Abstract

In today's China, many universities and schools have their own computer servers to store electronic materials in multi-media formats (text, image, audio and video…) to serve as educational resource to teachers and students for free use. But when a teacher/student needs to create his/her lecture or presentation with vivid materials from this digital library, much work has to be done first to copy those materials into his/her computer and then he/she can start to make the final material selection and edit the content. This usually takes time and is often inefficient.

On the other hand, as the final works created by teachers and students are normally only stored in their own computers, sharing of these processed educational materials seems not easy. This results in a huge waste of intellectual productions and also a waste of energy. Our proposed research project intends to develop a new system and a new tool based on grid technology to help universities and schools to build their own knowledge repositories, let them united and exposed to end users as one integrated interface, with which on-line materials from different sources could be screened at same time and direct editing of these materials without making local copies could become possible.

This system could let teachers and students publish their works as parts of knowledge repository so that other people could share, use or even do modifications based on these works. As our new system will be constructed using grid technology, a more vivid and flexible presentation form with on-line multi-media materials, such as video clips, could be directly used in the lectures and classes. This project will utilize some technology and tools newly developed by Vega Information Grid of Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, mainly GSML (Grid Service Makeup Language) and Composer of GSML. The outcome of this project could be easily applied to fit many specific circumstances so that a universal application using our system and tool in other countries would be possible.