My day was made today reading this post from Jim Groom: "Proud Spammer of Open University Courses" describing how he has pulled a couple of OpenLearn units into Wordpress via the OpenLearn unit RSS feeds, and republished them in a Wordpress environment:
I pulled the Open University courses feeds into individual blogs using Wp-o-Matic, a tried and true spamblogging plugin. And I am pretty excited by the results. (As an aside, I find great pleasure in re-purposing the wicked tools of spammers to make re-publishing open educational resources that much easier.
(Brian Lamb hails it too, also referencing a move on the eduglu front: With visions of EduGlu dancing in their twisted spamblogging heads...)
Here are a couple of examples: A course on Goya, and a course on Hume
The initiative was set in motion by a David Wiley post reporting on the publication of an opencourseware course via a blog, and a comment (legitimised by Downes) I made on a couple of trackback posts to it saying how I been itching to see someone experiment with importing some OpenLearn RSS feeds into a blog - Jim inherited the itch and promptly scratched it, taking the prize IMHO for the first third party, scaleably useful, mashup reuse of OpenLearn material :-)
With the concept now proven, comes step two - engaging a community around the resource...
Just in passing, Jim's comment about reusing a spam tool to get the content into the blog was an interesting one - and made me idly wonder whether it would be a good or a bad thing if the sploggers started using OpenLearn content as a hook into their ad-sales? It may go against the license terms, but so what, if the intention of initiatives like OpenLearn is to get a wider exposure for the materials (it would also suggest that maybe OpenLearn was missing out on some SEO tricks?)?
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Tags: openlearn, nolookingback, itoldyouso, blog, wpOpenLearn, oer
Posted by ajh59 at February 17, 2008 01:59 PMHello, Tony,
This post -- among others -- got me doing some thinking re the relationship b/w open courseware and more open learning systems --
I put the general outline together in a post over at the OA blog: http://openacademic.org/news/oers-publishing-easy-part
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by: Bill Fitzgerald at February 18, 2008 12:51 AMTony,
I agree with you entirely in regards to the hard part being community, especially with your RSS which made the import so easy :) The community is the real question mark, but a great advantage i see with this model is that the ease of use may very well make a big difference. The model for republishing in WP you suggested in the comments on Brian Lamb's blog encouraged me to try this, but after the experiment and reading this post, I immediately recognize just how cool this can be with a critical mass around it. I mean "the first third party, scaleably useful, mashup reuse of OpenLearn material" is pretty major.
Additionally, the ability to pull several courses into one blog and get rid of what you don't want and reorganize what you do is trivial in WP, not sure why so many suggest you need a more "powerful" CMS. It would be nice, I guess, but I don't think it will make things any simpler. As those courses stand now, it would be simple to remix these courses with very little overhead, and with a system like WPMu (my personal favorite) the user experience and the sense of "ownership," aesthetics, and freedom is unparalelled, in my opinion.
I'm glad to have been a guinea pig, and I look forward to more mashups, this time with WP/MediaWiki? In the mean time, thanks for the push to experiment.
Posted by: Jim Groom at February 19, 2008 04:58 AM