I followed this link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Williamsmithshouse.jpg) from a comment in Facebook and was really impressed by the amount of info available about the licensing. Possibly a very useful source for images!

We have now finalised the last versions of our Partner Advice Documents:

1. c-change_supporting_info_3a – Final (98Kb) – originally – C-change Back-Page Guidance
2. c-change_deposit_jorumOPEN_4 – Final (48Kb) – originally the C-change JorumOPEN deposit Guidelines

Development will continue of these guidelines, however they have now been made far more generic and aimed at all the wider GEES community.  The newer versions are still available on the documents page at:  http://c-changeproject.org.uk/?page_id=3

The C-change project is also working with the other STEM OER projects on some more generic guidelines for producing OER for the sciences.

JorumOPEN is based on a set of minimal metadata.  On the whole this is a good thing….or at least we can see that this idea started with good intentions!

But with so few fields to fill out, we really need to take great care on how we fill them.  It would be just too easy to end up with a lot of data squashed into just a few fields and a lack of standards making the data almost unusable.

The best example of this is most probably the ‘author’ field:

For a start, this field is taking three types of possible ‘author’.  First the name of the people who created it, but then also the name of the ‘owner’ , which is likely to be different and then finally the name of the insititute or univeristy who employed the author, who may or may not be the ‘owner’ of it.

Then there is the question of how to enter the ‘name’ into one field which has to include both ‘surname’ and ‘first name’. Remembering that it needs to be in such a way that when the data is sorted, it uses the surname rather than the first name.

This all asks for a high level of standardisation and we have started down that route by starting a set of draft guidelines, which can be downloaded from the Documents page at:

http://c-changeproject.org.uk/?page_id=3 and is called:  Depositing into JorumOPEN eib 4

As ever, we would appreciate any thoughts or feedback you had into this document

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.

Looking at many of the UK-OER resources that have been released so far, it looks like most projects have decided to use a very minimalist approach to ‘wrapping’ their OER resources.

Some I feel have taken this to extremes – I have found some resources which do not even have an author’s name within the resource. This does worry me a bit.  I fear that once a resource becomes separated from its basic metadata then it has become much less usable. Indeed I would suggest that without an ‘author name’ associated with it, it can no longer be covered by the CC license, which requires attribution, so is no longer truly open.

For our C-change partners, the chance to release their materials in an OER form was encouraged by their hope that it would be good publicity for them, their courses and their institutes.  This demanded a much more elaborate presentation of the material, with a much higher level of  ’visual design’, which included institute logos.  It is also the case that much of our materials are rather heavily laden with third party material for which we have to provide separate and individual attribution.

It was therefore unlikely that the ‘minimalist’ approach would work for us and we needed  to consider how best to include all this information within a ‘back page’.

From a project viewpoint, it seemed imperative that as much of the resource-metadata as possible should be included within the text of the resource itself where it is viewable by the user and search engines etc. to make the resource as useful as possible in it’s life in the wild after it has left its primary repository.

This metadata could also be held within the  file header in the Document Properties on Microsoft Office, Adobe file formats and within the header of HTML documents.

It has taken us much discussion with other OER projects, but finally we have written a set of draft recommendations of best practice for writing the ‘back page’, which can be found on our Documents page at:  http://c-changeproject.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/back-page-notes-draft-1f.doc

It is pretty draft, but makes a good start.

Any thoughts?

eib

It has come to our attention that the RSS feed for the blog isn’t working. The feed seems to work in Microsoft Outlook but little else. I am currently looking into the problem and will post here again when it is up and running.

Mark

We are getting to a point where most of our partners have got a large amount of their OER resources ready and we have to make a decision on just how we ‘wrap’ our OER before uploading.

We have already decided not to use a common ‘design’ or ‘look’ to the resources across all the materials as our partners want to retain their institutes logos and corporate design on their own material.  There is also a very wide range of material, that will be delivered in wide range of ways including: JorumOPEN, Institute Repositories, YouTube & Flickr.

But all the same it would be good if we could agree across the partners on some basic metadata and wordings that could be used within all of the c-change OER materials.

Currently we are thinking that this should include:

Front Page:

• Title of Work
• Author and Institute
• Date of creation or last updated

Credits, Terms & Conditions:

• Details of CC license with link to Creative Commons Website
• Details of any other 3rd party licenses are within the work
• Acknowledgements to the programme, project and funders

Should it include a ‘Take Down Policy’?  We are discussing this, but are tending towards the view that only the repository can provide that and not the item itself.

Then there is the question of how this information is best kept with the item.  Certainly it can be put into a page and held within the resource, but I would really like to consider also putting this data into the file-tags so that it is also held within the file itself.

Any thoughts?

The GEES Subject Centre is delighted to announce that:
‘C-Change in GEES – Open Education Resources (OERs) for climate change and sustainability – practicalities & pedagogy’ is to be held on Thursday the 29th of April 2010 at the Macdonald Hotel Manchester from 9.30am to 4pm.

This event will mark the launch of the C-Change in GEES project and has two main aims:

1. To disseminate the resources and learning outcomes from the GEES Subject Centre project ‘C-change in GEES: Open licensing of climate change and sustainability resources in the Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.
2. To promote the ‘Pedagogy of Climate Change’ book, published by the GEES Subject Centre and edited by Simon Haslett, Derek France and Sharon Gedye. Due to be launched at the event.

This event provides an excellent opportunity to both learn more about the production and use of OER materials for the GEES and also to further explore the pedagogy’s of climate change, identify the areas for development in our knowledge and understanding and look forward to what can be achieved in the future.

For further details of the event please visit:
http://gees.ac.uk/events/2010/geesoer/geesoer.htm

for any more information please do get back to anyone in the C-change team.

I have to admit it was with slight relief that I saw that some other OER projects are also having problems with clearing 3rd party works with publishers.

See BERLiN posting:   http://webapps.nottingham.ac.uk/elgg/berlin/weblog/2510.html

For some of our partners, this approach is our only option for a large proportion of the content and as it suggests in the last sentence, we suspect that this problem will be best approached at a higher level in order to get a ‘shift in publisher mindset’.