Following on from last week’s CaPRéT OER Technical Mini Project update we now have a progress report from Paul Horner of the University of Newcastle’s OER Bookmarking mini project. The project, which builds on the Dynamic Learning Maps initiative aims to:

1. To develop a non-proprietary social bookmaking service to enhance resource discovery across the community. This will be designed specifically for OERs.
2. To provide an openly available and well documented API, enabling 3rd party systems to access and add to the resources and associated ‘paradata’.
3. To pilot the API and system in Dynamic Learning Maps. This will harvest resources for specific topics and add descriptors and links to these within personal and curriculum maps.

In a recent post to the oer-discuss jiscmail list Paul explained:

We’ve done quite a bit of development work so far – we’ve setup the Django project; we’ve modelled the database; we’ve written the create/read/update/delete scripts for bookmarks, playlists and tags; we’ve sorted out authentication (by OpenID, Twitter and Facebook); and we’ve put in place the mechanisms to add comments and rate bookmarks. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks we’ll have finished the main bookmarking tool, and then we’re going to start looking at the API. Our code is in a repository at Bitbucket, but it’s currently only available to our development team because it’s not really ready for public consumption (yet).

Paul also called for help in naming the system

The Bitbucket repository uses the imaginative name ‘oerbookmarking’, so any suggestions would be gratefully received!

You can find out more about more about “OER Bookmarking” and download a copy of the project plan from the website here.