Why WordPress?
First, what were we trying to achieve? The overall aims were to make sure that our publications had good exposure online, to have a more coherent approach to managing them (for example to collect all the files into one place in case we ever need to migrate them), and to move away from the bespoke system we were using to a system that someone else maintains. There were a few other requirements, we wanted something that was easy for us to adapt to fit the look and feel of the rest of our website, that was easy to maintain (familiarity is an important factor in how easy something is–it’s easy to use something if you know how to use it), and we wanted something that would present our publications in HTML and RSS sliced and diced by topic, author, and publication type: a URL for each publication and for each type of publication and feeds for everything. We’re not talking about a huge number of publications, maybe 100 or so, so we didn’t want a huge amount of up-front effort.

We thought about Open Journal Systems, but there seemed to be a whole load of workflow stuff that was relevant to Journals but not our publications. Likewise we thought about ePrints and Dspace, but they didn’t quite look like we wanted, and we are far more familiar with WordPress. As a wildly successful open source project, WordPress also fits the requirement of being maintained by other people, not just the core programme, but all those lovely plugins and themes. So the basic plan was to represent each publication in a WordPress post and to use a suitable theme and plugins to present them as we wanted.

The choice of theme
Having settled on WordPress the first decision was which theme to use. In order to get the look and feel to be similar to the rest of the CETIS website (and, to be honest, to make sure our publications pages didn’t look like a blog) we needed a very flexible theme. The most flexible theme I know of is Atahualpa, with over 200 options, including custom CSS snippets, parameters and HTML snippets it’s close to being a template for producing you own custom themes. So, for example, the theme options I have set include a byline of By %meta('By')%. %date('F Y')% which automatically inserts the additional metadata field ‘By’ and the date in the format of my choice, all of which can be styled any way I want. I’ll come back to the “byline” metadata later.

One observation here: there is clearly a trade-off between this level of customisation and ease of maintenance. On the one hand these are options set within the Atahualpa theme that can be saved between theme upgrades, which is better than would have been the case had we decided to fork the theme or add a few lines of custom code to the theme’s PHP files. On the other hand, it is not always immediately obvious which setting in the several pages of Atahualpa theme options has been used to change some aspect of the site’s appearance.

A post for each publication
As I mentioned above we can represent each publication by creating a WordPress post, but what information do we want to provide about each publication and how does it fit into a WordPress post? Starting with the simple stuff:

• Title of the publication -> title of WordPress post.
• Abstract / summary -> body of post.
• Publication file -> uploaded as attached media.
• Type of publication -> category.
• Topic of publication -> tag.

Slightly less simple:

• The date of the publication is represented as the date of the post. This is possible because WordPress lets you choose when to publish post. The default is for posts to be published immediately when you press the Publish button, however you can edit this to have them published in the past
  
  

  WordPress publication date option

• The author of the publication becomes the author of the post, but there are some complications. It’s simple enough when the publication has a single author who works for CETIS, I just added everyone as an “author” user of WordPress and a WordPress admin user can attribute any given post to the author of the publication it represents. Where there are two or more authors a nifty little plugin called Co-Authors Plus allows them all to be assigned to the post. But we have some publications that we have commissioned from external authors, so I created an user called “Other” for these “external to CETIS” authors. This saves having a great long list of authors to maintain and present, but creates a problem of how to attribute these external authors, a problem that was solved using WordPress’s “additional metadata” feature to enter a “by-line” for all posts. This also provides a nicely formatted by-line for multi-author papers with out worrying about how to add PHP to put in commas and “and”s.
• The only other additional metadata added was an identifier for each publication, e.g. the latest QTI briefing paper is No. 2011:B02.

Presenting it all
As well as customisation for the look and feel, the Atahualpa theme allows for menus and widgets to added to the user interface. Atahualpa has an option to insert a menu into the page header which we used for the links to the other parts of the CETIS website. On the left hand side bar we’ve used the custom menu widget to list the tags and categories to provide access to the publications divided by topic and publication type as HTML and as a feed (just add /feed to the end of the URL). Also on the left, the List Authors plugin gives us links to publications by author.

In order to provide a preview of the publication in the post I used the TGN embed everything plugin. The only problem is that the “preview” is too good: it’s readable but not the highest quality, so it might lead some people to think that we’re disseminating low quality versions of the papers, whereas we do include links to high quality downloadable files.

The built-in WordPress search is rubbish. For example, it doesn’t include the author field in the search (not that the first thing we tested was vanity searching), and the results returned are sorted by date not relevance. Happily the relevanssi plugin provides all the search we need.

