The JORUM team are hosting the next EC SIG meeting in May where we will be discussing the possibilities for making the service more open. More details about the meeting will be available from the wiki soon.

As this was a joint meeting the presenters were a mix of people and projects working a the more formal ‘coal face’ repository end of things and those working more with staff and students in creating content using more informal technologies.

The day got off to a great start with David Davies (IVIMEDS, University of Warwick) who gave us an overview of the way he is starting to mash up content from various sources (including their formal repository) to create new and dynamic resources for students. A process which he described as being potentially both transformative and disruptive – for everyone involved. David gave a really practical insight into the way he has been combining RSS feeds with yahoo pipes to create resources which are directly embedded into the institutions’ learning environment. Using this type of technology staff area able to share content in mulitple ways with students, without the student having to access the learning object repository. David also strongly advocated the use of offline aggregators, describing these as personal repositories. As well as using RSS feeds from their repository and various relevant journals, Warwick are increasingly creating and using podcasts. David described how a podcast is basically and RSS feed with binary enclosures which means that they can do much more than just contain audio. At Warwick they are creating podcasts which include flash animations. So in this way they are again providing another way for students to access content.

Of course the system David was describing is quite mature, has stable workflow processes with agreed metadata. However it did show the great potential for ‘remixing’ content within an academic environment and how more informal interfaces can interact with formal repositories to create dynamic, personalised content. A real inspiration if like me you’ve been meaning to do something with pipes but just haven’t quite got round to it yet

Charles Duncan (Intrallect Ltd) then presented the SRU (Search and Retrive via a URL) tool they have developed as part of the CD-LOR project. SRU allows a way to embedded a simple query directly into a web-page. The tool was developed to meet a use case from CD-LOR which would allow someone (staff or student) to search a repository without actually having to ‘join’ it ( or become a member of that community) – a sort of try before you buy. Charles give an overview of the history of the development of SRU (and SRW) and then a demonstration of creating queries with the tool and then searching a number of respositories. The tool retrives XML metadata recordings which then can be transformed (using XSL generally) and then using style sheets the results are made ‘viewable’ on a webpage. Limitations of the tool include the fact that it is limited to a single repository search and there are a number of security issues surrounding XSL transforms from repositories. However using this approach does provide another way to access content (or at least the metadata about content) stored in repositories. As this was developed as part of a JISC project, the tool open source and is available on sourceforge.

Before lunch we had a short demonstration from Sue Manuel (University of Loughborough) of the PEDESTAL project. Part of current JISC Digital Repositories programme, the Platform for Exchange of Documents and Expertise Showcasing Teaching project created a service to provide new opportunities for the sharing of materials and discussion related to teaching and to provide new opportunities for showcasing teaching and research interests. Sue gave us a demo of the system, illustrating how it related content and people. It is now staring to be used by staff at Loughborough, unfortunately the future of the system is somewhat in doubt due to the implementation of a new VLE system throughout the institution.

After lunch we moved to more issues surrounding student generated content with Caroline Breslin and Andrew Wodehouse from the DIDET project. Part of the JISC/NSL funded digitial libraries in the classroom programme, DIDET is a collaborative project between the University of Strathclyde, Stanford University and Olin College. Based in a design engineering course DIDET actively encourages (global) online collaboration using online tools to create, store, share and assess coursework. Caroline and Andrew gave an overview of the project, the tools they had created (including an online collaborative learning environment and a digital library). They then outlined some of the challenges they’ve had to face particularly when putting resources into the formal repository and also how to capture some of the more tacit learning process that are taking place in this type of learning situation.

Students are increasingly using sites like youtube, flickr, etc when they are working – and this is actively encourged by staff. However a continuing challenge for staff and students alike is the issue of creativity versus legality. In a design course when students are expected to research existing products, and with the international dimension to this project, there is the added problem of differences between copyright laws in the UK and the US. As librarians as involved in course design and teaching information literacy is an underlying theme of the curriculum. There are QA procedures in place for any content that is going to be archived and made available in the formal repository. The project has a team of staff including lectures, learning technologists and librarians however they are still grabbing with workflow issues when it comes to adding content to the formal repository – mainly due to lack of time. However on the plus side the overall approach has been sucessful and gets positive feedback from students, staff and employers. The project also shows how newer collaborative content creation and sharing technologies can be integrated with more institutional based ones to allow students to use the technologies that suit their needs.

