No matter how carefully planned a move may be there are always unfinished fragments – the paper you’ll need to shelve for a while, the draft blog posts which either never quite got finished or never got beyond the record of a neat idea. As a way of rounding of my time with CETIS I wanted to mention some of the more recent blog posts which never quite made it (with apologies if this is more waffle than normal). [Rowin's blogged about all of our most popular and favourite published posts of 2011].

Identity, Emigration, and Learning
this post tried to draw together some of the thoughts and conversations I’ve had in the past year about culture, identity, and the opportunity for reflection and learning that they have presented. My reflections are still in process but I’m grateful for how twitter, conferences, and ds106radio have triggered opportunities and conversations which have helped me think through what we’re doing. In particular I’d have to single out @easegill for conversations about change, kids, and songs of emigration.

Kickstarter, innovation, and project bids
A post on my experiences with Kickstarter and experience as a backer. This post stalled because it became more about boardgames than about funding (and as much as I love games it is not what I’m paid to write about). The part which was of wider interest was thinking about good pitches vs good delivery and the importance of post-funding communication. It is a bit different for projects in JISC world but as Lorna and Amber are fond of saying – “as a project you can’t fail if you’re open about the process” It also might have talked about the increasing ‘subversion’ or ‘success’ of Kickstarter as it is increasing used by commercial companies (in boardgames at least) to fund their first print run and remove some of their risks – prompting a reflection on a) to what extent institutions are actually capitalising on JISC funding to fund institutional change, and b) how hard it is to make the funding process lightweight and attract interest from those who don’t regularly bid.

Next Generation Interfaces
This was another post inspired somewhat by games, but more about the radical shifts that we’re experiencing in consumer technology and the impact they will have on innovation. In themselves cameras and motion sensing are nothing new, but the availability of technology like the kinect in a relatively inexpensive consumer format (and upcoming mainstream release for windows) is likely to create affordances for all sorts of possibilities for innovation. Yes, it’s gimicky and fiddly but I also think it’s going to be one of those quiet leaps forward that changes how computers integrate into life and education .

copyright, zero cost reproduction, non-rivalrous goods
Prompted by a debate over a university sticking a copyright license on a digitized copy of a work which was in the public domain. I agreed and disagreed with this post all over the place – the intellectual content of it is in the public domain but the recreation and availability of a given version is a different discussion – I want to say the digitized copy should be free and pd but I know first hand what it costs to make such things, the relative lack of support for doing so, and the genuine creative work that can go into it (and how tightly institutions hold IPR of their offline special collections [which is incidentally why this whole discussion was a bit odd]). I could make tangential points for and against this and wish it could be open but in the wider discussion (not the original post) I found the lack of appreciation of the work and costs involved to be an unhelpful simplification.

opened11
given how much I’ve written about oer and ukoer lots could be said about the number of my unfinished posts relating to open but frequently for these unfinished posts it was simply that at times someone else said it first, said it well, and it was better to point out their work than to finish a post saying the same thing.

Looking forward

This blog will continue to exist here but I’ve also copied it onto kavubob.wordpress.com and hope to continue it there.

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This document assumes that you have some familiarity with intent of the Learning Registry (LR) http://www.learningregistry.org/ and that you are interested in contributing information about your resources. It lists a few things to consider before you get into the detail of the how to guide. More extensive information is available from the Learning Registry document collection. This document draws on that documentation (By US Dept of Ed, SRI International, and others) and feedback from the LR development team. It’s primary audience are those in the UK community thinking about in contributing metadata/ paradata/ resources. It’s intended to help technical managers get a quick overview of the issues in contributing to the Learning Registry test node and forthcoming experimental node at MIMAS.

