Open Educational Resources e-Infrastructure Update : Information Environment Team. Back in 2008 I helped define the technical requirements for the UK OER Programme . We were very keen to have as minimal technical requirements as possible so that we can find out what choices people make, for example, decisions about their metadata, and we wanted to see how people use different platforms, as individuals and within teams. As we described in the last IE blogpost on OER (May 2010) the non-prescriptive approach has allowed us to monitor organic emerging trends. For example, the Key Lessons of the evaluation and synthesis report states: “There is a clear model emerging of resources being deposited in a local repository (institutional or subject centre) where trust and community engagement can be built, then surfaced through syndication to general open repositories such as JorumOpen, Merlot, and to third-party sites such as iTunesU, YouTube, flickr, scribd, slideshare” There’s a lot to absorb from the OER Programme Phase 1, and more to explore.
Amber Comments. OER: Metadata Now : Information Environment Team. At the JISCCETIS08 conference session on Open Educational Content/Resources (OEC/OER), we had a really useful discussion about what “minimal tagging” might mean in terms of OEC today. It was part of my presentation on technical infrastructure for the JISC/HEA OEC Programme. By infrastructure, I think I mean Paul Walk’s soft definition of infrastructure The discussion made me reflect on all the assumptions that surrounds the term “metadata”, and the history that got us to where we are now, primarily around digital learning materials. For the purposes of description, let’s abstract workflows down to two: creation to curation (authors), and discovery to delivery (finders).
Metadata standardisation has always been about supporting the flow of content between people and systems, both for C2C and D2D. We’ve always known that if information about content is useful (and used) we should expect to find it somewhere in the workflow already. And thats where we always hoped to get to, isn’t it? One to Many; Many to One: The resource discovery taskforce vision.
Jorum Explaining RSS News Feeds. Xpert labs. Xpert contains metadata and resources for almost 150,000 learning objects from over 8000 providers. This data is not only of benefit when running the xpert system, but also to other users and service providers. As part of the "Open Nottingham" strategy (a combination of the Xpert, Xpert Media Search and Attribution, BERLiN, U-Now, Xerte, iTunesU, Youtube EDU and Second Life) we have devised, the Xpert Team have taken steps to start to provide data and services to other repositories and interested parties. Some of the services we have developed are listed below. We are keen to liaise with people regarding how they would like to use Xpert and what data / services they would find useful. If you do use any of these services, we'd like it if you could give us credit for it or provide a link to Xpert :) New tools - searching and wordpress We've finished off 1 new search tool, which is a bit like one of the earlier ones but with added dimensions!
You can do this with a cunning bit of javascript. Jorum Home page. Scoping_Study_One-page_Summary.pdf (application/pdf Object)