A Poem is never finished, only abandoned

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Patrick Lockley

(blog title is a quotation from Paul Valery)

A cloud, wandering, perhaps lonely

It is hard when developing to say “finished” – most web servers respond badly to having a champagne bottle cracked over them and pushed into the Solent. So there is a point with a web page, when it achieves a final status – a point at which it will not change. In the world of Wikis and Pinterest this seems somewhat ye olde web, and even on a Great Writer’s project – how many books only have the 1 version? That never changed? Probably because it wasn’t worth going back to – is static content then innately bad? No, but perhaps it suggests a sense of being abandoned.

So following on from our take away blog post, and Jenny Gray from the OU’s blog post – we have been experimented with packaging up some of our collections. However, we’ve almost straight away ran into a wall – a wall called static content. We can make a common cartridge file solely containing URLs which point to our content – this is relatively simple, and given we’ve got code to make RSS and itunes RSS it’s something that is a matter of algorithm wiggling and then adding code to zip the file up. So common cartridge down, and then onto SCORM and Content Packages. Sadly, here we stop, because we’d need to give these files the pages (in rendered HTML), and not just the links to the pages; this makes the process a lot more time consuming if you do it dynamically. However, it also asks the question – should we offer this as a service before we have “completed” the page, and then, how do we gauge content as complete?

A downloaded package is great, but we have no way of informing the end user – if VLEs had a Drupal or WordPress like ability to refer back to the original provider of the package to see if it had changed this problem could be resolved, but without that you fall into an either deposition or embedding camp, both have innate risks and quality issues – but it seems that the sheer variance in packaging standards places a prohibitive overhead on content production. If we had the benefit of making the content work for one VLE, we could achieve this in a more simple way- but as we are “open” we can’t really provide, or justify the provision of a fordist one size fits all solution. We are obviously limited time wise, and so developing every solution just isn’t possible.

So, in the short-term, before our Engage event (which is now fully booked!) we don’t have any evidence of which method is best – we have coded a page embed system – so now literally any page on a site can be added as an iframe to any other page (formatted nicely as well), and we will see how people think about this, before we think about developing new materials.

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An OER Star rating?

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Patrick Lockley

Black swan in flight

To the western world, the swan was innately white – it was almost seen as impossible that a swan could be any other colour. Once Willem de Vlamingh discovered the black swan, the notion of the unpredictable, or what constituted a swan became vague. Interesting that discovering a mammal with webbed feet, a beak and one which laid eggs and not live young was somehow less definitive in challenging taxonomies. So whereas we could argue that this could be a discussion over epiphanies and OER, it isn’t – it is a question of what characteristics should an OER have?

Yesterday at the OER3 / OER RI meeting in London we discussed whether it made sense to centrally mandate a characteristic of OERs – greater than say ensuring the resource is licensed openly (which is arguably a given, like all swans hiss). Perhaps discussion of top-down or bottom-up approaches doesn’t work with the notion of “open” – but then what of Tim Berners-Lee’s open data classification?

★ make your stuff available on the web (whatever format)
★★ make it available as structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table)
★★★ non-proprietary format (e.g. csv instead of excel)
★★★★ use URLs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff
★★★★★ link your data to other people’s data to provide context

So we can accept an approach where perhaps there isn’t a black / white / duck-billed cut off point, but instead a structured approach to which we agree some elements offer a more useful OER to an end user, but in not doing so prevent people from creating an OER. As we are developing the Great Writers resource, we are moving towards thinking about how we can enrich content and empower users of the content as simply and efficiently as possible. Sadly, we can’t work out in advance who are users are – we may know for some, but we definitely can’t make OER for all of the people all of the time. Giving too many options to end users may confuse, but giving too few options may lead to a failure of the content to be reused. If options for reuse could be mandated, or an OER star rating for reuse existed, then we could all develop around a “best practice” and it would be easier to consider what forms of reuse we could have on a site. At present we support, downloading, embedding, attributing and social media sharing – which are all relatively useful, but that is “what we think are useful” – is it worth us expending the time on doing so?

So could we consider any of these as a first or second star of OER reuse ratings? I’m loathe to suggest a standard, but I feel that I can offer the following two

★ The OER can be downloaded
★★ The OER can be embedded (iframe, object, video / audio).

I think this is a fair minimum of “Openness” and not too much effort to produce – the other options are considerably more effort.

I would welcome comments and thoughts on this, and how people would like to reuse OER.

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Pax Educationa

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Patrick Lockley

If we think of open education as a geographical space, then we can see that creative commons licensed content is safe and friendly for reuse, whereas other areas are distinctly “here be dragons”. Visualise the Pax Romana as a space in which certain actions and business could trade and the borders as spaces in which educators keen to use OER can safely travel. We create a safe zone via licences so educators can practice as they wish.