Finally a few tweaks. We chose URL patterns that avoid unnecessary cruft, and closed comments to avoid spam. We installed the Google analytics plugin, so we know what you’re doing on our site, and the login lock plugin for a bit of security. The only customisation that we want that couldn’t be done with a theme option or plugin was providing some context to the multi-post pages. These are pages like the list of all the publications, or all the briefing papers, and we wanted a heading and some text to explain what that particular cut of our collection was. Some themes do this by default, based on information entered about the tag/catergory/author on which the cut is made, but not Atahualpa. I put a few lines of PHP into the theme’s index.php template to deal with publication types, but we’ve yet to do it properly for all possible multipost pages.

And in the end…
As I said at the top, we’re happy with this approach; if you have any comment on it, do please leave them below.

One last thing. Using a popular platform like WordPress means that there is a lot of support, and I don’t just mean a well supported code base and directory of plugins and themes. One of the most useful sources of support has been the WordPress community, especially the local group of WPUK, at whose meet-ups I get burritos and advice on themes, plugins, security and all things wordpressy.

Maybe it’s a sign of age, but the changes in approaches to supporting the sharing of content is something that has been interesting me more and more of late. Nearly two years ago Lorna, John and I produced a paper for the ADL Repositories and Registries Summit called Then and Now which highlighted changes in technical approaches to JISC programmes that CETIS had helped support between 2002 and 2010. The desire to share resources had always been there, the change was from a focus on tight technical specifications to one which put openness at the centre. This wasn’t done for any ideological reason, but because we had an aim, “share stuff”, and the open approach seemed the one that presents fewest obstacles. I tried to describe the advantages of the open approach in An open and closed case for educational resources.

The timeline helps me understand why we are doing OER rather than some other means of solving the problem of how to share content, but that is just one aspect. What I really like about the open approach is that it creates new possibilities as well as solving old problems. So as well as a timeline of solutions what we should have is a timeline that shows what we are trying to do, one which shows the changing aims as well as the changing solutions, and that I think would show a trend to Open Education.

Simon and I organised a session “Are open badges the future for recognition of skills?” for the CETIS conference last week, with more than a little help from Doug Belshaw. As described in more detail on the session’s wiki page, the programme was simple: presentations from Doug and Simon followed by discussion structured around a SWOT analysis for the use of badges in two scenarios.

Doug’s conference blog has his slides, audio recording and his own reflections. One of the highlights for me was almost incidental to badges: I hadn’t come across the idea of “stealth assessment” before. Simply put, stealth assessment involves monitoring what people achieve and then telling them what it qualifies them for. So a young child might be told that they have just swum 10m and now qualify for an achievement badge (kinder than putting children through the stress of pre-arranged assessments).

If Doug’s presentation was about “why?” Simon’s was about “how?”. His presented some requirements for badge systems, which also considers how close the Mozilla open badge framework comes to fulfilling these requirements.

The second half of the session was spent in group discussion structured around a SWOT analysis of two scenarios outlined by the groups:

Scenario 1, formative assessment in a high stakes field (medical education)

Strengths:

• Assessment can be continuous, accreditation expires if not renewed.
• Badges are machine processable as well as human readable.
• Cumulative, can show progress being made towards degree

Weaknesses:

• New, and therefore not trusted

Opportunities:

• Works well with highly competitive students (e.g. medics)
• Could be transferred between institutions

Threats:

• Perception of being trivial
• Unwelcome addition to current systems

Scenario 2, within a community of practice

Strengths:

• Recognition by community of practice
• Transferability to other communities

Weaknesses:

• Lack of context (range, scope etc.)
• People unwilling to dig into detail provided
• Unclear governance
• Proliferation

Opportunities:

• Currency outside the community
• Could include qualifications
• Branding opportunities
• Invitation to examine evidence in detail

Threats

• Over simplification
• Brand recognition dominates quality
• Issued by inappropriate bodies

There was a lot of discussion, and I can’t really do it justice here; I shall mention only a couple of comments. First one reported on Doug’s blog:

“We’re sick to death of hearing that X, Y or Z is going to change the world. Accept that it isn’t and move on.”

Hmm, yes, that may be a fair point. OTOH sometimes something does change the world, or at least parts of it, and it is important to keep a watch for the things that might, so I’ve no regrets about being involved in this session on that count.

