Two members of Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) team, namely Giannis Stoitsis and Stavros Gkinis, participated in the “Green Hackathon” event that took place in Stockholm. The goal of the event was to highlight the potentials of the “Open Data”-principles, which make it easier to access “environmental facts”, and which are an important part of decisions with a focus on sustainability in our society.

During the hack day the GRNET team developed a showcase to demonstrate how green educational resources of existing learning federations can be used for the development of online pathways that can interconnect the school curriculum with the Natural History Museum’s collections. In the context of Natural Europe project a pathway authoring tool based on OMEKA platform is developed. This pathway authoring tool allows museum educators to develop innovative online educational pathways using cultural and learning resources.

During the hack the GRNET team developed a module for OMEKA platform that allows the ingestion of environmental learning resources to the OMEKA repository and use of these resources in the generation of online educational pathways. To this end the GRNET team used the Solr-based search API of the Organic.Edunet SCAM system provided by MetaSolutions that allow search of resources in Organic.Edunet learning federation.

The demostrated use case was:

a) to search for environmental learning resources in Organic.Edunet federation suitable for the development of educational pathways on the topic of sustainability & resource conservation,

b) to annotate the ingested learning resources using the Natural Europe metadata Application Profile (AP)

c) to add these resources as supporting material in an environmental educational pathway. This included searching metadata using the SCAM Solr-based search API, mapping them to the Natural Europe metadata AP and adding educational metadata using the pathway authoring tool interface.

The GRNET team presented the whole procedure for an existing educational pathway about Renewable Energy Sources that was developed in the frame of Natural Europe project.

The demo installation and the outcome of this session can be found here

http://education.natural-europe.eu/green/admin/users/login

(user: greendemo, pwd: greendemo)