Sadly, we aren’t one empire, and the Pax Eductiona isn’t quite as simple. The licences might be roughly the same, but sometimes a Lilliputian egg cutting disagreement could make travel slightly more problematic to the embolden educator. Driving on the left, driving on the right, warning triangles.

As we come to remix and reuse content though, we move past a mere border as licence – what of borders in content. As part of Great Writers we are keen to bring in OER from other organisations which compliment the materials we are producing. We’ve gone to a lot of effort to make the presentation of our content as rich as possible – so, to avoid denigrating OER as some academic aside and “different” from our prime content (OER as an immigration?) we should aim to present the OER with the same quality as we do our own materials.

We’d like to do this, but should we? Why not?

Well, as an example, we have lots of audio files we could reuse. Our site is set up to play audio files from our academics, however if the address of the audio file isn’t available (say embedded like a youtube video and not accessible directly) then we can’t offer the same playback. We’ve put audio OER in the same lists as our own content – so to the site user they aren’t different, but we’ll end up with a slightly different user experience and a slightly different interface for some OERs. So a site user is explicitly going to notice different kinds of content – some content, will sadly, be different.

Now if we can get at the URL, we can display it as we did our content, but what of usage stats and evidence? Does snaffling the URL rob the OER project of evidence of reuse? Probably.

So what if we use an “iframe”, and display their content within “our” site? Do we appear to be claiming ownership of it? Does the interface architecture of the iframe show us as controlling this resource like some protectorate? We’ve now problem giving traffic to another site, but does a link suffice? Does it make the content seem a little drab and disincentivise the reason for clicking on the link in the first place? Is an iframe the better of two evils – you get the traffic, but not quite in the way you expected, but at least you get the traffic?

The CC licence assures that the BY means attribution. So we will always display the CC licence for the content, but is their an OER netiquette as to whether an iframe is better than a link?

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Open Education Week

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Lisa Mansell

This week is the first ever Open Education Week which aims to raise awareness of the open education movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Oxford University Computing Services has successfully run many open projects; one of our current open educational resources projects is Great Writers Inspire which will bring together collections of open materials which can be reused in education worldwide for free. To get an early insight into the content take some time out to be inspired by our Great Writers Inspire blog.

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Gone in the link of an eye

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Patrick Lockley

Taken from http://farm5.static.flickr.com/3544/3850632269_d8dda783ce_b.jpg on 2012-3-06
Original URL – http://www.flickr.com/71717049@N00/3850632269/ created on 2009-08-23 08:36:31
Trisha CrabbCC BY-NC-SA 2.0

A broken link on a webpage is perhaps akin to an obscured roadsign. We might well miss our turn, but the destination might still exist and our friendly sat nav or google maps can still find us a new route as to where we want to go. It might be a distraction, but it definitely doesn’t stop the journey. Whereas when you embed content – say an iframe or a video – then that content going away really does break up the educational content. It’s much more of a “bridge out”. Your sat nav is going to need to know the bridge is gone, and then find a new route for you completely.

With Great Writers, and OER websites in general, there is a requirement to make the content reusable. Now, we can argue downloading one of our podcasts or videos is a reuse case, but is that enough. We have on our development site got embed code working for our materials, but the embed code, like youtube embed code relies of a URL to provide the video and the audio back. I’d assume that an embed code is easier to use than download and uploading would be, and also it perhaps offers reuse statistics for the producer of the materials. So embed is useful, if not always better as an option. But when we provide an embed service, do we then take on a greater level of responsibility. We become part of someone else’s educational material, and so need to make sure we don’t jeopardise that.

URLs clearly don’t live forever, maybe there is a case for OER handle URLs (a sort of OER LOCKS service). Perhaps we could argue a case that Jorum could store all ukoer URLs, and so should a URL die, people could refer there for another version? We obviously want our content to be reused, and also, perhaps to have evidence for reuse – to which an embed code is ideal. But then we accept that this is a high risk for us as people might wonder, or may well find out that the content disappears.

The case for OER – remix / reuse / stats versus permanent hosting places us between a rock and a hard place. We want both, but we might have to chose one over the other. Once HTML5 becomes more mainstream then embedding will become so much easier, but it still places a dilemma on OER sites as to what to do, especially if only short-term funded.

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OER killed the Website Star

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Patrick Lockley

So you’re on a journey, you know roughly where you want to get too. On the road ahead are a few places you can get food, one slight detour away is a restaurant you know is good, and a way off the route is a restaurant you know is brilliant. So there is your dilemma, press on, take the quick route, eat the ok food or take a different route and enjoy fine dining.

