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Comaprison of iBooks 2.0 textbook format with ePub. Apple uses ePub3 but changes just enough to mess up other readers. First the extension is changed from .epub to .ibook, but more importantly Apple use non-standard (and apparently undocumented) CSS. End result? "This piece of code is going to be gobbledygook to all web browsers and all ePub reading systems."(except those from Apple, ofcourse) From an evaulation I did a few years ago: "What's your favourite feature of this learning resource?"--The print button. Sad, maybe, but realistically it will help some learners if you web pages and ePub texts can be rendered in print. As an OER producer you'll want to author once but provide multiple renderings for different platforms. WeasyPrint might help with that: it is open source software tyhat converts HTML/CSS documents to pdf. Basically does "@media print" better than browsers. 
"Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. Build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences." 
This relates to a legal objection to a technical solution to resource discovery: "To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material “alignment”—a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers’ copyrights." OER Copy tracking using Google Analytics...
JS which adds to Google analytics an “event” each time someone either “click copy”s or uses a keyboard shortcut to copy from a webpage. Blackboard's range of services that support the use of of OS technologies incl. Moodle and Sakai. 
Free, open-source, high-quality textbooks for your college course. OpenStax College is an initiative of Rice University and Connexions. Free textbooks developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements... Abstract: "OERPub is a simple, open API for publishing OER that supports software and services that help authors create, adapt, and publish open education resources that can be shared and remixed. The API is also intended to encourage more open libraries of content that support remixable content, by making authoring and remixing easier. The API described in this specification is built on SWORD, a public standard for depositing resources into repositories."
by Kathi Fletcher, Shuttleworth fellow, JISC Sword v2 project, connexions... 
A google spreadsheet you can copy and modify to show who is bookmarking your resource in Diigo. A useful pattern that could be reproduced for other bookmarking/sharing sites (like delicious, er . . .) This prototype was built to show a method for making use of standards alignment data that resides in the Learning Registry to suggest resources that an educa... Collaboration among open education innovators creates rich learning opportunities for independent learners 
A bit of retrospective, telling the story of efforts in UK HE and elsewhere to share teaching and learning resources, with a focus on JISC and CETIS's activities. I find this sort of thing useful as a check on whether the reasons and circumstances that lead to the approaches we take now still apply. |
Another tool for converting HTMLto pdf, allowing OER publishers to author once and render for different plantforms. This time using the well supported webkit engine. 
In a recent video interview, O'Reilly's Sanders Kleinfeld addressed a number issues surrounding ebook formats. He also talked about how vendors are among the biggest obstacles to an open, universal ebook standard and the end of DRM. "A group of folks that participate on the Connexions’ Technical Committee wanted a way to broaden that discussion to the wider OER and OER tools community, attract new partners and collaborators, and yet stay focused on the principles of remixability. Thus was born the new oerpub-dev mailing list." Dan Brickley presents schema.org, a set of extensible schemas that enables webmasters to embed structured data on their web pages for use by search engines. ... If you use schema.org the search engines will better describe your site, it's also a toe in the water of giving the search engines more of a clue of what your site is about. There are some remarkable numbers in this. One that's relevant to OER is that authors' intial set up for their repository lead to only 18% of its content being indexed by Google. Most of the paper considers Google Scholar (which only indexed 1 in a thousand of their papers), but I'm intrigued: how does a platform for putting resources on the web manage to hide so much stuff from Google?
As far as I know most repositories hosting UKOER resources do better than this. 
An intitial rough draft of the intro to Rob Reynold's new book (drafts of all chapter will be posted as he writes them). It will be a book about making text books and other online learning content using ideas taken from hacker culture. [via Stephen Downes Part of Open Textbook Authoring Tools series from Scott Leslie. 
New features that will be appearing in Google Analytics and how they can be used for tracking resource use. 
PIMPS (put in many places and syndicate) API toolkit used by OER projects at Newcastle's MEDEV, which offers the possibility upload resources / resource descriptions to many places at once. 
Viewshare is a free platform for generating and customizing views (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow users to experience your digital collections. One of the biggest surprises to those of us who come to ebook development from the web development side of things is the scarcity of documentation. 
From Pat Lockley: "Some of you might have heard about Jlern and the learning registry (see learningregistry.org or http://jlernexperiment.wordpress.com/). The learning registry system isn't quite as straight forward to submit to as you might be used to, so I made an RSS to Lr submitting tool. You give it an RSS feed, and it shows you the URLs in the feed and then allows you to submit them. It's very basic, but has a web front end" |
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