Now I’m no authority on tracking technologies but this reminded me of a very interesting article I read in the Guardian today How Belle de Jour’s secret ally Googlewhacked the press. This explains how a blogger known as Derren used some astute guesswork and a unique key combination of two terms associated nowhere else on the web to monitor whether anyone else was coming close to guessing the identity of the anonymous call girl Belle de Jour.

At the OER Technical Roundtable at last week’s CETIS Conference one of the actions participants prioritiesd was case studies and examples of different approaches to tracking. I’m not entirely sure that the above is the kind of case study the projects had in mind but it’s a pretty good real world example never the less! Just thought I’d mention it…..

Phil’s slides from the Elluminate session are available on Slideshare and no doubt there will be blog posts to follow.

The CETIS conference always strives to address current and cutting edge issues in the domain of education technology, however the OER Technical Roundtable session was arguably more timely than most given that it coincided with a Guardian article on open courseware and open educational resources: Any student, any subject, anywhere.

The session was attended by over thirty participants representing a wide range of projects and initiatives, all of whom brought a plethora of technical issues to the table. These issues were ably captured by my colleague R. John Robertson using some recalcitrant mind mapping software which he is still fighting with. John has already posted the raw list of issues on his blog and on Slideshare.

As expected the range of issues was considerable but the following broad themes did emerge:

• Tracking – metrics, Google analytics, statistics to support advocacy.
• Usability of repositories – deposit and the role of SWORD, discovery and use.
• Streaming large media files.
• Licensing and rights encoding.
• Resource description – metadata and JorumOpen, portability and interoperability, tagging, automatic metadata generation, identification of derivative works, SEO, Google discovery, how to users search for resources?
• Aggregators to manage distributed resources – metadata aggregation, resource aggregation, iTunes & iTunesU, OER broadcasting, batch upload, Flickr & Slideshare APIs.
• Granularity – disaggregation and reuse, content packaging, dependencies between resources.

Participants voted with their feet and broke into groups to discuss tracking, resource description, aggregators and granularity. We’ll try to synthesis the outputs of these breakout groups in later blog posts but in the meantime here’s a summary of the potential activities the groups identified that JISC and CETIS could take forward to benefit both the OER Programme and the community more generally:

• Develop an agreed RSS / Atom profile for open educational resources.
• Undertake research to analyse how teachers and learning actually search for educational resources. What terms do they search for and what metadata is actually necessary to facilite their searches? Synthesise data from projects, including Jorum and Steeple that are already gathering information about search terms, techniques and characteristics.
• Investigate how successful commercial systems such as Amazon and iTunes create and manage resource descriptions. What can we learn from them?
• Opening access to analytics and anonymised user data. Encourage the sharing of Google analytics data between projects.
• Set up shared Piwik or Google analytics accounts for each JISC programme.
• Share and synthesise good practice in resource tracking. Record and disseminate case studies.
• Identify requirements and minimum recommendations for resource tracking.
• Fund mini-projects on esoteric approaches to tracking.

We intend to discuss these recommendations with JISC in the not too distant future with a view to taking some of them forward. Hopefully we’ll be in a position to discuss progress in some if not all of these areas at #cetis10!

Issues we expect to turn up include:

• Metadata, resource description and tagging.
• Version control – Does it really matter? If so, what can be done about it?
• Tracking – What? How? Why?
• Working with different repositories.
• Aggregating and linking resources distributed across multiple services and applications.
• Using and managing feeds.
• Bulk upload.
• Encoding license information.

The Steeple Project have already raised some additional issues:

• Subject classification – mapping between proprietary subject classification codes and JACS.
• Approaches to describing “levels of difficulty” and “intended use”.
• Consistent CC license description in audio, video and feed metadata.

We want to know what works for you and what doesn’t? What technical problems have you banging your head on the desk in frustration? Or have you discovered an elegant technical solution to a thorny problem that you’re willing to share?

Members of JISC, CETIS and other community experts will be on hand to offer advice and explore potential solutions.

We would welcome more suggestions of issues you’ve encountered so please add your comments here and we’ll add these to the list of topics to discuss.

Conference tag #cetis09
Session tag #cetis09oer