Preparing your data

The primary purpose of the LR record is to indicate the existence, location, and owner of the resource and related metadata and paradata. The LR allows you to submit full or partial metadata, and to (optionally) include the resource itself as payload. The more metadata you submit, the more discoverable your resources become. It does allow you to optionally include some basic information about resources to support filtering and browsing you can opt to include original records in the data rather than referring to them. The LR does not care what metadata formats you use (though data consumers who discover your information through the LR might…).
Contributors submit/push data about their resources to a node which distributes that data to other nodes in the system. In itself the LR will not harvest/ gather information about your resources, you need to actively contribute it.

However, there are issues of local practice that you may want to consider prior to the process of sharing your data. In particular – how are you identifying your resources (e.g. does it have a cool uri? and how are you exposing any usage/activity data which you have about those resources (the paradata format developed alongside the learning registry might be useful).

Mechanisms for LR deposit

Contributors have to create a signature (OpenPGP key pair) for themselves on the LR (anonymous contribution is not permitted). This is a relatively simple self –registration process and will let users interact with the LR test node. However, contributors should note that to contribute to the live LR they will need an agreement with a given live node which has opted to accept their signed data.

The LR uses JSON rather than xml and offers a number of approaches to publishing data, these are:

• Http post (basic publish). This is fully described in: The Learning Registry in 20 minutes or less . You need to be able to submit your data as JSON.
• an OAI-PMH Publish Utility (under development). This is fully described in: OAI-PMH to Learning Registry Publish Utility the utility will wrap your oai-pmh xml in a JSON envelope and surface elements of it.
• a SWORD Publish Utility (under development). This is outlined as part of the LR Quick Reference Guide .
• (other options may be developed)

Policy and License Issues

Please note the LR requests that any data you create or publish to the LR is clearly licensed. A Creative Commons Zero (CC0) or Attribution (CC: BY) licence are good options [Reccommended by both the Learning Registry, JISC, and UK Discovery]. You should ensure that you have the rights to assign this licence if it not already assigned and that the data you publish conforms with appropriate data protection and privacy laws. whatever data you submit to the LR is likely to move between legal jurisdictions.

The Learning Registry: Rough Guide for Contributors by R. John Robertson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

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About a month ago I tweeted that we CETIS and CAPLE had a visiting scholar working with us for this semester. I’d like to take this opportunity to more comprehensively introduce Gema, some of the work she’s doing while she’s with us, and plug our survey investigate the role of academic libraries in OER efforts (you’ll remember I ran a study in this area last year).

Gema Bueno de la Fuente is a visiting scholar from the Library and Information Science Department, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain where she works as an assistant professor teaching in several Undergraduate and Graduate Programs, e.g. the Master in e-Learning Production and Management. She holds a PhD. in Library Science since 2010 with the dissertation “An Institutional Repository of Educational Content (IREC) Model: management of digital teaching and learning resources in the university library”. Her main research interests are digital teaching and learning materials, open content, digital repositories and e-learning systems, with and special focus on the library role in these topics, mainly related to metadata, vocabularies and some specific standards.

While she’s at Strathclyde she’s working on two projects, one looking at OERs and Libraries and one looking at institutional practice in managing learning materials. She’s primarily working with myself and Stuart Boon (one of the lecturers in CAPLE). The survey Gema has created and introductory email are copied below:
“The Centre for Academic Practice & Learning Enhancement (CAPLE) and Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (CETIS) at the University of Strathclyde are conducting a study about the involvement of the Library as an organizational unit, and of individual librarians and other information science specialists, in OER initiatives. OER (Open Educational Resources) are “digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research” (OECD, 2007).

This survey (http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/669964/OER-Libraries-and-librarians) is open to any institution or initiative dealing with OER and/or open content for learning and teaching in a Higher Education context. This includes the creation and release of OER, its dissemination and promotion, the implementation of learning repositories or others management and publishing systems, the aggregation of open educational content, etc. Those projects focused solely on open educational practice are out the intended scope of this survey.

The survey should be answered by an individual OER initiative team member with an overview of current activity and the team composition and profiles. The survey instrument has 15 questions and the estimated time for completion is 15-20 minutes.

