The first presentations covered (not in this order):

• what the Jorum is and how it got here;
• what’s in the Jorum (covering both metadata and resources in seperate presentations);
• how to get into the Jorum (now through Shibbolith)–thankfully there’ll be less of that sort of stuff with Open Jorum.
• the move to Jorum Open, offering creative content licensing and open access in place of the current licensing and access regime (though more restrictive options will also be available as Jorum Plus for those who need it).
• the plans for a community bay (which has previously been described as a development bay—community bay is better): a place for discussion and knowledge sharing about technology and pedagogy related to the Jorum.

The second part of the day showcased from various initiatives and projects with a connexion to the Jorum

• Steve Smith, showing how audio-visual and Flash resources from the Jorum can be used in powerpoint to give an effect that is quite unlike death by powerpoint. He showed us how, with appropriate content already on hand, he could put together material for a lecture in 10 minutes.
• Sarah Darley of the Pocket project on taking content used in specific courses at various universities and rendering suitable for use in the Open University’s OpenLearn—her account of what they had to do and the issues they had to deal with, i.e. removing inappropriate local context, clearing copyright, breaking into small units, marking up with XML and dealling with accessibility issues, chime reasonably well with my own thoughts on what is necessary for “shareability”.
• Fleur Corfield of Staffordshire University on that institution’s experiences with sharing material with in an institution, a federation of colleges and wider. I found it interesting that she identified as benefits better handling of copyright issues and location of resources in a known place—both of which relate to resource management.
• Richard Goddard of MR CUTE demonstrated how it embedded search, access and upload of repository content (including IMS Content Packages and SCORM content) into the Moodle VLE, for more of that sort of stuff see here.
• Amber Thomas of JISC outlined the forthcoming HEFCE-funded JISC/HE Academy call for Open Educational Resources, you can read the authorised word on this in the Press Release.

There wasn’t enough time for discussion. There never is. Hopefully the discussion will take place in the Community Bay. Various questions were raised through the day as points on which the Jorum would like community input, for example:

• what can the community bay be used for
• How can communication with the community be improved
  what training and support should be offered
• how can the website be improved
• what metadata should be used.

Overall, an interesting day, it was being recorded, so hopefully there’s be a decent record of it online soon. I hope it was a successful meeting, especially in encouraging people to get involved with the Jorum community.

(*yes, I only mentioned that so I can say something about the Jorum forum quorum – I’ll stop now)