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The Learning Registry, a joint project by the US Department of Education and US Department of Defense intended to help students and teachers discover and leverage learning resources from numerous federal agencies, will make a prototype of its platform available to the public later this month.

The project, unveiled at the National Rural Education Technology Summit in July, was a recommendation of the Federal Communication Commission's National Broadband Plan, delivered to Congress last March.

"No technological innovation in our lifetime has greater potential to transform education than high-speed Internet," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said at the summit. "But computers and connections alone are not enough to seize the opportunities of broadband for education. The National Broadband Plan recommended that the federal government increase the pool of high-quality digital resources that educators can easily find, access and combine with other content to help their students learn. I am very pleased to see this recommendation being adopted. The Learning Registry will put a library of world-class educational content at the fingertips of every American student and teacher."

According to Steve Midgley, deputy director of the Office of Education Technology at the US Department of Education, the Learning Registry will make federal learning resources (defined as primary sources, historically and culturally significant materials and resources designed specifically for educational use) easier to find, access and integrate into learning environments. He said it will enable teachers, students, parents, schools, governments, corporations and non-profits to build and access better, more interconnected and personalized learning solutions.

"Let's imagine you're a high school physics teacher or the head of an online learning company," Midgley said. "In either case, you might want to build a course on the early years of the US space program in a way that integrates history, writing and physics. You might want to use those resources; you learn that each agency has its own repositories (often many of them) and you have to search each site to find the materials. Even Internet search engines are of limited (though still significant) help. Finding the right information stored at these different agencies requires significant Web research expertise. At this point today, you might give up your search because it will take too much of your time to find the resources you need."

But the Learning Registry could change all that, Midgley said.

"The point of the Learning Registry is to make it much easier to find and access these federal assets," he said. "The benefits of finding resources stored in the federal government can be significant. In this case, the Learning Registry would help you discover that NASA has numerous photographs of the missions and related information. The National Archives has the transcript of the historic phone call between Nixon and Armstrong while Armstrong was on the moon. NOAA has a history on their weather program that supported the early rocket launches and landings. Open government and data access are important goals for the Department of Education, and this project is one of a number of open initiatives designed to make the information currently available within the federal government accessible. The Learning Registry will help to fulfill one of the mandates of the Open Government Directive to make information for education use available to students and teachers online and "clearly demarcate the public's right to use, modify and distribute information."

The initial plan for the project is to focus on federal assets. The Learning Registry project has brought together numerous federal organizations, including the Department of Education, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House and the Federal Communications Commission. Midgley noted that these groups have been consulting with the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the Department of Commerce, the National Archives and Records Administration, the data.gov team and the Federal Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer. The project has also held discussions with NASA, the Smithsonian Institution and the Department of Energy.

Midgley said the project plans to engage many other agencies and organizations, both inside and outside the federal government.

"We aren't trying to boil the ocean with this project and can't solve every issue ourselves," Midgley explained. "In particular, we want to be sure there is room for others to participate and innovate within the Learning Registry in a way that makes it much easier to find and access them. One important technique is to enable the categorization and sharing of resources based on information beyond that made available by the original publisher. In the trade, this is called "metadata augmentation," and if we do this project right, we can enable Web sites, users, learning management systems and others to classify, rate, review and republish federal resources in a way that helps more people find the resources most useful for their needs."

The prototype of the Learning Registry is slated to be made available to the public on Feb. 28.

Thor Olavsrud is a regular contributor to Schools.com and former senior editor of InternetNews.com. He writes about technology, security and business.