No personal data will be required, but you will be able to provide some basic information about your type of organization and OER initiative purpose and objectives if you wish. Participating organisations will be listed in the study report but responses are not connected to individual participants.

The results will be published in a report through JISC CETIS Open Educational Resources web page. If you want to receive a free PDF copy of the final report, please provide your email address at the end of the survey (your email will not be published or held beyond distribution of the survey results).

The survey is open for your feedback until Friday, November 4, 2011.

Thank you in advance for participating in this study, your contribution is very valuable to us.

BEGIN THE STUDY BY GOING TO THIS LINK: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/669964/OER-Libraries-and-librarians

Please feel free to forward this survey to any interesting parties or lists.

For further information, please contact:
Gema Bueno de la Fuente (Visiting Scholar from University Carlos III, Spain) (gema.bueno@strath.ac.uk), R. John Robertson (robert.robertson@strath.ac.uk) and Stuart Boon (stuart.boon@strath.ac.uk).
Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (CETIS) / Centre for Academic Practice & Learning Enhancement (CAPLE). University of Strathclyde, Glasgow (UK).”

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

In my earlier post in this series on the collections strand (C), I presented a graph of the technical choices made just by that part of the programme looking at the issue of gathering static and dynamic collections, as part of that process I realised that, although the collections strand reflects a key aspect of the programme, and part of the direction future I hope future ukoer work is going, a consideration of the programme omitting the technical choices of strand C might be of interest.

The below graphs are also the ones which compare most directly with the work of UKOER 1 which didn’t have an strand focused on aggregation.

Platform related choices in UKOER2 excluding the collections strand

Standards related choices in UKOER2 excluding the collections strand

I’m hesitant to over-analyse these graphs and think there’s a definite need to consider the programme as a whole but will admit, that a few things about these graphs give me pause for thought.

• wordpress as a platform vanishes
• rss and oai-pmh see equal use
• the proportional of use of repositories increases a fair bit (when we consider that a number of the other platfoms are being used in conjunction with a repository)

Reflections

now in a sense, the above graphs fit exactly with the observation at the end of UKOER that projects used whatever tools they had readily available. However, compared to the earlier programme it feels like there are fewer outliers – the innovative and alternative technical approaches the projects used and which either struggled or shone.

Speculating on this it might be because institutions are seeking to engage with OER release as part of their core business and so are using tools they already have, it might be that most of the technically innovative bids ended up opting to go for strand C, or I could be underselling how much technical innovation is happening around core institutional technology (for example ALTO’s layering of a web cms on top of a repository).

To be honest I can’t tell if I think this trend to stable technical choices is good or not. Embedded is good but my worry is that there’s a certain inertia around institutional systems which are very focused on collecting content (or worse just collecting metadata) and which may lose sight of why we’re all so interested in in openly licensed resources (See Amber Thomas’ OER Turn and comments for a much fuller discussion of why fund content release and related issues; for reference I think open content is good in itself but is only part of what the UKOER programmes have been about).

Notes:

• the projects have been engaged in substantive innovative work in other areas, my comments are purely about techincal approaches to do with managing and sharing OER.
• when comparing these figures to UKOER graphs it’s important to remember the programmes had different numbers of projects and different foci; a direct comparison of the data would need a more careful consideration than comparing the graphs I’ve published.

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UKOER 2 has just finished and things are rapidly coming together for UKOER 3 which looks like it is going to be awesome (and you know how little I use that word).

I am, however, moving on.

I’m not going anywhere quickly but all being well in about 3 months my paperwork will be done and some time between January and July I’ll be emigrating to the States.

No, I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but we decided that it’s time to give the US a go.

I hope to keep working in ed tech, open education, and repositories though I may consider moving back towards more digital library like stuff depending on what prospects come up. I’m going to start looking in Seattle (my wife’s hometown) and expand my search from there (advice welcome).

In the meantime it’s time to finish the tech synthesis of UKOER 2 and get ready for UKOER 3.

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