October 12, 2007
My RadiOBU Confusion...
Earlier today, I got tipped off to an Open2.net/OU programme listing feed (which I have vague memories of being told about, but don't recall having seen on the Open2.net site, where it should really be autodiscoverable on every page ;-)
What this means is I can now use something like 30 boxes to get a calendar interface to the listings, and probably also generate an iCal feed easily enough (what would be handy would be to have the programme listing available in a Google calendar...).
(Just in passing, 30Boxes calendars can be added to a Facebook profile....)
Digging around the Open2.net site, I also found a handful of podcast feeds: for Ever Wondered About Food, The Things We Forgot To Remember, Weekend Break and Talking Languages, in fact.
It was trivial to add these to a Grazr reading list using the new Grazr 2.0 drag'n'drop reading list interface, along with a current podcast feed from the Material World website on the BBC Radio 4 website (Material World is another programme that the OBU (the Open Broadcasting Unit) have a hand in producing.
I also added an 'enriched' Click On bookmark feed using a feed enrichment pipe that augments a delicious RSS feed with media attachments, in this case a link to a ram (Real Audio) stream - many widgets (such as Grazr) will embed an appropriate player if they find a media enclosure in a feed, so you can play it without having to leave the widget at all.
Stumbling across some Reith Lecture pages, I bookmarked the Real Audio feeds to delicious with some appropriate tags to seed a couple of Reith Lecture "channels" too.
(I need to do a new pipe that generates the ram enclosure URL automatically from a bookmarked webpage on the BBC website, assuming an appropriate URL mapping exists, of course!)
So here's a link to my RadiOBU Grazr Widget:
And here's where confusion sets it... How, why and if at all is this interesting? (I've doodled around this before, in What's on the Web RadiOU?.)
A couple of weeks ago, I put together an OU SplashCast player containing several OU related channels (I'll add some radio ones when I get a chance). And as I put together more OBU related programmes, I'll add them to that channel and this RadiOBU ("radio, boo") widget. But so what?
I'm starting to feel as if I've found lots of OU broadcast related jigsaw pieces (including some from the BBC Programme Catalogue), but I've no idea whether they can be put together in a compelling way?
For what it's worth, here are couple more bits of confetti that are muddling my thinking further, both from meetings today:
- an interest in our new department to produce regular "podcast" material for our department website. My impression was that this could be something like Channel 9 rather than Diggnation, a short form Talking With Talis rather than TWiT, but we'll have to wait and see...
- "traditional production models rule, okay?" - a takeaway for me today from a course team meeting for a course that will start in 2010, is that we invest a huge amount of effort in course production, but very little in exploiting OBU productions, particularly radio. IMHO, the recent series of Click On could be used as the basis of an interesting magazine website, with content to wrap the "listen againable" programmes, and suitably selected and filtered news feeds providing fresh content to keep the pages up-to-date without human intervention. I started to explore this in the context of Click On series 1 some time ago: Click On in Context. Of course, OBU already do this to a certain extent (if you need a Netvibes tutorial, why not point pople to the Click On Web2.0 Workshop, for example?) but we donlt exploit OBU material at a departmental publicity level.
OpenLearn is putting out more and more content all the time, and yet I get the feeling we don't really have much idea about how we can really start to exploit its publicity-through-use value alongside the public service education payoff.
Maybe it will all become clear to me in the morning...
UPDATE: because it was so easy to do, I created a proof-of-concept RadiOBU Facebook application that allows you to listen to RadiOBU from a Facebook application canvas page.
Tags: openlearn, obu, OU, broadcast
Posted by ajh59 at October 12, 2007 11:01 PM