May 20, 2008

The Norwegian Ministry of Defence has established an Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Partnership Lab in Oslo, to develop ADL capabilities in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense. The signing ceremony was held at the recent annual Norwegian ADL Conference in Gol, Norway. Rear Admiral Louise Bastviken, Commanding Officer of the Norwegian Education Command, and Mr. Daniel Gardner, Director, Readiness and Training Policy and Programs, Office of the Secretary of Defense, were the principal signatories.

The intention is to foster collaboration on developing and delivering world-class technologies for education, training, and research. The ADL CO-Laboratory system structure fosters the collaborative development of common tools, standards, content, and guidelines for ADL. The relationship will allow collaboration on activities and projects of mutual interest. Early projects will likely involve harmonizing the S1000D technical publication standard into the ADL framework and initializing a Norwegian implementation of the Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration Architecture (CORDRA). The latter project will be patterned after the U.S. instance of CORDRA, termed the ADL-Registry.

Commander Hans Peder Mogensen, head of the Norwegian Defence ADL Section, serves as the Norwegian point of contact, and Dr. Robert Wisher, director of the ADL Initiative for the United States, serves as the U.S. point of contact.

The Norwegian ADL Partnership Lab is the sixth Partnership Lab to join the ADL Co-Laboratory network. Other partnership labs include the United Kingdom ADL Partnership Lab, Canadian ADL Partnership Lab, Australian ADL Partnership Lab, Korean ADL Partnership Lab, and Latin American and Caribbean Regions ADL Partnership Lab.