This post by Phil Barker from over a year ago has been getting renewed interest recently. It stresses the need to help humans (well, developers ;-p) find information about how your website works. Seems to me this links to how to describe to humans what you do with their data too. Being more clear about how this website works, what data it collects, what data it exposes. In my head this connects to Brian Kelly's posts about cookies and usage data. (I feel a diagram coming on). 
I am pretty sure that usage information is a key value gained from content on the free web (and the paid web, for that matter). So getting better at sharing and understanding usage data is key to sustaining investment in the free web. In this post Brian argues that blogs should share their usage data. Ever wished it was easier to understand Creative Common's open licenses? Well so does Prof Randy Weasel - and luckily his good friend Dr Kooei Goose can expl... ![40 days to let you see the impact of the OER Programme #ukoer [day 1] – MASHe | open and free content | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/ce_eRyQB0UdN4vHncCpy3Dl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
Because a picture paints a thousand words, JISC CETIS and I have commissioned Martin Hawksey to do some visualisation work on the UKOER Programme. I have specified some work around visualising OER outputs from the projects, we will find out what picture the available data paints. We expect to learn some lessons about data quality on the way, which we will share back with the content providers. This project was funded via a CETIS mini project grant of £10k (a sister project to Capret). The important thing is that the codebase is on github. I love the idea of an enriched bookmarking tool that can be enhanced in lots of directions. Great work from the Newcastle University team, learning parallel with ISKME OER Commons, hopefully all those brains will help us develop the best tools. First on my wishlist - draw on OpenAttribute standard for embedded licensing metadata and autofill the fields supported by that. Developers - I challenge thee! 
Comic book approach to explaining the ins and outs of CC licenses suitable for children. Love the range of remixes and translations on this cc wiki site. <- FANTASTIC! Via ChrisPegler 
Nice reflective piece by David Kernohan on the learning curve we're all on with the UKOER programme (now in its third phase). My recent update of JISC/HEA work around open educational resources. A little bit of genius from the University of Nottingham and Pat Lockley. You know the faff of downloading an image from flickr, then laboriously copying and pasting and editing information about it so you can attribute it, to comply with the "BY" requirement of CC licences? This little tool searches across openly licensed resources, displays them, then offers to do the hard work for you. It gives you the image with a little black bar on the bottom with the attribution in it. I use it for images in my presentations. I hope others see the cleverness and copy the model. Attributed to the University of Nottingham and Pat Lockley, of course ;-) 
This is a direct link to JISC digital media's guidance on finding open image, audio and video resources that are available to reuse. Plenty of good stuff from this service but this is a particularly useful list for the purposes of this scoopit. Discover digital resources and archives to support study in arts and culture, economics, health, history, politics, law, lifestyle, science, technology and sport. Lots of free content here (no authentication, no cost) as well as content available to subscribers through JISC Collections. I love the interface. In fact its so good we're borrowing it to create a prototype for UK OER Collections. You'll probably recognise bitly links. But have you got a bitly account? The brilliant thing about bitly, in my opinion, is not so much the shortener but the free analytics are great. You can sit and watch as the links you share get shared and clicked. And once you have "bitlyed"(?) a url, you can see summary activity of other people's bitlys to the exact same url. Its not perfect but its pretty damn useful. 
The IPR expertise underpinning the UK OER Programme can be found here. A collaboration of JISC Legal and Web2Rights, including the fabulous Naomi Korn, and with input from CC UK, there are guidance papers, templates, wizards and other tools available to you to not only use but also repurpose. Seriously brilliant stuff here. CC compatibility wizard, how open are you? self assessment, risk calculator ... we're really proud of these resources and there are more on the way. |
since usage data is so important (see previous scoopit!) its important to understand what the EU cookie legislation allows. In THIS post Brian collates info about the information commissioner's office guidance on cookies. 
Does OER reduce inequality between rich and poor? It doesn't harm the poor but does it reduce the gap? Read on ... 
Nice post asking what can be done under the terms of the CLA ... can you have open practice using traditionally licensed resources? A question worth revisiting! 
It was with great pleasure that I released this Call for Proposals on 29th November 2011. I'm really excited about the projects that might emerge from this strand! 
Lovely example of a crowdsourced book, looks like lots of nice pieces here. I want to do something similar on "digital infrastructure for open content" next year. Direct question about changes to the economic model behind academia as we move towards open scholarship models. The author asks about the total cost of doing things differently. I think things like the Houghton report http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelssummary.aspx modelled this sort of change, but we need more ... JISC is exploring how to model changes in economic structures to enable changes in practice. Gill Kirkup asks an important question that those of us advocating change need to articulate good answers for! Final report of phase 2 of the UK OER Programme by the excellent evaluation & synthesis team. Plenty to chew over in this. I find the summary of key lessons particularly useful. 
i have been following Kathi's work with interest and i'm looking forward to meeting with her soon. the world of APIs and ecosystems she talks about chimes strongly with my picture of the space we're working in. its also great to see SWORD being developed like this. 
This is well worth downloading and supporting. It looks in the metadata of the webpage for licensing information and displays it in your browser. As I suggested in the post about the Capret tool, these sorts of machine readable licences and autoattribution tools could change the nature of the web, IMHO. 
The titles and covers of these free e-books are seriously enticing, but there is more to it than that. Funded by JISC, they are collaborative ebooks that are designed to grow over time. I think this collection has the wow factor. 
There is a wealth of materials here (over 12,000 items), and we know it only scratches the surface of what is being shared by academics and teachers. I've been involved with Jorum, wearing various hats, since it started in 2003, and now I oversee it on behalf of JISC. We're thinking hard about what Jorum needs to be for it to bring greater benefits. Very open to feedback! 
If you're interested in the technology issues around OER then this is a must-visit. There's a huge amount here on issues like discovery, standards, platforms and tracking. We've lots more planned too. |
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