I went to the CETIS Education Content SIG meeting on Open Educational Resources in Milton Keynes at the end of February. I came away with two thoughts about OER and marketing: first about the role of the OER content in marketing courses, second about the need to market the concept of OER in UK HE.
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George Orwell is blogging, so is Samuel Pepys. And quite aside from the content (I’m an Orwell fan, the merits of this content was discussed when the blog was launched here, and here), I think this is brilliant way of putting diaries online as open content[1]. Delivery, at least, relies on software anyone can use for free[2]; you and I can get the text in a machine readable format, HTML and RSS; each entry gets a URI; the entries can be tagged and commented on; locations can be mapped on Google (Orwell, Pepys), other concepts mentioned linked to encyclopaedia entries; the blog owners could, at least in principle, export the whole lot in XML and stick it in a database to process, and anyone can process entries with text mining software or by setting up a Google custom search engine or . . . .
The two examples above are slightly short of perfect. I like to see the dates for the blog entries matching the dates for the diary entries (the Pepys diaries do this, Orwell managed it at first, but then slipped). And I think it would make more sense if the monthly archives were arranged to be read top-to-bottom in chronological order. Also I wonder if hosting on wordpress.com is the best idea. It has its attractions, but the tags in the Orwell blog link to posts from other blogs which are well out of scope while the Pepys diary has some very interesting customizations; also if the Orwell blog owners do ever find a way to go back to posting against the diary entry date I imagine they would have problems setting up redirects so that links to the current posts still work.
Notes:
1. I guess I should be clear: I’m not saying that these diaries are open content. The Pepys text is from Project Gutenberg, I don’t know the licensing arrangements for other aspects of the blog; Orwell’s text is still copyright in many countries (including the UK and the US), I don’t the licensing arrangements for the blog.
2. The Orwell diary is on WordPress.com; Pepys uses a customized installation of Moveable Type.
In a comment to a previous post of mine, Gayle reminded me of the point made by the ACETS project:
“Re-use is not in itself a good or bad thing and it should not be encouraged or discouraged as a matter of dogma. Rather it should be nurtured and supported where it can provide benefits and not where it will not.â€
So the question we should ask is: when will re-use provide benefits? Here are some links to recent and ongoing work relating to the benefits of sharing, reuse and open content.
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I’ve just been talking to colleagues about sharing learning resources and I suggested that we could try to describe what attributes make a resource more easily shared. I’ve been using the set listed below in discussions relating to several projects I’ve been involved with over the last two or three years, but I don’t think I’ve ever put them down clearly on their own rather than embedded in some presentation on a specific project. Mostly they were first suggested by Charles Duncan at the 2005 Eduserv Symposium, but the first two are my own addition (Charles probably thought them to obvious to mention).
So here for clarity and ease of reference (but certainly not novelty) are six attributes of a resource which I suggest will make it more likely to be shared:
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I’ve been known to make a fair amount of use of computer based concept and mind mapping tools to help me organize information or get my head around a tricky problem (I find linear thinking difficult). So I was pleased to be reminded of VUE, the Visual Understanding Environment from Tufts University, by an email announcing the official release of VUE 2. I remember VUE from a few years back as a way of creating a sort of concept map user interface for repositories. VUE 2 has that, with interfaces to fedora, Flickr, JSTOR, Wikipedia, but the real emphasis is rightly on its potential as an Understanding Environment: “VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.” New in version 2 is support for predefined ontologies, the website says “VUE also provide tools to apply semantic meaning to the maps, by way of ontologies and metadata schemas.” So I guess VUE is also very relevant to the discussions we have been having at CETIS since the semantic technologies for teaching and learning session at last November’s conference.
Update: one of the outcomes of some the discussions I mention above has just been released, a JISC ITT for a study on the potential of semantic technologies for learning and teaching.
