[These posts should be regarded as drafts for comment until I remove this note]

In the UKOER 2 programme Strand C funded “Projects identifying, collecting and promoting collections of OER and other material around a common theme” with the aim “…to investigate how thematic and subject area presentation of OER material can make resources more discoverable by those working in these areas” (UKOER 2 call document). The projects had to create what were termed static and dynamic collections of OER. The intent of the static collection was that it could in some way act as an identity, focus, or seed for the dynamic collection. Six projects were funded: CSAP OER, Oerbital, DelOREs, Triton, EALCFO, Open Fieldwork and a range of approaches and technologies was taken to making both static and dynamic collections. The projects are all worth reading about in more detail – however, in this context there are two possible general patterns worth considering.

Technology

Overview of technical choices in UKOER 2 Strand C

The above graph shows the range of technology used in the Strand. Although a lot could (and should) be said about each project individually when their choices are viewed in aggregate the following technologies are seeing the widest use.

Graph of technologies and standards in us by 50% or more of Strand C projects

Although aspects of the call might have shaped the projects’ technical choices to some extent, a few things stand out:

• the focus on RSS/Atom feeds and tools to manipulate them
  • reflection: this matches the approach taken by many of the other  aggregators and discovery services  for OER and other learning materials as well as the built in capabilities of a number of the platforms in use [nb "syndicated via RSS/Atom" was a programme requirement]
• a relative lack of a use of OAI-PMH
  • reflection: is this indicative of how many content providers and aggregators in the learning material’s consume or output OAI-PMH?
• substantial use or investigation of wordpress and custom databases (with php frontends)
  • reflection: are repositories irrelevant here because they don’t offer easy ways to add plugins or aggregate others’ content (or are there other factors which make WordPress and a custom database more appealing)

Community

One of the critical issues for all of these projects in the creation of these collections has been the role of community; for some of the strand projects the subject community played a crucial role in developing the static collection which then fed, framed, or seeded the dynamic collection, for other projects the subject community formed the basis of contributing resources to the dynamic collection.

Although the projects had to be “closely aligned with relevant subject or thematic networks – for example Academy Subject Centres, professional bodies and national subject associations” , I find it striking that many of the projects made those defined communities an integral part of their discovery process and not just an audience or defining domain.

Reflections on community

I’m hoping someone else is able to explore the role of community in discovery services more fully (if not I’ll try to come back to this)  but I’ve been struck by the model used by some projects in which a community platform is the hook leading to resource discovery. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum to Google – to support discovery you create a place and content accessible and relevant to a specific subject domain. The place you create both hosts new content created by a specific community and serves as a starting point to point to further resources elsewhere (whether those pointers are links, learning pathways, or tweaked plugin searches run on aggregators or repositories). This pattern mirrors any number of thriving community sites (typically?) outside of academia that happily coexist in Google’s world providing specialist sources of information and community portals  (for example about knitting, cooking, boardgames).

What it doesn’t mirror is trying to entice academics to use a repository… [I like repositories and think they're very useful for some things , but this and the examples of layering CMSs on top of repositories, increasingly makes me think that on their own they aren't a great point of engagement for anybody...]

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I have previously “blogged” about, what I see as, often poorly informed and quite “Draconian” policies regarding internet usage within FE colleges including, for example the wholesale blocking of students’ internet access to social networking sites. It’s easy and too simplistic to suggest that this is resolved solely by increased knowledge amongst administrators, education, or by a more sophisticated understanding of ICT by those responsible for policy. There are major issues at the policy level, which Colleges are obliged to deal with.

There is some discussion as to what level of technical understanding should senior Management in institutions have. Lawrie Phipps, JISC programme Manager “blogged” about this very subject earlier this week. And he raises some important issues and questions.

What has prompted my current thinking on this situation are recent guidelines produced by Ofsted in structuring grades for College Assessment within the Leadership and Management effectiveness. Two of the criteria “Safeguarding” and “Equality and Diversity” are what are termed as Limiting grades; which in effect means should a college receive an “ineffective” grade on one of these criteria it is unlikely that overall effectiveness of the college would be assessed as anything but “inadequate” which in turn triggers a series of requirements of the college.

Whilst these two criteria are clearly extremely important the emphasis of college’s maybe, understandably, concentrated on these criteria. Quality of provision, which falls within the teaching, learning, and Assessment criteria, could be compromised. Whilst Ofsted recognizes the need to equip students with the skills necessary to navigate the digital space safely; the balance is precarious.

Clearly any college that blocks access to all sensitive sites and social networking sites is “effective” with its safeguarding policy but would, in my view, be quite inadequate with its teaching, Learning and assessment provision. The former however carries much greater weight.

I’m sure there is good practice in dealing with this in the FE sector but it does present a real challenge to senior Management

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Introductory Presentations

Vashti Zarach, XCRI Support Project: Introduction to the day (ppt)

Sarah Davis, JISC Programme Manager: Project Deliverables (ppt)

Short Presentations from the 6 Mini Projects

Chris Frost & John Hughes, University of Bolton: BoXCRIP (ppt)

Mark Stubbs, Manchester Metropolitan University: XCRI@MMU (ppt)

There is more info about XCRI@MMU at the JISC XCRI@MMU web page.

Trish Judson, MOVE: MOVE-XCRI (ppt)

Alan Paull, APS: OCCAM (Open University) (ppt)

Keith Lewis, University of Oxford: OXCRI (ppt)

There is more information about OXCRI at the JISC OXCRI web page and the Oxford University OXCRI website.

Peter Moss, Staffordshire University: StaffsXCRI (ppt)

There is more info about StaffsXCRI at the JISC StaffsXCRI web page.

Other Presentations

Ben Ryan, XCRI Support Project: XCRI Validator (ppt)

Scott Wilson & Vashti Zarach, XCRI Support Project: XCRI website (ppt)

Scott also demonstrated the XCRI Aggregator (website link)

The post Report from the XCRI Mini Projects Start Up Meeting, 30 March 2007 appeared first on Cetis Blogs - expert commentary on educational technology.

The post Some of the latest Enterprise SIG meeting presentations now online appeared first on Cetis Blogs - expert commentary on educational technology.

There will be a briefing day for those interested in submitting proposals in Birmingham on May 9th.

Details of the calls online.

There are a few project calls of possible interest to Enterprise SIG members, 2 in the April call:

1. The e-Learning Call for projects exploring cross institutional use of e-learning to support lifelong learners (“Regional and collaborative projects to pilot the use of e-learning to support lifelong learning, including the support of progression and workplace learning, and the provision of flexible delivery and personalised learning experiences.”)

2. The Cross Programme call for institutional exemplars (“Projects to develop exemplar technology and practice solutions to large-scale institutional problems in the areas of administration for teaching and learning and for digital repositories.”)

And 1 in the forthcoming July call:

1. The e_Learning call for Institutional Business Process Review (“Projects of up to a year in duration which will describe the administrative processes across an institution or consortium, whether manual or technology-enabled, which support key aspects of learning, teaching and student support.”)

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