As I understand it, two of the many arguments used to support the original case for OpenLearn were that OU courses are not just about the content (so we wouldn't be stealing business from ourselves by giving content away) and that useful open content learning materials are not just PDFs stuck up on the web but that community and learner support tools are important as well.
I've been thinking long and hard about whether I should do what I'm about to do in this post - but I've decided 'what the heck', if nothing else to try and prompt a discussion about where we think users will get most benefit from using OpenLearn content, how we can support user annotation of materials, (and I guess by implication, what's the best way of bringing in community support and discussion forums).
So here goes...
Some time ago, I posted about the rather wonderful Firefox Scrapbook extension, showing how it could be used to rip complete courses (as HTML web pages) from the OpenLearn site ("Annotating Local, Navigable Copies of OpenLearn Content").
I didn't post a link to a sample then, but I am going to now (which is what I was umming and aahing about):
LivingWiththeInternet_KeepingItSafe.zip (compressed Scrapbook file)
If you have Scrapbook installed in your browser, you can download the file, unzip it and then import the course into your Scrapbook. Try it... (If you don't have Scrapbook installed, and you are using Firefox, download it and just give it a go...)
(In fact, it's just a compressed folder containing ripped copies of the OpenLearn pages for T180_8, which can be viewed without the need for Scrapbook.)
So - having made that gesture - how does it feel to have the OpenLearn content exposed in that way?
Firstly, the content is a direct rip of the actual OpenLearn site. Most of the links link back to OpenLearn - when creating the Scrapbook file the only pages I downloaded were the content pages for T180_8 and the legal notices (copright, privacy and so on), my feeling being it would be prudent to retain these notices in an offline copy if this were an official distribution. Even so, it's not a very polite way for me, as essentially a third party, to redistribute the content.
Note that I could have generated my own HTML pages from a legitimate download of the XML source material for the course obtained from LabSpace and then used these as the basis for my Scrapbook file. But I didn't (because it requires desktop tools I still haven't set up).
Secondly, users can now download the content without OpenLearn tracking (though I do have analytics running (on the blog site) that OpenLearn are welcome to inspect). This loss of usage information is easily countered by providing content downloads direct from the the OpenLearn site or maybe even setting up some Tubes to support distribution and maybe build a remix community who are interested in pulling in and sharing additional resources, maybe?
Thirdly, offline use of materials means that usage cannot be tracked using OpenLearn's web analytics (though I'm not sure to what extent this information is being collected and analysed anyway?)
On the other hand, offline use (particularly within Scrapbook) does mean that users can annotate the course materials as they see fit (as mentioned in my earlier Scrapbook post), as well as deleting elements of it.
It would be easy enough to support online annotation of the OpenLearn hosted content of course (that post is a bit out of date, methinks, and many more possibilities are now available...) but I don't think that any such tools are enabled - as yet - on either OpenLearn or LabSpace. (As far as I am aware, tool support for content manipulation is focusing on Compendium, which I have to say I really struggle with... Maybe I've got too used to easy to start playing with online tools? The problem with power tools like Compendium is that they are often a pain to use for novices...)
Another thing in favour of offline use, particularly for 'remixers', maybe, is that they can edit the HTML (in code or WYSWYG views) on their own machines, either using desktop HTML editors or browser based document editing tools (such as Codetch).
This is a far easier way for most people of revising the actual content than downloading the LabSpace hosted XML document for the unit and finding an XML editor to edit it in (and XSL stylesheet and processor to generate pages from).
My own experiments using Codetch to edit T180_8 HTML files in my Scrapbook directory has had mixed success (some of the spaces got mangled (maybe ones that were originally characters?)) but the potential for the combined use of Scrapbook and Codetch extensions in a browser based OpenLearn material revising environment seems promising.
By preserving the links to the forums (as long as the URLs don't change) users of the downloaded content will be able to interact with the forums just as they would from the original site (if they are online, that is - they have access to the downloaded content offline, of course...).
However, users are now also in a position to share their annotated versions of the course content with others (although not as effectively as they could with an online annotation server).
The theme I am exploring with respect to OpenLearn content is perhaps best described by 'how can we get the content out there'? Wherever there is...
Just as providing an effective learning experience is not really about making content available, building an effective learning community is not just about colocating content pages and course forums in a Muddled learning environment.
The content can go elsewhere, and I'd suggest there are good reasons for allowing users offline access to it. It won't necessarily mean the users are any less likely to engage in a community that has formed around those materials.
After all, if I'm in a book club, I don't limit my reading time to when I am in the company of all the other members of the book club, do I?
Posted by ajh59 at January 10, 2007 05:11 PM