So you’ve arrived. You need to make some learning materials. There is the default route,  advanced straight to go and focus on getting their quickly. Or there are approaches where you could look to take a long route, but in doing so end up with richer learning materials.

So you decide to try some new places when making learning materials. You can copy and paste text and images, download certain files. Let’s think of this as taking ingredients from the website. But you might also want to take out sections of the website (say something like a youtube embed code, or a widget), or you might like the website and structural elements of it, then you almost want to take away the entire site, a doggy bag, or sac-aux-chien from the michelin starred website-cum-restaurant.

For people to want to come to a website, it has to be engaging, well structured – provide a good user experience. But we also explicit make this website for the purpose of it’s quasi-destruction. We seek the export, the take away, the remix, the re use. For some people this is a website, for some people it is a shelf from which to take things. The people who want to use the site like the shelf perhaps don’t care directly for how well it works as a site, as they won’t be consuming the site itself.

Websites exist, and to an extent, their underpinning CMSes (CMSii?) and repositories to present content – they are the “destination restaurant” that is explicitly worth the visit.  They might sit well as a link in a powerpoint or pasted into a VLE. Explicitly any use of them requires that content to be assessed. If the website is perceived instead as a service for allowing a polyphony of content, then the site needs to almost provide a contextless approach for all content. Sadly a website babelfish – izer doesn’t exist – mostly because identifying all reuse cases is impossible (in advance), and also because it is a non-trivial piece of work to do so. Taking a list of possible types (such as this open learn example) shows how some forms exist, shows some forms exist – but are these the types people want? We’re moving to the point with Great Writers that we are thinking about how people want to take away content – we’ve got embed codes / download working, we’ll be looking into Capret – but we have no idea on the bigger forms – is common cartridge a term with any traction amongst teachers? How many VLEs support it? Is it worth us coding that in? Should we aim for something more oEmbed like – or is that again, too nerdy? Would we be better spent making powerpoints or word documents – some bread and butter, maybe not michelen starred bread and butter, but incredibly popular bread and butter downloads instead? You argue that for OER and reuse it makes sense to have the content everywhere, and not “just” on one website, so does OER, and working openly mean the website is dead?  Hopefully this will come up at our engage event as a topic for discussion.

It seems there is an almost Zen Perfection dilemma in the OER website. We want to make it as good as we can do, but accept that some people might want only a part of it, or to actively destroy it, or to just take it away. So it is no longer directly, a site, but more a pipe through which things can flow. If I was being clever, I’d refer to Marshal McLuhan at this point, perhaps pop will eat itself, but I prefer to think that OER might kill the website star, oh yes :)

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Students as open content producers

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Lisa Mansell

One of the themes we chose to embrace as part of our Great Writers Inspire project was the concept of students as producers of OER. We experienced success with this during the Triton project as part of OER phase 2, when we had a small number of Student Ambassadors supporting content acquisition for the Politics in Spires blog. In fact, the initiative worked so well that students continue to play a significant role now that the Department of Politics and International Relations run the blog.

So a month ago we started the search for some graduate student helpers for Great Writers Inspire. We were amazed at the initial response: well-considered applications quickly filled my in box, all full of enthusiasm to get involved. We short-listed the strongest candidates (no easy task) and met with them to discuss the project and the duties they would be expected to undertake. Principally, their role would be to support our academic content producers to develop the collections of resources to be released by the project, including:

  • Preparing some introductory essays (in the form of a blog posts) which establish context and set the scene for the materials presented within a collection.
  • Writing additional contextual pieces for the blog which may be used to enhance content items.
  • Assisting in the evaluation of relevant epubs/ebooks for use on the site.
  • Source images under a suitable licence for use on the site.
  • Support the project’s engagement with schools.
  • Support the project’s social media campaign.
  • Support audio and video production.

As part of the selection process we invited interested candidates to write a blog post on their chosen great writer and this was extremely effective in capturing some excellent student-generated content for the site. Some of the blog posts are beginning to appear on the project’s WordPress blog, see Sylvia Plath, Anne Brontë, Frances Burney and James Joyce and more will be appearing soon. We also took the opportunity to raise awareness of OER at the meetings with the candidates, thereby increasing open content literacy amongst the student community at Oxford. Of course the successful candidates will become experts in such matters and they have already received their first briefing from the project team. We are delighted to welcome Charlotte Barrett, Cleo Hanaway, Alex Pryce, Colleen Curran, Kate O’Connor and Erin Johnson to be part of the Great Writers Inspire project.