The other comment came in the form of of tweets from Lawrie Phipps:

Sentiments that I have some sympathy with, however it has happened that you think you have solved a problem locally only for some external solution to come along and get adopted widely enough to be significant. So, while we don’t have an answer to the question we posed in the session title, I think open badges are looking relevant enough for it to be important that CETIS keep a watching brief on them.

So, I went to YouTube and searched for UKOER, and this was the top hit. Well, it’s a lesson in tagging I suppose. I don’t think it invalidates the approach, we never expected 100% fidelity and this seems to be a one-off among the first 100 or so of the 500+ results. And it’s great to see results from Chemistry.FM and CoreMaterials topping 10,000 views.

The potential of text and data mining is probably well understood in technical circles, and were well articulated by JohnMcNaught of NaCTeM. Briefly the potential lies in the extraction of new knowledge from old through the ability to surface implicit knowledge and show semantic relationships. This is something that could not be done by humans, not even crowds, because of volume of information involved. Full text access is crucial, John cited a finding that only 7% of the subject information extracted from research papers was mentioned in the abstract. There was a strong emphasis, from for example Jeff Lynn of the Coalition for a digital economy and Philip Ditchfield of GSK, on the need for business and enterprise to be able to realise this potential if it were to remain competetive.

While these speakers touched on the legal barriers it was Naomi Korn who gave them a full airing. They start in the process of publishing (or before) when publishers acquire copyright, or a licence to publish with enough restriction to be equivalent. The problem is that the first step of text mining is to make a copy of the work in a suitable format. Even for works licensed under the most liberal open access licence academic authors are likely to use, CC-by, this requires attribution. Naomi spoke of attribution stacking, a problem John had mentioned when a result is found by mining 1000s of papers: do you have to attribute all of them? This sort of problem occurs at every step of the text mining process. In UK law there are no copyright exceptions that can apply: it is not covered by fair dealling (though it is covered by fair use in the US and similar exceptions in Norwegian and Japanese law, nowhere else); the exceptions for transient copies (such as in a computers memory when readng on line) only apply if that copy has not intrinsic value.

The Hargreaves report seeks to redress this situation. Copyright and other IP law is meant to promote innovation not stifle it, and copyright is meant to cover creative expressions, not the sort of raw factual information that data mining processes. Ben White of the British Library suggested an extension of fair dealling to permit data mining of legally obtained publications. The important thing is that, as parliament acts on the Hargreaves review people who understand text mining and care about legal issues make sure that any legislation is sufficient to allow innovation, otherwise innovators will have to move to those jurisdictions like the US, Japan and Norway where the legal barriers are lower (I’ll call them ‘text havens’).

Thanks to JISC and the SCA on organising this event; there’s obviously plenty more for them to do.

An interesting take on the scope of the project that someone (I forget who) raised during the meeting concerns working within the constraints of the search engine interface and results page. Yes, Google, Bing and Yahoo have advanced search interfaces that allow check-box selection of conditions such as licence requirements, they also provide and support for specialist search e.g. Google Scholar and custom search engines; however real success will come if the information that can be marked up as a result of LRMI is effective for people using the default search engine. What this means is that the actions that result from a use case or scenario should be condensed down to a few key words typed into a search box,

Bing search box

Bing search result

That’s quite useful in terms of focussing on what is really important, but of course it won’t meet everyone’s ambitions for learning resource metadata. The question this raises is to what extent should the schema.org vocabulary attempt to meet these requirements? That, I think, is still an open question, but I am sure that embedded metadata markup such as schema.org has limitations and external metadata such as is provided by the IEEE LOM, Dublin Core and ISO MLR is a complemetary approach that may be necessary in meeting some of the more extensive use cases for learning resource metadata. Indeed, one requirement of LRMI which was raised during the meeting is to provide a means of linking to external metadata. One more observation on this line: at least from the basis of this meeting, it seems that the penetration of standards for educational metadata into the commercial educational publishing world (both online and more conventional) is not great.

A final issue concerning the scope of LRMI, and schema.org more generally, with respect to the use of other approaches to handling metadata is relevant to the idea of linking to external metadata, but is better illustrated by the issue of how to convey licence information. At the moment there is no schema.org term for indicating licence terms, however there is a perfectly good approach advocated by Creative Commons and recognised by Google and many other search and content providers (i.e. a link or anchor with attributes rel=”license” href=”licenceURL” optionally spanning a textual description of the licence–no prizes for guessing how I think this could be extended to links to external metadata). Is it helpful to reproduce this in schema.org? On the one hand, one of the aims of schema.org is to offer web masters a unified approach and a single coherent set of recommendations for embedding metadata; on the other hand this approach seems to be in accord with HTML in general and is aready widespread, so perhaps any clarification or coherence in terms of the schema.org offering would be at the expense of muddying and fragmentation of practice with respect to how to embed licence information in HTML more generally.

