OUseful Info

So What Exactly Is An OpenLearn Content Remix?

A couple of things the OpenLearn project tries to sell itself on are the provision of individual and community learning tools, and ability to 'remix' OpenLearn materials.

The community and learning tools include the Compendium sensemaker/concept mapper (it's a download, so there's no web app to link to... ;-), Flashmeeting and the Moodle forums (?!), as well as the MSG (Jabber) instant messaging tool (which is now the open source MSG lite web messenger).

The remix opportunities are afforded by the open Creative Commons license, the provision of XML download/Moodle module exports (as well as uploads/imports in the same formats) and the aforementioned desktop Compendium application.

Laura Dewis and Stuart Brown (who both blog on Open Air) have been doing some good stuff in looking at ways of getting Openlearn content into spaces where people may interact with it (and not just using OpenLearn RSS ;-)

However, a problem I have had all along with OpenLearn is 'why bother going there?'

(I'm going to stick my neck out a bit in this post, so it's worth saying that I'm not part of the OpenLearn team, and the opinions expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employers...)

So - first comment - I don't know how many informal learners would choose - or even consider - to do an online course that is - to all intents and purposes - formally presented?

Maybe they'd go to an evening class for formal/informal study? But I'm not convinced about them doing it online...

A use case I can see is people dipping into course material when they are searching for something vaguely instructional on a particular topic.

For example, I do a lot of queries along the lines of 'xsl for-each tutorial' (tutorial is a keyword I have found to be useful for certain sorts of content, as is 'howto'). I will then look at the particular thing I want to know about and - maybe - look around the edges at what else is there. Or bookmark the site and add it to a searchfeedr profile on a particular topic.

Reuse of courses at a course level is another use case of course (that is, another reason to visit the OpenLearn site and look through a course), but one that applies to a different user group - that of instructor, rather than independent, individual learner.

However, I still don't know what an effective example of an 'openlearn remix' would be - either at an individual learner or instructor level (though I guess the instructor example would be to take some content and import it into another Moodle environment, then delete the bits you don't want, presumably. I am assuming, of course, that the Moodle export option is an all-or-nothing export of course - but maybe it's friendly than that and lets you choose what you want to take from a particular unit?).

As I understand it, a condition of funding for the OpenLearn team is to get a certain number of hours of content up on the OpenLearn site.

In my opinion, there's enough there now to suggest that the balance of tools, content, community, and sharing/remixing is not quite right.

And my tinkering with XML2whatever toys suggests the schema's not as tight as it could be; or being applied as uniformly as it it might to content across the different subject areas.

Maybe adding more and more content to the site will encourage people to start mixing content outside of OpenLearn - and contributing more back - (dreams of OpenLearn overtaking wikipedia here ;-) but I suspect it won't... Because for OpenLearn, I don't necessarily think that - given the current architecture of the site - more is necessarily different. And I think different is what's required... (though that said, with every new tool and every minor redesign, things do improve slightly...).

One solution may be for the team to spend a bit of time putting up exemplar reuse cases/mashups whatever the funders say...(?!) if, that is, the team is trusted to do the right thing, rather than what they thought was the right thing way back when while the bid was being pulled together but is now proving - arguably - to be the wrong approach. That is sort of to say - continued addition of content using the same recipe that was used to create the first tranche of content is perhaps not adding as much value as another recipe might?

If one of the OpenLearn objectives is to benefit from the same reuse and share, virally marketed hype of sites like YouTube etc., (though closer to OpenLearn are things like scribd.com, slideshare.net, videolectures.net, elgg.net) the content needs to be reusable in usefully shareable chunks.

To take off, the site needs people to stumble across the neat stuff on page one, watch it, share it, look at what's related to it. I've found all sorts of useful presentations on Slideshare, as well as YouTube, by seeing what's related to something I'm already looking at/have already discovered and know to be relevant - socially mediated discovery is really starting to work for me (at times... ;-).

Effective deep linking from the search engines directly into the content is also required - everything needs its own URL, (and to keep the hackers happy, these URLs should conform to some sort of well-structured pattern (I could mention OpenLearn navigation here...)).

So how easy is it for me to share a video clip on OpenLearn with you (a) if I can find it; and (b) err - is there anything I'd want to share anyway?

(Check out the OpenLearn media browser - Ed.! or The Fall and Rise of VideOU)

Okay - so maybe OpenLearn is not like a YouTube and will never get that sort of reach (like Wikipedia... err...).

But the comparison is worth making, I think - because it forces you to look at the sorts of things that are being successfully shared and remixed.

So how do we get people really engaging with the content in a way that makes them want to repurpose it, even if that only means sharing it...

Maybe we need to unpack the idea of "share"? Sharing is, after all, one of the ways you grow sites virally.

How about this for starters: as a learner, I may share a piece of content in a blog post or via a forum because it is 'a neat explanation of' something; or the explanation gives me a feelgood 'so that's how it works' feeling. (Include in this use case any other reasons you can think of for saying 'check this out folks - a really neat whatevr' (that's a web 2.0 whatever, yes? Technical term...;-)

In addition, it's probably also worth thinking about how people who are sharing resources - or links to particular bits of content - might describe it in a blog post, forum post, email, face to face lecture/lesson/workshop/seminar etc. (This is maybe a bit like the "inside out' model of scenario development put forward by Peter Schwartz et al.?)

Then, when you have a feel for how people would introduce this stuff into their own performances (where a performance is a lecture/workshop/blog post etc;-) you can start to think 'okay - so how do we make it easy for people to get to that point?' That is, what would they have had to do/experience in order for them to be making use of the content in that way, and how would the content have to be presented to them in order to make it easy for them to use that content?

Another, proactive, way forward that would increase the number of content hours on the OpenLearn site (although not in the sense the project has defined those hours, I suspect...) would be to start committing resource to producing example remixes.

The easiest remix is not really a remix at all, and barely counts as a reuse, though it is a republish or represent - just take a direct copy of someone else's content and make it your own property/publish it on your own site, in your own content area etc.; which is not that interesting... but at least it shows someone else cares enough to take a copy. And it's another place for eyeballs to see that content.

The next but several easiest remix (;-) is to take a direct copy of someone else's remix pattern and then change a couple of bits contained within that pattern; by a pattern, I mean something like: a dash of OpenLearn content, a drizzle of a youTube movie and a splash or two of BBC news item per page. Retain the pattern (or maybe 'remix template'?), change the content.

One of the things I'm exploring with Stringle are patterns - or arrangements - of content that maybe appropriate for OU/BBC automated remixes. So for example, the Click On Stringle demo has a particular (templated) navigation pattern:

Okay - this post has gone on way too long - I'll end it with some news: the OpenLearn Conference in October will have a keynote from John Seeley Brown; read the announcement here. Maybe I will have to go after all...;-)

Posted by ajh59 at April 3, 2007 06:01 PM