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Engage workshop 19th-20th April 2012

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Lisa Mansell

Register your interest now http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TKCDC8K

We invite you to register your interest to participate in a free 2-day interactive workshop run by the Great Writers Inspire project. Our ‘Engage’ workshop for teachers (HE, FE, 6th form) and learners will take place on Thursday 19th and Friday 20th April at Oxford University Computing Services in the centre of Oxford.

The Great Writers Inspire project will release digital learning content with a literary theme: lectures, electronic texts and ebooks plus background contextual resources will be made available under an open content licence making them free for reuse in education worldwide.

‘Engage’ will offer discussion of teaching approaches in literature in HE, 6th form and distance learning settings and explore how digital resources can be used to enhance the teaching and learning experience. Participants will have plenty of hands-on time to interact with the Great Writer Inspire resources and provide a steer on their development. The Oxford academics supporting the project will lead a debate on ‘What is a Great Writer?’, and we will also help to clear up some of the misunderstanding around copyright and reuse by increasing your open content literacy. An outline of the programme is below:

DAY 1 Thursday 19th April 2012, midday start

Arrive for registration and lunch at OUCS
Welcome and introductions, ice breaker
Introducing Great Writers Inspire – digital resources with a literary theme free for reuse in education worldwide
Ways of using Great Writers Inspire –participants explore, engage and offer feedback
Exploring eBooks on computer and mobile devices – how can these be used in teaching and learning?
Making it easy to reuse digital resources in teaching – become open content literate
Early evening tour of the Bodleian Library
Dinner

DAY 2 Friday 20th April 2012, 9.30 am start

What is a great writer? What is a great text?

Oxford academics share their thoughts and invite discussion and debate
How do you engage with Great Writers? How do you engage students/learners with writers and literature? How do you inspire them?
Building collections – participants have the opportunity to discover reusable digital resources and create collections
Lunch provided
Building collections continued
Presentations of collections developed
Wrap up, evaluation and follow-up

We will be recording parts of the event and short interviews (vox pops) and these will be made available on the Great Writers site under the following licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/.

The workshop is free, meals will be provided over the 2 days and there are some funds available to cover travel and accommodation for those travelling from a distance. We will be sending participants some information beforehand to think about, and you will be asked to come prepared to share your experiences, engage with other participants and help us make the workshop as productive as possible. Participants will be given the opportunity to create a collection of resources which can be used in the future. There will be presentation time to share these collections and the issues they address with the group, plus an expectation to create at least one blog post reflecting on the event.

If you would like to attend then please let us know as soon as possible by completing the short registration form (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TKCDC8K). We have limited numbers and we will let you know if you have a place.

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Watch, listen and learn

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Lisa Mansell

The audio and video recordings which were captured at our Be inspired event are now live http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/great-writers-inspire. These inspirational short talks by Oxford academics form the basis of content collections for the Great Writers Inspire website, but we didn’t want you to wait until that was ready so they are freely available via Oxford’s podcasting portal and iTunesU. With talks on a diverse range of writers from early English to post-colonial; the Beowulf poet, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Stephen Duck, William Blake, George Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Olive Schreiner and J.M. Coetzee, these short talks will inspire you to discover more. And of course they are all free for reuse under the terms of our Creative Commons licence.

Enjoy!

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The shelf-ish gene

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Patrick Lockley

The benefits of a database over a big blob of text is you can automatically generate links to related content. Writing this text now every time I want to add a link I have to stop, thinking about what I want to link to, and then rewrite the sentence so the link makes sense and is included so as to be accessible – click here – just doesn’t cut it. However, when we enter information into our all seeing database, we can use it to generate vast permutations and combinations of information – the bookshelves of our site are unlimited, they could stretch as far as the eye could see, which is, a lot less than the visitor would tolerate.

So we dress our shelves with faceted views, of filters and fail safes so as to ensure that a site visitor can almost create their own little micro site based on our content. The shelves are still unlimited but we’ve given people the ability to remove the content they aren’t interested in very simply. Which isn’t bad, but…. well, does it matter? My mind epiphanies away with how people will find our content. The logical presumption, is that the initial find will be via a search engine, not via mechanisms within the site. If we are to be found, there is an obvious process that we should take our content through various stages of search engine optimisation. Therefore, content highly optimised for search engines will mean some one searching for those terms will find our content. However, what about the boundaries of the terms? The path less trodden? They are doing a search as much as anyone, and logically have the same needs to be sated - so is there a case therefore for the plethora of shelves? Should we over produced collections and categories. to see which ones prove popular? A put up shop style of OER?

We hope for our content to be remixed and reused, but don’t apply, or have effectively a concept of internal remixing. Maybe the referrer “if you liked this, then you might like this” is only a half way measure – it helps keep people on the site – but perhaps  generating collections out of those pairs would help people find the site, and perhaps, that is more important?

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