Grid Enabled Collaborative Learning

From a pedagogical perspective the importance of collaborative facilities that support conversational processes has been identified as a generic requirement. From a technical perspective the notion of a service- oriented architecture (SOA) provides an attractive means of meeting that requirement. More generally a SOA holds out the possibility of dynamically composing learning environments from diverse, distributed, heterogeneous learning resources. The open grid services architecture (OGSA) provides a suitable basis for exploring the efficacy of this approach. This paper reports on work carried out in the European Learning Grid Infrastructure project´ to make two established learning facilities, Finesse and BuddySpace, OGSA compliant and interoperable.