeted digital libraries for a given education audience, such as the National Science Foundation's National SMETE Digital Library.9 This article presents a framework for extending and enriching the Eli for allied health. We identify significant existing efforts that can be applied to allied health in their current form, where existing efforts can be modified for allied health education, and areas requiring significant development. We also discuss perceived benefits to the development of an allied health EII. Framework for the Emerging Education Information Infrastructure A five-part framework was established by Lankes and Sutton (Figure 1).10 The framework, used to define various aspects of the Eli in the context of the Internet, consists of five distinct core functions of the Eli: (1) aggregating, (2) organizing, (3) using, (4) tool building, and (5) policy making. The first three functions are the core of the information system infrastructure that connects end-users with needed educational resources. The last two functions may be viewed as enabling functions without which a fully operable system as envisioned in our scenario is not possible. AGGREGATING Aggregating is defined as "bit bucket" or digital repository that is neutral toward file format, document purpose, or organization scheme. The digital repository simply stores digital objects for use by some third-party agent. One could use the analogy of a computer hard drive, where it stores hundreds of different files (word processing documents, music, programs), as a set of 1s and 0s. ORGANIZING Organizing is the creation of context, or creating a higher level, abstract view of the information stored in a repository. The repository is simply a collection of digital objects with no inherent structure, whereas an organizer imposes some structure or, broadly, a point of view, on the objects. As Lankes and Sutton10 stated, "the organizing function can be likened to the organizational functions of the traditional library-albeit a library that contains only metadata (data about data) and no primary resources." USING Using is the application of some digital information or object, as housed in a repository and organized by some service or agent, to a given situation. Lankes and Sutton' described two aspects of information use: (1) direct end-user information discovery and retrieval of educational materials through one or more of the mechanisms of organization, and (2) indirect information discovery and retrieval performed for the end-user through digital agency. …