TALIESIN

You have come into the ePLANETe platform Through the TALISIEN Doorway.  Here you will learn about ePLANETe as a place of discovery and learning.  You will discover how to make use of the various opportunities to exploit ePLANETe tools and functionalities in activities of knowledge mediation, of creation and use of knowledge resources, and of collaborative learning.  The tools have a generic potentiality.  In the context of ePLANETe itself, they are exploited to address the complex and incessant challenge of "Building Knowledge Partnerships for Sustainability".

Taliesin is the name of a Celtic historical and mythic figure, celebrated poet, druid and bard.
See:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliesin (in English), and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliesin (in French)

The knowledge mediation activities supported by the ePLANETe platform fall into two broad categories.  

• On the one hand, there are activities of deliberation support which include (but are not limited to) the engagement of stakeholders in exercises of multi-criteria multi-actor deliberative evaluation.  These evaluation exercises can address a wide variety of situations.  In the context of territorial development, often there is a comparative evaluation of alternative technologies, alternative sites, alternative policy scenarios, and so on.  
• On the other hand, there are collaborative activities of a pedagogic character, that is, teaching and learning.  There are the domains of activity that are most immediately accessed through TALISIEN.

The ePLANETe is organised as a set of Galleries which present collections of digital objects.  Each gallery, like a room in a house or in a museum, provides for a set of functions.  In simple terms, these functions are (i) the creation of digital "objects" of a type or types corresponding to the gallery; (ii) the mobilisation or exploitation of such "objects" in knowledge mediation activities; and (iii) the communication of the results of the preceding activities to interested user-communities.  Galleries accessed directly through The TALIESIN Doorway are organised in several distinct Thematic Spaces, as follows :

• The KerBabel Learning Resource Centre, whose core gallery is the Forest of Brocéliande with a rich array of on-line teaching resources organised in modules on a thematic basis.
• The thematic space of Teaching Programmes & Activities, whose core gallery is Yggdrasil (The World Tree), a catalogue of educational programmes (ranging from university degree programmes to life-long learning opportunities) offered by individuals and institutions active in the ePLANETe User Communities.
• The thematic space for KQA (Knowledge Quality Assessment) whose core gallery Knowledge Hot Topics proposes specialised tools for the representation and analysis of knowledge claims and controversies around societal hot topics.

You are also invited, coming in through the TALISIEN Doorway, to access to several of the KerBabel "service" galleries.  These include, notably, the KerBabel Knowledge Warehouse which gives access to:

• The transversal Babel Gardens meta-information system for digital management of documents, videos, website profiles, images and other media objects which are mobilised or held available as "supplementary resources" for the platform's different knowledge mediation and deliberation support activities;
• The Cabinet of Curiosities, a gallery of objects called "Well-Springs", which organises the interfacing with external sources of information and data;
• The Toolkit gallery of key concepts, methods and analysis tools, which has a support role for several uses of the KerBabel Deliberation Support Tools.

Each Gallery of ePLANETe is unique, in the sense that it provides for the creation and exploitation of specific Types of digital objects that have no exact equivalent elsewhere in the system.  For example, in the Brocéliande Forest gallery, it is possible to create "Grains" which are short blocks of content intended to be used in a teaching/learning process.  These "Grains" are grouped thematically within "Modules", and can be compiled into composite objects called "Pathways" which are exploited as sequences for a learning process.

Of course, the two broad domains of knowledge mediation mentioned above are not completely separate.  Evaluation exercises can be components of collaborative learning processes in a variety of ways ; and various forms of apprenticeship are necessary for intelligent participation in evaluation and deliberation processes.  This is why, when you come in Through the TALISIEN Doorway, you are offered, directly and indirectly, learning opportunities about every feature of ePLANETe.  The organisation of these learning opportunities can be understood in two complementary ways.

• First, the ePLANETe system presents and documents itself in a number of reflexive ways.  These mechanisms of self-documentation are pedagogic tools in themselves.  As set out in the Thematic Space named "PANORAMIX" accessed through the KerBabel Doorway, these tools provide an overview of the functional character of each gallery of ePLANETe, and an introduction to their typical uses and, more particularly, to the ways that different galleries and functions are inter-linked.  

• Second, the TALISIEN Doorway functions itself (like each of the 6 Doorways of The Public ePLANETe) as a gateway for the progressive discovery of the whole system.  In the conventions of ePLANETe, an accredited user entering Through the TALISIEN Doorway is accessing a SMMAAD.    

Recall that "SMMAAD" is an acronym in French for "System Multi-Média d'Apprentissage et d'Aide à la Délibération".  The term is used to refer to any distinct deployment of ePLANETe for the creation of a “gateway” or "portal" that is exploited autonomously in a collaborative activity by a reference User Community.  In the present case, we identify a community made up of all users whose primary preoccupation is the exploitation of the collaborative learning functionalities offered by ePLANETe - including learning about ePLANETe itself - which for simplicity we refer to as "The TALISIEN Community". 

An accredited user entering the SMMAAD "Through the TALISIEN Doorway", is offered the opportunity of navigating along specific pathways permitting the progressive discovery of every gallery in ePLANETe, with examples of their Object types, their creation and typical uses.    

In technical terms, the key steps for the design of a SMMAAD are: (1) identification of the roles/uses of each gallery; (2) specification of the key interfaces between pairs of galleries; and (3) presentation of the types of activity with these galleries envisaged for members of the User Community.  Each type of activity will be characterised by a workflow, with an associated learning pathway.  

The overall pedagogic ambition for users entering "Through the TALISIEN Doorway" is thus formalised by setting out the corresponding set of workflows, with their navigation and discovery opportunities, as a composite object within the gallery Les SMMAAD.