OUseful Info

OpenLearn/OCW Reading Lists

I was just having a quick look at the MIT OpenCourseware site to see how they structured their content (it is, of course, just enough different on each page to make screen scraping a chore...) and many of the courses listed there have a reading list associated with the course.

For example, here's the reading list for a course on sustainable development. In this case, the reading list is split into a section detailing recomended books, and then additional readings (categorised as required reading, related reading or essential reading) for each of the weekly study topics.

In the same way that I think there is a lot useful something (information, definitely, but also maybe: knowledge? structure? relevance? focus?) tied up in the set of external links that are included in online teaching materials (see Making the Most of Links from Online Course Materials to External Websites for example) I think the same is probably true of traditional reading lists.

So methinks it would be really handy if the lists were made available in a machine readable way that supported syndication.

To make things easy, something like Amazon Listmania! lists looks like it could provide a pre-established way of: a) storing lists of ISBNs; b) linking directly to book info/book covers etc; and c) offering the possibility of revenue generation (by associating the list with an AMazon affiliate ID somehow, so if someone buys a book via your list, you get a cut...)

To get things gloing in the 'how does it actually feel when you try it' game, I produced a list based on the Recommended Reading list for the aforementioned MIT OCW course. Here it is: MIT OCW: 17.181/2 Sustainable Development (rec. reading) Listmania List.

Using a third party service that leverages Amazon ECS webservices, here's a link to an RSS version of the list: MIT OCW: 17.181/2 Sustainable Development (rec. reading) Listmania List [RSS]. This feed actually includes my Amazon affiliate ID.

The feed can of course now be displayed in a wide variety of ways, from Grazr widgets to webtops, blogs and maybe even VLEs ;-)

Issues? One of the ISBNs in the reading list wasn't recognised. Whilst it was easy enough to set up the Listmania! list and add the ISBNs to it, it wasn't obvious what comment to apply to each book.

More significant questions are sure to arise when it comes to actually putting the weekly readings into a list. For example, how to a) identify the topic (maybe the list name?); and b) specify sections/pages to be read (use the comment field, I guess?).

Listmania lists only work for ISBNs, so referencing academic articles etc. is more problematic.

Maybe a more useful tool - in academic circles at least - would be to use something like CiteULike?

That said, using a Listmania! list may have some useful side effects.

Firstly, it sets up an association between titles that Amazon may draw on as part of its book recommendation algorithm.

Secondly, people shopping on Amazon may have your list pulled up as they search. In terms of supporting informal learning, this may be quite handy (even more so if there were a way of associating the Listmania! list with a URL, such as that of an Open Content course associated with the list?)

A more extreme approach could even see the reading list being used to seed an Amazon aStore, like my own first crude attempt: Geek Lit ;-)

This represents a more heavyweight approach to generating revenue via an open content course/free informal learning course, of course (3x ?!), but how else are such initiatives to become financially sustainable? (Ads, maybe?).

PS It turns out that you can actually use a Listmania! list to seed an aStore, so it took less than 10 mins to use the above OCW/Sustainable Development list to seed this Sustainable Development aStore (yes, I know I probably shouldn't have used the MIT/OCW logo...)

The aStores also support subpages, so if a Listmania! list for each weekly topic of the OCW course was provided, these could be trivially used to pipe content into weekly book requirement pages within the aStore. (Using Listmania! lists to store the books for each topic is better than entering the books explicitly into an aStore page, because it makes syndication so much easier).

With the addition of something like the OU Library Traveller greasemonkey script, looking up a book on the aStore wil also return physical and/or ebook holdings info for that book from the OU library.

Posted by ajh59 at January 7, 2007 02:05 PM