Across the country thousands of schools, libraries, and community centers are getting ready to bring together kids and books. The National Education Association’s (NEA) Read Across America is an annual reading motivation and awareness program that calls for every child in every community to celebrate reading on March 2, the birthday of beloved children's author Dr. Seuss.

The 13th annual NEA Read across America will get special support this year by teaming up JES & Co.'s Gateway to 21st Century Skills' editorial staff and Reading Rockets, a non-profit content provider. NEA is the Premier Sponsor of the Gateway, a free digital library with over 50,000 free teaching and learning resources. Together, Reading Rockets and the Gateway to 21st Century Skills will provide easy access to free resources for teachers, parents, grandparents, caregivers, and anyone else who touches children's lives.

The poster, "Conceptual Discovery of Educational Resources through Learning Objectives" by Stuart A. Sutton and Diny Golder, was presented at the Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, ECDL 2009, held in Corfu, Greece. You can read it in full here.

Washington, DC – November 19, 2009 - At the annual National Science Distributed Learning conference sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), participants learned how JES & Co.’s Achievement Standards Network (ASN) framework is being used by Australia’s Curriculum Corporation in an effort to link educational resource data globally. Representing Australia’s nationally funded Le@rning Federation Initiative was Jillian Dellit, for 9 years Director of The Le@rning Federation Secretariat. Diny Golder, the executive director of JES & Co., the home of the ASN, has been working with Ms. Dellit for over 10 years in an effort to launch an international exchange of learning resources, discoverable by learning objective or achievement standards. Stuart Sutton, the lead scientist for the ASN project, has worked closely with Curriculum Corporation’s Steve Sunter and Les Kneebone to align Australia’s rich educational vocabularies to existing ASN properties.

Presented to the National Science Distributed Learning community was a demonstration of the ASN configurable Resource Description Editor (RDE) developed in cooperation with Zepheira that has been configured to meet Australia’s unique educational needs. Many in the area of education publishing are familiar with resource metadata, but the notion of describing learning goals is fairly new. The ASN is both an open source framework for the description and encoding of achievement standards and an open resource, Web-accessible repository of all historical and current U.S. K-12 standards. The ASN was partially funded at its start by NSF through its National Science Digital Library (NSDL) initiative. The repository of U.S. K-12 standards has APIs that enable cataloging tools to link to the repository in order to search, browse and assign identifiers (URI) for fine-grained achievement assertions to learning resources. All identifiers so assigned are then resolvable over the Web, yielding related metadata and the text of the achievement assertion identified. Ms. Dellit explained to the audience the opportunities in the current Australian context and the ways in which the ASN will leverage some of the Australian digital resource work of the last decade.

Diny Golder, Executive Director of JES & Co. and Jillian Dellit, Director of the Learning Federation Secretariat will co-present during the upcoming CoSN Conference 2010: Innovation, Ingenuity and Insight to be held March 1-2, 2010 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC.

Their presentation titled, "Global Exchange of Resources Through Standardized use of Academic Standards Metadata" will highlight the recent collaboration between JES & Co. and Australia to produce an interoperable collection of Australian National learning standards using the ASN.

JES & Co. announced today that they have joined IMS Global Learning Consortium as a Contributing Member to support development of interoperability standards for the K12 Common Cartridge Curriculum Standards project. This work will be part of the Common Cartridge v1.1 release, which will enable curriculum standards (e.g. learning objectives) to be contained with the learning materials of a Common Cartridge. As a result, teachers will gain greater precision in identifying appropriate materials for their students and schools can more systematically track student progression.

See the full press release, JES & Co. Joins IMS Global Learning Consortium