C-change in GEES is totally committed to using JorumOPEN for the delivery of all its OER materials and has always considered it to be the primary interface for  our community to find and download C-change OER materials.

We therefore have high hopes for how JorumOPEN will work for the Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences community, but feel that there are still some areas where we would like to see some improvements in the user interface and workflow, before we can unreservedly recommend it to our community.

After talking with JorumOPEN, they recommended that we post our experiences and thoughts to their forum on Community Bay.

We have done this and the thread can be found here:

http://community.jorum.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=98#p142

We would really appreciate any further thoughts that you had – posted on the thread there or if you prefer do go ahead and leave a comment here.

cheers

eib

As part of our bid for the UK OER project we put forward the idea of an aggregator. We have kept all of our materials and discussions about the project on our WordPress blog. This is where we also wanted to host the aggregator so we could easily see all the materials uploaded by our partners.

I have been looking into a number of systems we could use to create an aggregator page on our WordPress blog. After some simple research it looked like the best option would be to have an RSS feed reader within WordPress.

I began by looking at a way of incorporating an RSS reader into our WordPress blog. After a quick search on the internet I found a simple solution which used two WordPress plugins. The first is the Exec-PHP plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exec-php/). This allows for PHP code to be executed within pages and posts when using the HTML editor within WordPress. To display the RSS feed I used the GetRSS plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/getrss/). This was the simplest plugin to use that required a single line of code on a page to display an RSS feed.

The next step was to create an RSS feed of the materials that have been uploaded into Open Jorum. I looked at a few websites that created RSS feeds from websites automatically. Some of these picked up the links and some didn’t. All of the sites didn’t create clean RSS feeds though. This meant that we had incomplete links on the WordPress site.

I then discovered a website called http://www.feedmarklet.com. This website allows you to create RSS feeds for free but requires you to add the items individually. It worked well within WordPress but could be quite time consuming as the project moved on.

After looking at the Bioscience OER blog (http://biooer.jiscinvolve.org/2009/12/03/aggregating-blog-outputs-using-yahoopipes/) I decided to look into using Yahoo pipes to create our RSS feed. After some time to get to grips with it I found the system to work rather well. I had a rather large problem with the Jorum Open RSS feed. The feed didn’t show the keywords metadata so I couldn’t search for the GEESOER keyword that we have asked our partners to use. For the time being we have added the GEESOER tag to the end of the description. This allows me to display all of the Gees uploads whilst discarding all the others within the community on Jorum Open.

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo pipes looks like it will be the best solution for what we need and this will be going live on the site next week. Ideally it would have worked without having to add the keyword in the description. This could change as Jorum evolves which could then make this an even better option in the future.

Yahoo Pipes RSS Feed

Mark Treagust

The C-change team are delighted to be finally uploading their OER materials into JorumOPEN.

It has taken a long time for us to get going.  First for our partners to re-purpose and copyright-clear the resources  and then for us all to agree the ‘backpage’ notes for licenses and attribution.  But we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel and are now sitting on a very large pile of OER resources – all to be uploaded shortly into the partner repositories and JorumOPEN.

So, please do drop by to:

http://open.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui

and search under our specific keyword of GEESOER

Thanks to Jonathan Wallen at University of Wales for preparing the presentation of  Professor Simon Haslett and to Stephen Whitfield for preparing the work of Dr Jamie Pringle at Keele University.

For some of our OER Partners, there is a slight worry about ‘how’ their materials may be used (or mis-used) in the future.

They are happy for their material to be released, even under a ‘share-alike’ CC license….but still they worry that it might be re-used in a way that they feel could mis-represent their original intentions.  This is particularly the case with some materials that are built on research into  sensitive issues of ‘climate change’.

Some authors have suggested they might be more comfortable if we were to tighten up the CC license for these materials and released them under a ‘No Derivatives’ CC license, but we have tried to discourage this as we felt it was an approach that lay outside our ‘open’ intentions.

But recently another idea was suggested:

Could these materials be protected at all under the author’s ‘Moral Rights’ which allows the author:

“to object to derogatory treatment of the work or film which amounts to a distortion or mutilation or is otherwise prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director”

This seems an interesting idea and certainly I think we should add a line to our ‘Back Page’ notes that specifically says that the author retains the ‘Moral Rights’ on the work……however, there are some examples of where these rights do not apply and these include:

“where ownership of a work originally vested in an author’s employer”

So we again return to the thorny question of who the primary copyright holder is.  If we work on the principle that as the academic author was employed to write this material, he does not hold any copyright in the work, then he isn’t going to hold any ‘Moral Rights’ either.  However if an institute’s IPR policy allows for the original academic author to retain (in part or whole) the copyright in their own works, then arguably they should also have the ‘Moral Rights’.

For further details on ‘Moral Rights’ in the UK see:  http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-otherprotect/c-moralrights.htm

Any other thoughts on this?