Yes, I have never met or have collaborated with Tony Hirst and Scott Leslie (I hope to one day!). But we seem to have done something interesting together, which hopefully someone out there find useful.

Also, Stephen Downes (or Joseph Hart) I suppose is the ORACLE that have linked us together on this mission to find great OER and OCW.

Although, I really admire Tony Hirst’s great idea to use Google Custom search for this post, I did actually create an OER search using Google’s master piece way back in January (2008). URL: http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/2008/01/google-custom-search-for-openfree.html

Google Custom search can be a useful tool (if we we feed it with a lot of relevant links) to search OER and OCW (or whatever!), especially if we use the filters, too.

At least it is cheap, I mean free and fast to develop

Combine Google Custom Search with human generated repository and course collections, and we are really going to make it easier for the rest of the world to find great OER and OCW.

Have a great learning week and thanks for great reflective post

Warm Regards,

Zaid

Yes, I have never met or have collaborated with Tony Hirst and Scott Leslie (I hope to one day!). But we seem to have done something interesting together, which hopefully someone out there find useful.

Also, Stephen Downes (or Joseph Hart) I suppose is the ORACLE that have linked us together on this mission to find great OER and OCW.

Although, I really admire Tony Hirst’s great idea to use Google Custom search for this post, I did actually create an OER search using Google’s master piece way back in January (2008). URL: http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/2008/01/google-custom-search-for-openfree.html

Google Custom search can be a useful tool (if we we feed it with a lot of relevant links) to search OER and OCW (or whatever!), especially if we use the filters, too.

At least it is cheap, I mean free and fast to develop

Combine Google Custom Search with human generated repository and course collections, and we are really going to make it easier for the rest of the world to find great OER and OCW.

Have a great learning week and thanks for great reflective post

Warm Regards,

Zaid

http://www.downes.ca/post/45032
Downes writing about Zaid’s post in OLDaily:
“Zaid has updated his list of free online learning resource sites. This is a great resource – and something to spur me to create something (using RSS or something) that will aggregate and make available for search the collected resources from those sites.”

The CSE hack was actually a response to Stephen’s ‘note to self’…

“painful and expensive they are to implement and manage…” that’s the whole frickin’ point! IT’S NOT GOING TO GET ANY BETTER IT’S GOING TO GET WORSE. What we need is to stop pulling content out of it’s CONTEXT OF USE and let that serve as the way we find it, exactly the way google works. It’s the 80/20 thing again, and I’m quite happy with 80% (especially for free).

No doubt indeed, the existence of some structured or properly curated metadata does help the search engines, and in limited cases (read: your library catalog) may provide the expert searcher better results. For now. but don’t go betting your pension on it. And you’re right, we can use other things like tags, social search and the like to add to the pure search engine approach.

(oh, and you’re still invited to our place this summer, that way I can pull my tongue in person

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/tag/index.php?id=3535

http://mathforum.org/library/topics/history/?keyid=9373651&start_at=51&num_to_see=50

http://www.bbc.co.uk/topics/

An example in which well-described structured content has been automatically harvested and reused is a project I worked on at the BBC called Topics, a directory of sorts that pulls in various content from across the site related to places, people, or subjects. It represents the best of both worlds: content management and dynamic content generation. No human interference necessary after programming the initial search queries. But the content that is returned is rich, and more importantly, relevant.

Cheers,

pj

(and by the way, do you ever get the sense someone is messing with your heads with the captchas below? The two words I am supposed to type – “Crowley” and “Insane”. Is it a full moon or something?)