Web Sites of the Week November 24, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentQuite a few this week, the list includes discussions on openness its benefits and definitions, links to repositories, software to encourage openness and a pitch for a project that is looking into developing an API that can help us to navigate the messy world of OER.
- OER Theory and Practice: 2 presentations: 1st presents a strengthened and clarified definition of OER, 2nd recognizes that in “practice” people play extremely fast and loose with the term “open.”
- Open Access Anthropology Repositories : new and incomplete overview over digital libraries and repositories with free access to papers and theses. Most of them are in English (some in German and Scandinavian languages) and mostly based on the overview at Open Doar.
- Trends in Large-Scale Subject Repositories : D-Lib article noting a lack of broad empirical studies on subject repositories, the authors investigate subject repository trends that reveal common practices despite their apparent isolated development
- Microsoft works with educators and open source to support free knowledge sharing wiki: New open source extension for Microsoft Word delivers support for MediaWiki file format so users can upload documents directly into Wiki repositories.
- Exemplar Preservation Repositories: Comparison by Format Profile : How format profiles can reveal potentially characteristic fingerprints for emerging types of repository – from Diary of a Preservation Project
- University of Michigan Library Enable Broader Sharing and Reuse with Change to CC: the University content on its website under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. This announcement is significant because the Library had been using the more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license.
- Roadmap for an Open Educational Highway: This project seeks to develop an application programming interface (API) for publishing Open Education Resources (OER) to remixable repositories -and an excellent way to pitch a project
- Creative Commons Case Studies : organisations share experience of using CC
- Why Bother Being Open: from iterating towards openness blog providing an overview of the benefits of openness
National Workshop Preparation November 24, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentAs we get ever closer to the finishing line of the project our thoughts and planning turn to our national conference. The project threw around a few ideas with respect to what we wanted to focus on, the ideas ranged from OER to repository usage. In the end we have decided to focus on developments in learning respositories, I was inspired to do this after the recent RSP event at sheffield. The workshop will be called “I Fought the Learning Repository and the Learning Repository Won” and will focus on learning repository developments past and future, together with a short showcase of our project outputs. The workshop will take place on 16th March at our Nottingham Conference Centre and will be free. We will have places for about 50 people. We have had the date in our diary for several months and I have noticed that JISC is having its conference on 14th and 15th in Liverpool, not quite a clash and you can get a direct train from Liverpool to Nottingham (it takes just over 2hrs as you are going west east). More details can be found in the National Workshop tab and in the next month or so we will circulating details on how to book on to it.
Web Sites of the Week November 16, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentThis week reports, history and guidance.
- Removing Friction in Open Education - Erik Duval’s keynote from the OpenEd 10 conference in Barcelona
- Report on the International Council for Open and Distance Education - looks at the barriers to open and distance learning
- Uncovering Open Access - a history of open access
- Taking OER beyond the OER Community - the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) aiming to expand understanding of OER by educational decision makers and quality assurance experts in order to promote their wider use.
Conversations on Strategically Embedding Sharing November 16, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI am continuing to have further discussions with schools and services on embedding sharing learning resources within their practice. So far I have had discussed this with colleagues in the Schools of Arts and Humanities; Animal and Rural Science; Science and Technology; Law and the Centre for Professional Learning and Development. In all of the conversations I have had so far colleagues have found not too challenging the suggestions I have made with respect to activities for embedding learning resources and all could come up with ways on how these activities can be implemented within their school/service, some had already begun to work in the suggested areas. These discussions and the subsequent responses from colleagues show that NTU is making further steps in the journey of staff engagement with sharing learning resources.
To recap – this is the checklist of activities further finessed as a result of my conversations with schools/services by March 2011 schools/services should have evidenced:
- Opportunities and activities for sharing learning resources with colleagues have been adequately addressed in the School Learning and Teaching Enhancement Strategy Action Plan or Service Operational Plan
- Staff have a knowledge and understanding of NTU’s Learning Repositories: It is expected that School/Service will host a workshop/s on NTU’s Learning Repositories.
- The start of an implementation of School/Service project/s that use NTU’s learning repositories: A suggestion is 2/3 resource management projects, for example the sharing of generic content (e.g. study skills, student support, assessment criteria, information literacy etc.), across a range of learning rooms. Alternatively, 1 large project evidencing collaborative sharing of module learning resources across a range of programmes (e.g. third year project, ethics, research methods, project management etc.).
- Illustrations of School/Service learning repository use have been disseminated within the School, the NTU Community and beyond: The project will help to capture these and details of the project/s will be in the final report.
- The use of NTU’s learning repositories has been integrated within School/Service learning technology/e-learning developments: The learning repositories should not be treated separately to other e-tools used within the School/Service, so for, example, if the School/Service has an e-learning champion/friend or any other method of support within the School the learning repositories should be integrated within the support already provided.
In addition to the above, the project would also like see that the School/Service is beginning to:
- Develop staff knowledge and understanding of Open Educational Resources
- Integrate OER into School/Service learning technology/e-learning developments
Further movement to OER November 15, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentAt our wider meeting we discussed moving towards publishing OERs in our learning repository. A couple of months ago the University changed its “Copyright and Educational Resources Policy” to accommodate the attachment of a creative commons license to educational resources. Lisa Warburton, the University’s Copyright Advisor has produced an excellent guide to Creative Commons so really colleagues can start to produced OERs now. However, we are still specing how we can make items open in our learning repository. There are two options make resources open in our NTU repository or have a separate repository something like NTU Open that just has OER. It looks like the most straightforward approach would be the latter option, resources could then be accessed via their URLs and/or the repository could be harvested. We now need to do some testing.