“As any discussion about metadata grows longer the probability of a comparison to Google approaches one.”

Of course the comparison is usually that formal metadata is insignificant for the resource discovery needs of most people when compared to Google.

On one hand this is an over simplification: metadata is important for resource management in general not just for resource discovery, the information contained in metadata can be exposed to Google and other search engines, and it helps resource discovery in other ways, for example in displaying relationships between resources that can be browsed and crawled. It remains, however, true that all the effort that has gone into formalising and standardising metadata schema has had little, if any, direct effect on how people find resources through the search engine of their choice. So it’s interesting that the big search engines are now taking an interest in metadata markup of web pages, first with Google’s rich snippets, and now the more extensive (in a number of ways) schema.org initiative. I guess that this approach (that is, marking up the human readable infomation on a web page to show its relationship to a formal metadata schema as opposed to holding it seperately in a purely machine readable format) appeals to search engines because of their suspicion that any information not visible to the reader of a page (e.g. metadata elements in the HTML head element) might be there purely to spam search engine results.

Of course, my interest through CETIS is in educational metadata, and I have already dabbled in using rich snippets to mark-up a description of an educational resource. So I was extremely interested to hear about the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative headed up by Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers, aiming to apply the schema.org approach to educational resources (schema.org initially, with an RDFa expression planned as a secondary output derived from it). I was extremely pleased to be accepted on to the technical working group to help draw up the details. Tomorrow is the first face to face meeting of that technical group, which is why I writing this on a plane on the way to San Fransisco.

While this will be the first face to face meeting, the technical group has made a start on its work. The previous work in educational metadata has been surveyed; use cases for lrmi have been collected, including those which were submitted for the Dublin Core Education Application Profile; and we’ve had a couple of teleconference meetings. It’s early days, so a lot is still open, but this much I can say (but I say it as an individual, I’m not claiming to be reporting any consensus of the working group). The scope of lrmi is resource discovery, and for me it stands or falls on whether it helps discovery through search engines. With respect to this there does already seem to be some uncertainty (generally) over how search engines will use schema.org and how the governance of the main schema.org vocabulary allows for community-driven additions and usage profiles (there is an upcoming schema.org meeting that might help clarify this). However, I guess that in the end it will come down to Google and others using what they find useful and ignoring what that don’t: which isn’t a bad way of establishing an industry standard in this field (I see parallels with browser developers and HTML5). The use cases gathered include the usual discovery issues, so far I haven’t seen anything unexpected, so hopefully the lrmi output will align with other efforts to meet those same scenarios. There is one slight coda to that though, there is a lot of interest in expressing the usefulness of a resource for specific learning objectives as set out in standard curricula. This is largely with respect to showing the alignment of a resource with US state standard curricula, and the US national core K-12 curriculum. I know very little about the US standard curriculum/a, but I do think it is important that (and believe it would be useful) any approach adopted by lrmi to showing this alignment should be usable more generally for, e.g., the English National Curriculum and possibly for wider competency frameworks as used in UK HE for some disciplines (e.g. medecine, Scottish law, engineering). I should stress that, while the level of interest in this is noteworthy, showing such alignments isn’t new: it’s achievable with the LOM (classification with purpose set to learning objective), Dublin Core has had the conformsTo term for showing alignment to an educational standard for a number of years, and it has been discussed for the conceptual model for ISO MLR part 5.

I’ll report more when I am home from the meeting and will, of course, be happy to feed forward any comments you have, but to be kept up to date on all developments and to have a more direct say join the LRMI discussion group.

When a user cuts and pastes text from a CaPRéT-enabled site:

• The user gets the text as originally cut, and if their application supports the pasted text will also automatically include attribution and licensing information.
• The OER site can also track what text was cut, allowing them to better understand how users are using their site.

I tested Caprét on a single page, my institutional home page and on this blog. To enable Caprét for material on a website you need to include links to four javascript files in your webpages. I went with the files hosted on the Caprét site so all I had to do was put this into my homepage’s <head> (The testing on my home page is easier to describe, since the options for WordPress will depend on the theme you have installed.)


