Bill – your post is an excellent synthesis of where things stand, I’m hoping to get a comment on there later today. And I’m glad you are underlining the role of these tools in reshaping materials — I think it’s key.

Bryan – sometimes I worry that I can go a little overboard with this chip on my shoulder. Anecdotes like yours remind me exactly where we are…

Again, thanks all for this stimulating and encouraging feedback.

RE: “we need to find a place for thoughtful and easy recontextualization and revision as well. That’s why I find the prospect of authoring in blog and wiki environments so promising… and what will evolve out of this?”

The “easy recontextualization” piece is frequently missing from existing implementations of Open Content — and using blog-like tools to author content overcomes this weakness: the republishing/remixing/reusing piece becomes a whole lot easier.

I put some ideas together re one version of what could evolve here: http://openacademic.org/news/oers-publishing-easy-part

Cheers,

Bill

Thanks for this post. I just followed your link to the presentation by Jim and D’Arcy. Very impressive and convincing!

I have posted about their work on our blog – http://www.mediastudio.unu.edu/en/
I can see we have a lot to learn from them.

All the best,

Brendan Barrett
UNU Media Studio

It is funny that David did not mention it on his blog, but here at the UNU we have building courses in WordPress for the past couple of years. He knows, cause we showed him the last time he visited Tokyo. Maybe slipped his mind.

In fact most of our websites here at the UNU Media Studio, including the our main website are all WordPress.

For examples see: http://www.mediastudio.unu.edu
or
http://eia.unu.edu/course/?page_id=173

We have built a load of plug-in and customized polyglot to make a bi-lingual site in English and Japanese. More developments are in the pipeline.

Brendan Barrett
UNU Media Studio

Alan – it’s true, we don’t just want piles of Frankencontent — we need to find a place for thoughtful and easy recontextualization and revision as well. That’s why I find the prospect of authoring in blog and wiki environments so promising… and what will evolve out of this?

And I am ready to frame this quote, “And you’d have to be huffing gold paint to think it is easier to author in one of these CMS’s than it is in WordPress or MediaWiki.”

Need to mull and chew on ideas presented here yet I see maybe 2 threads- one being the proof of concept of making OER thus portable (pretty much done by Tony and David’s work), and all of the tool centric things of making this happen. The second is the fundamental shift in how orgs can move from the locked down expensive bloat boat approach, and like you I remain highly skeptical of seeing that change. Thinking about that only depresses me, and pushes me more to ponder thread #1.

My own puzzlement is wondering what do we do being EduGluing stuff together; it can be just one more pile of “stuff”; once we have all these portable pieces of OER, how do we recontextualize, add to it and then republish; or do we just rebroadcast it?

Brilliant snarky post in how it generates this conversation…

OpenLearn content via a wiki – http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010436.html

I also tried to blend some wikipedia content with an OpenLearn unit – http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010443.html

wikieducator are experimenting with full content rss feeds, I believe, using http://jimbojw.com/wiki/index.php?title=WikiArticleFeeds_Extension

Using mediawiki as a generic content publishing engine seems like a v Good Plan to me…

JSON out would be interesting; i wonder whether it would make sense usign a de facto (wikitext?) standard, to e.g. point to things like embeddable video content (I think it’d be easier eg passing a youtube movie url in the json and letting the handler wrap a player round it, rather than passing a load of embed code?)

re snarky comments not getting through – heh heh, that’s one of the reasons why we blog, isn’t it?

A few people note my tone, so allow me to add that if nobody is going to take my arguments seriously (and I really have been arguing this stuff for years with minimal evident effect) I don’t see why I should always be dead serious. It’s likely that being snarky reduces my effectiveness as a communicator to some people (I’m hearing that more and more lately), but that’s the way I am and there are plenty of other people to read.

@Lanny, my point is that this insane desire to keep educational environments closed and highly managed is not only ethically dubious but also creates headaches. I have taught a course in WebCT the past four years, and it forces me to enter a password, provide something like ten clicks (waiting each time for the thing to load) just to see if someone has added to a discussion. I literally could check up on a dozen blogs in the time it take me to get my first look at course activity. And you’d have to be huffing gold paint to think it is easier to author in one of these CMS’s than it is in WordPress or MediaWiki. So yes, the squeeze on practitioner time is a huge issue, which makes the endless hassles we cause ourselves by clinging to a closed model all the more problematic. Imagine if all the IT/support positions presently filled by people fighting bugs and addressing bewildered user questions were instead creative people using lighter and simpler open tools. Or imagine what kind of time/strategy options would open up to us if we weren’t paying out these licensing fees, or having to support the kind of infrastructure these heavy systems require.

As for why people haven’t been doing this earlier, when the options have indeed been available for some time… I am far more baffled than you. As I noted, I’ve been making this argument for years, as have many others. What shocks me is that this approach, while it gets a more respectful hearing now that Web 2.0 is enjoying a vogue, is still seen as “unserious” (OK blog boy, you’ve had your say, now let’s talk ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE)…

@Jeff I think your comment addresses my point more explicitly.

@Tony – glad you chimed in here. Stephen Downes posted a link to this post, and drew a line between David’s work and what you’ve been doing, and I wished I had thought to do so myself.

I think there is growing interest among ed techies to address OER directly, and for the OER crowd to use more creative technology, but why there even has been this odd cultural disconnect has always puzzled me.

Nice point about the PDFs.

Once again, I am honestly humbled by the calibre of discussion my ramblings can generate. (Not even a hint of mirthful sarcasm intended on that assertion.) Thanks to all of you!