Web Sites of the Week November 8, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentThis week enhancements, efficacy and challenges in open education.
- JorumOpen - enhanced features previewing and editing
- A decade of OCW benefits at MIT - after a nearly a decade its benefits to users
- Open Education, Cracks, and the Crisis of Higher Education - a blog post by Stephen Downes
- Open Content and the Costs of Online Learning - the real cost on an online masters degree
- Learning with ‘e’s: Open for use? - Steve Wheeler open educational resources and open scholarship
A strategic approach to staff engagement in repository use November 8, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI am in the process of meeting our learning and teaching coordinators to discuss strategically how to engage staff in the use of learning repositories, the first one was last week. I have decided that a way to steer these discussions would be to create a checklist of activities that learning and teaching coordinators and their e-learning champions could support in order to enable a more strategic approach. The checklist would be something like:
- Opportunities and activities for sharing learning resources with colleagues have been identified in the School action plan or Service Operational Plan
- Staff have a knowledge and understanding of NTU’s learning repositories
- Staff have a knowledge and understanding of Open Educational Resources
- School/Service project/s that use NTUs learning repositories have been identified
- Illustrations of School/Service learning repository use have been captured and disseminated
- Support for the use of NTU’s learning repositories and OER have been integrated in School e-learning support
Activities to facilitate the above
- LTC’s and e-learning champions/friends understand how to use NTU’s learning repositories and access open educational resources
- Workshop on NTU’s learning repositories
- Workshop on Open Educationa Resources
- Learning repository and sharing learning room (toolkit)
- Models of repository use
- Illustration/s of learning repository use
- Illustration/s of using open educational resources
RSP Event Doing it differently November 1, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , 1 comment so farLast week I attended RSP’s one day conference Doing It Differently at Sheffield Cathedral. The invited speakers covered a range of areas with respect to repository usage. After an introduction by Bill Hubbard from the Centre for Research Communications at Nottingham University, Stephanie Taylor Research Officer for UKOLN provided in insightful history of repositories and provided some considerations for future repository developments, including hidden repositories, subject and national repositories, aggregation and finding out what end users want. This was followed by Beyond SNEEP: Ideas for Creative Repository Management – Richard Davis, Repository Service and Development Manager, ULCC. Richard considered the use of tagging, enhancing the user experience, through personalisation and customisation and the use of feeds, providing an overview of SNEEP - Social Networking Extnersions for Eprints. Richard said that Newsfeeds can provide links to datasets within the repository, they can be dynamically updated, and encourage the use of the repository as the single place to deposit. He suggested the use of repository stats, to demonstrate effectiveness, areas of interest, to support research exercises and encourage healthy competition, as well as putting links in abstracts to related resources.
After the morning break Pat Lockley, Learning Support Development Officer, University of Nottingham presented on Xpert: creating a repository using RSS. Xpert is a JISC funded rapid innovation project (summer 2009) to explore the potential of delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources created and seamlessly published through the open source e-learning development tool called Xerte Online Toolkits. The aim of XPERT is to progress the vision of a distributed architecture of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use. Learners and educators can use XPERT to search a growing database of open learning resources suitable for students at all levels of study in a wide range of different subjects.Creators of learning resources can also contribute to XPERT via RSS feeds created seamlessly through local installations of Xerte Online Toolkits. Xpert has been fully integrated into Xerte Online Toolkits, an open source content authoring tool from The University of Nottingham. Xpert, Free to use, web based, open source (PHP / MySQL), lightweight (3 files), OAI harvester (as well as RSS), similar to the MIMAS demonstrator. Future developments include, Facebook Integration, VLE Integration, Wordpress Integration , “Searching” and “Serendipity”, Library Integration, Xpaper – linking OER and research. This was followed by Practice-based research in repositories: representing non-textual artefacts as research outputs – Stephanie Meece, Manager, UAL Research Online, University of the Arts London. As the title states Stephanie provided an overview of the challenges associated with depositing non-textual objects within a repository. Overcoming this challenge required consultation with endusers who would be depositing and retrieving resources with respect to how the artefacts should be best presented and the supporting resources required to contextualise the artefacts.
After lunch Jason Hoyt, Vice-President, Research & Development, Mendeley Ltd provided an overview of the reference manager and academic social network Mendeley. Mendeley aims to help researchers work smarter, make science collaborative and transparent and to create an open research database. Taking an approach similar toLast.fm it connects researchers to related libraries, researchers and papers- by aggregating research data in the cloud. The largest users of the database are Cambridge and Stanford Uni, overall it has 500,00 users. This was followed by RSS in, RSS out. Experimenting with WordPress for scholarly publishing – Joss Winn, University of Lincoln. Joss described how Wordpress can be an excellent feed generator and can be used as a content management system and provided an overview of http://jiscpress.org/ a document authoring, publishing, discussion and syndication platform for JISC’s funding calls and final project reports.
The day was concluded by iTunesU at Nottingham – Sally Hanford, Audio-Visual Media Development Officer, University of Nottingham. This presentation provided some useful observations with regards the resources and processes required to launch an iTunesU reflecting on Nottingham University’s experiences. Sally presented some impressive statistics on the Nottingham iTunesU which is a public site only and since its launch in June of this year has had 110,000 previes, 44,000 downloads, 67 albums, 300 tracks, 14 GB of data. The university had been podcasting since 2006 and saw iTunesU as an opportunity to reach/build a global audience for some the resources their inspiring educators produces. Its implementation was managed by a multi-disciplinary team which included staff from senior levels, marketing and media production. Sally said that success was dependent on a clear plan and ongoing resourcing and institutions should not underestimate the time it takes to upload a back catalogue.
