I've just been setting a couple more OpenLearn_daily feeds up (see the complete list of OpenLearn courses delivered via feedcycle.co.uk), in particular on business topics ('The Market Led Organisation' and 'An introduction to business cultures') and been looking at 'easy' ways of adding further value to the feeds.
Here's what I've come up with so far.
Firstly, a link at the top of each item to the OpenLearn forum associated with the course. This is an attempt to engage readers of an OpenLearn_daily feed with the wider OpenLearn community following that unit.
I'm not convinced - usability and engagement wise - about how and where in the item to provide this link? Maybe it would be better at the bottom of a post, which is where you'd find the comment link on a blog post. Topping and tailing the post with a link to the forum is maybe overkill. Thinking about it, I'm going to move the forum links to the bottom of each item.
Secondly, I have produced an Amazon Listmania list for the books referenced in each course: Books referenced in 'The Market Led Organisation', Books referenced in 'An introduction to business cultures'.
I'm not sure exactly how to use this yet, but as it's relatively easy to get a feed from a list using Amazon web services, it may be worth exploring a StringLE assembly around a course?
Having created the Listmania lists (which would have been easier if the books in the OpenLearn XML had been tagged with an ISBN number...) it was trivial to import them into an Amazon aStore. So here's what may become a work in progress, subject to change in at the least the styling/presentation/design, and possibly likely to grow over time: the OpenLearn_daily Amazon Store.
At the moment this is populated with books from just the two courses mentioned above, but as I've pretty much decided to use Listmania lists to organise lists of books associated with the OpenLearn courses I RSS/feedcycle-ify (?!) it won't be any extra effort to then add them into the OpenLearn_daily Store.
The 'similar items' Amazon feature potentially adds remix value, too, and it'll be interesting to see how Amapedia, Amazon's new 'wiki review' site develops to see whether or not useful content appears there.
The Amazon aStore doesn't seem to offer the Amazon 'Search Inside' feature, so I'm exploring a couple of ways of getting 'search inside' like functionality into the feed content.
At the moment, I do this from the Bibliography (which appears as the last item in the feedcycle) by linking to either Amazon (to give something like this), or Google books (to give something like this) .
In future, what I'd like to explore is pulling links in at the point of reference, but I'm not sure how best to do this. If it's possible to deep link into the actual page(s) referenced - using either Amazon, or Google books etc - that would be really neat :-) Especially if it could be done automatically. Which would require references being properly (i.e. semantically) marked up in the source XML. Which they probably aren't...
I don't know whether the OpenLearn/LabSpace metadata file supports the listing of at least book references (keyed by ISBN, ideally) but providing this info would potentially facilitate automatic book related remixing.
Similarly, a list of links to external sites would be useful, though it's easy enough to generate from the XML and is on my to do list. For a brief, preliminary discussion of why I think link collections are useful, and how I think they may be reused, see Making the Most of Links from Online Course Materials to External Websites.
Posted by ajh59 at January 28, 2007 12:00 AM