Using the full PALETTE: Integrated Services for Learning in Comunities of Practice

PALETTE - or Pedagogically sustained Adaptive Learning Through the exploitation of Tacit and Explicit knowledge - is a project aimed at enhancing learning within Communities of Practice (CoPs), i.e networks of professionals who share knowledge and practices in a common domain.
Collaborative learning is inherent in such communities: members learn informally by sharing their explicit knowledge and practices, thus adding to their collective pool of ability and experience. Such a process is increasingly important as organizations and individuals are challenged to innovate to maintain their position at the leading edge.
To this end, a growing number of companies and public institutions are implementing and “cultivating” CoPs, capitalizing on informal learning processes to increase organizational and employee experience and knowledge, thus empowering their employees to increase their value to the company.
To support such learning practices, PALETTE has designed an interoperable and extensible set of webenabled services and usage scenarios, now used by CoPs in a variety of contexts.
In CoPs, learning is collaborative and peer-oriented. The efficacy of such learning relies on offering members variety in information, applications, and environments, a functionality PALETTE now offers in the Web 2.0 spirit.
Specifically, PALETTE has developed a learning portal that allows CoPs to access networked applications using interactive user interfaces and Rich Internet Application technologies, all tailored to provide highlevel support for CoP learning.
As is fitting with Web 2.0-style applications, the underlying challenge is to develop an online environment that fosters the idea that e-Infrastructure provides a social, interactive service, or at least a place for living conversation between its users.

Standardisation and interoperability

The success of this portal is inherent to PALETTE ability to turn diverse applications into a set of interoperable components. The PALETTE project followed a multidimensional approach to interoperability challenges, using standards-based formats to enhance information sharing between sets of services, providing platform-independent Web services that clearly separate data from the user interface, and integrating services at the presentation level using their customizable Web portal. Within this portal, services are provided as mini-applications or “widgets”, linked using simple drag-and-drop operations. The portal can be customized to suit specific communities, individuals or tasks.
The PALETTE project also provided a set of support services that add value to this integrated environment: the ability to manage end user identities and provide transparent access, to search for content across service boundaries, to reuse or advertise content to the outside world, to embed subsets of other services into a single service (such as the portal) and finally, to trace the presence of users and hence build a group memory. Further, since data access and business logic have been decoupled, associated services are reusable and scalable, thus easing the introduction of new services.
In summary, businesses or groups keen to optimise informal learning and development within CoPs can now benefit from the tools on offer through the PALETTE portal. Users are able to exchange information and meta-information, developers have a platform for the publication of services with search engines and browser applications, and community animators and end users are free to compose their environment via the customizable portal, all providing unparalleled and easy access to services that complement and enhance the CoP learning process. The PALETTE service users community will be accessible through the portal.
The PALETTE portal (and much of its support services) is available Open Source: http://palette.ercim.org