<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://capret.mitoeit.org/js/jquery.plugin.clipboard.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://capret.mitoeit.org/js/oer_license_parser.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://capret.mitoeit.org/js/capret.js" type="text/javascript"></script>


Then you need to put the relevant information, properly marked up into the webpage. Currently caprét cites the Title, source URL, Author, and Licence URI of the page from which the text was copied. The easiest way to get this information into your page is to use a platform which generates it automatically, e.g. WordPress or Drupal with the OpenAttribute plug-in installed. The next easiest way is to fill out the form at the Creative Commons License generator. Be sure to supply the additional information if you use that form.

If you’re into manual, this is what does the work:

Title, is picked up from any text marked as
<span xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type"><span> or, if that’s not found, the page <title> in the <head>

Source URL comes from page url

Author name, is picked up from contents of <a xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/contact/philb" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL"></a> (actually, the author attribution URL in the href attribute isn’t currently used, so this could just as well be a span)

Licence URI, is picked up from the href attribute of <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">

You might want to suggest other things that could be in the attribution/citation.

Reflections
As far as attribution goes it seems to work. Copy something from my home page or this blog and paste it elsewhere and the attribution information should magically appear. What’s also there is an embedded tracking gif, but I haven’t tested whether that is working.

What I like about this approach is that it converts self-description into embedded metadata. Self description is practice of including within a resource that information which is important for describing it: the title, author, date etc. Putting this information into the resource isn’t rocket science, it’s just good practice. To convert this information into metadata it needs to be encoded in such a way that a machine can read it. That’s where the RDFa comes in. What I like about RDFa (and microformats and microdata) as a way of publishing metadata is that it builds the actual descriptions are the very same ones that it’s just good practice to include in the resource. Having them on view in the resource is likely to help with quality assurance, and, while the markup is fiddly (and best dealt with by the content management system in use, not created by hand) creating the metadata should be no extra effort over what you should do anyway.

Caprét is being developed by MIT OEIT and Tatemae (OERGlue) as part of the JISC CETIS mini projects initiative; it builds on the browser plug-in developed independently by the OpenAttribute team.

[Aside: textbook rental might be an attractive idea for some, but pricing based on a typical rental of 30 days!?]

The OER I was hunting was an “Interactive timeline on Anglo-Dutch relations (50 BC to 1830)” from the UKOER Open Dutch project. It was recommended at a year or so ago as great output which pretty much anyone could see the utility of that used the MIT SIMILE timeline software to create a really engaging interface. I liked it, but more importantly for what I’m considering now I used it as an example when investigating whether putting resources into a repository enhanced their visibility on Google (in this case it did).

Well, that was a year+ ago. The other week I wanted to find it again. So I went to Google and searched for “anglo dutch timeline” (without the quotes). Sure enough, I got three results for the one I am looking for on the first page (of course, your results my vary; Google’s like that now-a-days). These were, from the bottom up:

1. A link to a record in the NDLR (the Irish National Digital Learning Resources Repository) which gave the link URL as http://open.jorum.ac.uk:80/xmlui/handle/123456789/517 (see below)
2. A link to a resource page in HumBox, which turned out to be a manifest-only content package (i.e. metadata in a zip file). Looking into it, there’s no resource location given in the metadata, and the pointer to the content (which should be the resource being described) actually points to the Open Dutch home page.
3. Finally, a link to a resource page in JORUM. This also describes the resource I was looking for but actually points to Open Dutch project page. The URL for Jorum page describing the resource is given as the persistent link–I believe that the NDLR harvests metadata from Jorum, so my guess is that that is why NDLR list this as the location of the resource.

Finding descriptions of a resource isn’t really helpful to many people. OK, I now know the full name and the author of the resource, which might help me track down the resource, but at this point I couldn’t. Furthermore, nobody wants to find a description of a resource that links to a description of the resource. I think one lesson concerns the importance of identifiers: “describe the thing you identify; identify the thing you describe.”

This story (and I very much suspect it is not an isolated case) has significance for debates about whether repositories should accept metadata-only “representations” of resources. Whether or not it is a good idea to deposit resources you are releasing as OERs in a third-party repository will depend on what you want to achieve by releasing them; whether or not it is a good idea for a repository to take and store resources from third parties will depend on what the repository’s sponsors wish to facilitate. Either way, someone needs to take some curatorial responsibility for the resource and for the metadata about it. That means on the one hand making sure that the resource stays on the web and on the other hand making sure that the metadata record continues to point to the right resource (automatic link checking for HTTP 404 responses etc. helps but, as this post on link rot notes, it’s not always that simple).

By the way, thanks to the incomparable David Kernohan, I now know that the timeline is currently at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/alternative-languages/OER/timeline/.