Notes from the web: Making Standards that Work and a Sordid History of Learning Object Repositories

November 5, 2009

A few quick items of interest form the web this week. Two offer a perspective of the process of making standards (looking at OAI-PMH); another is an interview with Brian Lamb reviewing the history of Learning Object Repositories.
Talking to DC [Washington] (Adam Bosworth, Adam Bosworth’s Weblog)
In a post based on his experiences with standards development, [...]

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Notes from the web: Proposed NSF Repository, and Open Textbook act

October 7, 2009

Just a few quick points of interest from the web about developments in the US which are worth noting:
A new subject repository and OA mandate?
“In addition to the $20 million grant announced today, the Libraries received a $300,000 grant from NSF to study the feasibility of developing, operating and sustaining an open access repository of [...]

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Open Education: project or process and practice?

September 9, 2009

I’m new enough to the Open Education world that I can’t tell how unusual the closure of Utah State’s OpenCourseWare initiative is (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Utah-State-Us-OpenCourseWare/7913/ and http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/967). It’s probably the largest OCW initiative in the US after MIT and in a summary of its successes earlier this year the  Utah State University online news noted that it [...]

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Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 3)

September 2, 2009

The first two parts of this foray into metadata requirements for Open Educational Resources examined: 1) how the required information for the UKOER programme compared with the requirements for the Jorum deposit tool and the DiscoverEd aggegator 2) how the UKOER requirements compared to the information projects thought would be necessary for particular activities (find, [...]

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Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 2)

August 31, 2009

In Comparing metadata requirements (part 1) I examined the required and suggested metadata for Open Educational Resources in the UKOER programme, for the Jorum deposit tool, and the DiscoverEd aggregator. In this second part of the comparison I’m going to try to capture some of our initial discussions fom the UKOER programme session about metadata [...]

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Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 1)

August 26, 2009

In our elluminate session on metadata and aggregation for Open Educational Resources, Phil and I spent some time  gettting everyone to think through the information required to interact with an educational resource in certain ways  (such as: (re-)use, cite, find, identify, manage). this produced a lot of responses prioiritizing different bits of information that are [...]

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Open Educational Resources, metadata, and self-description

December 8, 2008

If we share learning materials, do we have a professional responsibility to describe them?
At the CETIS conference Open Educational Resources / Content session in the midst of the discussions about metadata someone, I think John Casey, made an offhand comment about embedded metadata. As valuable as his next statement was, it was the notion of [...]

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Metadata in an Ecosystem of Presentation Dissemination

September 25, 2008

Metadata in an Ecosystem of Presentation Dissemination - R. John Robertson, Phil Barker, Mahendra Mahey
How and how why do academics disseminate their presentations? How does this relate to their other forms of dissemination? What academic and organisational influences affect their dissemination? What influences their choice of tool? What metadata is created about the various things [...]

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Give me all your bookmarks…

June 20, 2008

or Adventures with Firefox 3, Del.icio.us toolbars, and Wordle
I’ve been using del.icio.us for a while for work and find it a really good way to keep track of stuff. Although to be honest I find it most useful as an ability to keep track of other people’s stuff. I spend a few minutes each morning [...]

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