We then moved to the Resource Browser project, presented by Michael Gardner (University of Essex). Part the JISC eLearning programme’s current toolkits and demonstrators projects, Resource Browser is a tool which aims to help improve searching by linking resources with information about the people who created them and vice versa. Building on the work of a their previous Delta project (which was aiming to help practitioners find and share resources) Resource Browser combines a web service tool for storing FOAF (friend of a friend) profiles with exsiting functionality of Delta. Michael then gave a demo of the sytem. If you are familiar with topic maps it looks like quite a similar interface but uses a technology called touchgraph for viewing. By clicking on a person an extended view of that persons profile, the resources they have created and the people they are linked with is viewable. As this is only a six month project it is very much at a prototype stage but it does look like it could have potential. With the use of educational ontologies created in Delta it could be very useful for sharing learning designs as peer recommendation seems to be very important when searching for learning designs. Michael also outlined some ideas they have for automatic metadata creation where an application scans the documents on a users pc then creates a concept map which can be uploaded to the Delta system . . .I have to say the thought of what useful metadata might come back from such a scan on my documents does seem a little scary

The final presentation of the day came from Julie Allinson (UKOLN, University of Bath) who presented the SWORD (simple webservice offering respository deposit). As Julie pointed out her presentation nicely ended the day as it dealt with putting ‘stuff’ into a repository and not just getting it out. The project is looking to improve ways to populate repositories through a standards based approach and they are looking at ATOM in particular. Perhaps the best summary of this talk comes from David Davies blog – where he describes how the project has restored his faith in educational technology – can’t get better than that really.

Overall a great day with lots of interesting presentations and hopefully some useful linking of people and projects – in fact a bit of f2f mash up of ideas! Presentations and audio recordings are available from the JISC CETIS wiki.

As in previous events the ‘bash’ focused mainly on content related activities concerning IMS Content Packaging and QTI. However there were a number of extended conversations surrounding various e-portfolio issues. The Portfolio SIG held a co-located meeting at the University on the second day of the codebash.

Thanks to our Dutch colleagues at SURF we were able to provide remote access to the event through the use of their macromedia breeze system. We had about 15 remote participants including a large Scandinavian contingent organised through Tore Hoel from the Norwegian eStandards project. Tore also hosted a face to face meeting on day two of the bash.

Day one began with a series of presentations giving updates on IMS Content Packaging, QTI and SCORM. Although it may well seem that content packaging is ‘done and dusted’ there are still some issues that need resolved particularly with the imminent release of v1.2 of the specification. Wilbert Kraan outlined the plans the IMS project working group have to develop two profiles (one a quite limited version of widely implemented features and one more general) for the new version of the spec to mixed response. Some people felt there was a danger that providing such profiles could limit creativity and use of the newer features of the specification and create defacto limited implementation. It was agreed that care would have to be taken on the language used to describe the use of any such profiles.

Steve Lay then gave an update on IMS QTI and a useful potted history of the spec’s development stages and the functionality of each release of the specifcation. The IMS working group is currently looking at profiling issues and hopes to have a final release of the latest version of the spec available by early 2008. Angelo Panar from ADL provided the final presentation giving an overview of developments in SCORM and the proposed LETSI initiative to move the governance of SCORM out of ADL and into the wider user community. Angelo also outlined some of the areas he envisaged SCORM would develop such as extending sequencing and consistent user interface issues.

Although smaller than previous ‘bashes’, the general feeling was that this had been a useful event. There’s nothing quite like putting a group of developers in room together and letting them ‘talk technical’ It’s probably fair to say that less bashing of packages took place than in previous events, but some useful testing particularly in relation to QTI did take place between remote and f2f participants. Maybe this was a sign of the success of previous events in that many interoperability issues have been ironed out. It is also probably indicative of the current state of technology use in our community where we are now increasingly moving towards web services and soa approaches. It is likely that the next event we run will focus more on those areas – so if you have any suggestions for such an event, please let us know.

Copies of the presentations and audio recordings are available from the codebash web page. You may also be interested in Pete Johnson’s (Eduserve) take on the event too.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/bItJQC7D2xGvFoY000qv4w – this pipe searches a sub-set of JORUM.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/_nxRZz7D2xGGvKQPqGIyXQ – this pipe searches aggregated JORUM & Intute feeds.

I guess the downside of these are you need to be logged in to preview and download resources. But it shows that the technology has potential for educational applications.

The objectives of the day were to reach a better understanding of the use of some content packaging standards and models to describe complex objects and to compare and evaluate the appropriateness of each in the context of digital repositories.

So what were the outcomes – were there any clear winners or losers? Is content packaging really just metadata? For me, I’d have to say. . . maybe. The elegance of the DC solution is perhaps, at this point in time, just a bit removed from some of the realities of certain packaging scenarios – particularly those relating to teaching and learning when you start to think about the differences between storing an package and then being able to run it. At a more fundamental level, and one that was brought up during the discussion, how should a repository deal with complex objects and their related standards/models – what should they injest, expose, make available to users? Answers on a postcard please

The IEEE RAMLET (resource aggregration model for learning education and training) model is starting to address some of these issues by providing mappings in the form of an OWL ontology which will allow a system to perfom transforms from a number of specifications ( METS, MPEG21, IETF Atom have been idenfitied so far). But there’s no implementation yet, so how this will actually work remains to be seen.

Personally I found it really interesting to get an overview of each of the areas. Both MPEG 21 and the DC approach seemed to be quite similar in terms of each of them offering a great deal of flexibility in the ability to define and describe relationships between items. METS and IMS seemed to have a bit more strength in terms of describing structure. I think at this stage, it’s all still a bit horses for courses when deciding what standard to use/support, but I have no doubt that whatever the solution, metadata will play quite a big part in it.

Copies of the presentations from the day and a summary report comparing the appropriateness of the various approaches for digital repositories will be available from the RRT wiki soon.