June 25, 2008

SocialLearn Workshop - Open Invite - July 1/2, 2008

Some eagle-eyed readers may well have picked up on reports about the SocialLearn workshop that was run over a couple of days last week for members of the OU community (see a write up here, here or here, or even...

Tags: , , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2008

OER Custom Search Engine

In an OLDaily post last week (University Learning = OCW + OER = FREE! which picked up on a blog post of the same name by Zaid Ali Alsagoff (University Learning = OCW + OER = FREE!) and which contained...

Tags: , , , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2008

Single Item RSS Feeds from OpenLearn Pages

Picking up on Embedding Single OpenLearn Unit Pages in an Arbitrary Blog Post, it seems some people are never satisfied, (?!;-) so here's a bookmarklet (I think) that will take you from a page within and OpenLearn unit, to a...

Tags: , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 02:19 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2008

Embedding Single OpenLearn Unit Pages in an Arbitrary Blog Post

I'm really pushed for time at the moment, so it's looking like the Visual Gadgets uncourse blog is going to have to be produced with as little effort, and as in little time, as possible...! ;-) The approach I want...

Tags: , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2008

Some Minor Observations on Reusing OpenLearn Content

Internet access has been somewhat fractured for me this week (and will continue to be...), so I scheduled several posts for the Digital Worlds blog to try can keep the daily delivery thing running... To write several posts that would...

Tags: , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 11:08 AM | Comments (2)

February 17, 2008

Food for Thought - OpenLearn Spamblogs? and a Welcome to wpOpenLearn

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...

Tags: , , , , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 01:59 PM | Comments (2)

February 12, 2008

OpenLearn XML Processor, Redux

Some time ago, I posted about an OpenLearn XML processor, that parsed the XML representation of a sample OpenLearn XML unit in various ways, disaggregating the unit into component assets, such as images, audio and video items, and so on....

Tags: , , , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 05:11 PM | Comments (2)

February 10, 2008

The Problem With OpenLearn...

Downes linked to a post yesterday - Is the Open University making the right content open in OpenLearn? - that raised various concerns about the value of the OpenLearn endeavor. The post also picked up on another post - OpenLearn...

Tags: , , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 01:11 AM | Comments (6)

January 21, 2008

eLearning Design Patterns - "Quotes in Context" Links

At a social:learn workshop last week, Martin declared that he'd get me interested in the notion of learning design eventually, but he's not going to have it easy! I can maybe see some utility in using the approach as a...

Tags: , , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 02:54 PM | Comments (1)

January 18, 2008

Yale OpenCourseware Feeds

Continuing the theme of feedifying open courseware from around the world (why they don't make RSS versions of courses available, I really don't know...), here's a proof of concept demo of using a handful of Yahoo Pipes and bit of...

Tags: , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 10:10 AM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2008

MIT Courseware for High Schools - in a Grazr Widget

I've just been having a little tinker with a couple of OPML scripts that combine the Yahoo Pipe scrapers that generate RSS feeds from MITs Courseware for High Schools to deliver a portable feed browser for all of that content.......
Posted by ajh59 at 07:49 PM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2008

Quoting from Books Using Embedded Quotes

Some time last year, I posted a thought about Deep Linking 2.0 - What Counts as Fair Use of Online Book Extracts?, where I pondered whether we could start linking in to clips and quotes from books that are at...

Tags: ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 12:29 PM | Comments (3)

December 10, 2007

MIT Open Courseware for High Schools

It seems that MIT have started to reach out to High Schools with the MIT open courseware. Apparently, "there are thousands of resources designed just for high school teachers and students, including 15,000 lecture notes". Good stuff - I can't...

Tags: ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2007

Hey Babe - Dump the Gorilla...

...was quite possibly the least successful sign I ever used when hitch-hiking years and years ago now (with somebody else, it has to be said), but we'd been stuck at Scratchwood services on the M1 for way too long, and...

Tags: , , , , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 07:34 PM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2007

A Really Simple Question About <embed>

In Reusing Third Party Materials, Not...? I asked the question:[J]ust how we might make use of online, third party materials ... because as far as I can tell, "open content" licenses don't really lubricate the process of reusing such materials...

Tags: , ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 12:46 PM | Comments (3)

October 04, 2007

UC Berkeley Lectures on Youtube, via Grazr

TechCrunch reported today that UC Berkeley have been putting a wide selection of their lectures up on YouTube: UC Berkeley Puts Courses On YouTube, though AJ isn't much impressed... I was intrigued as to whether it's possible to search videos...

Tags: ,

-->
Posted by ajh59 at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

September 24, 2007

Reusing Third Party Materials, Not...?

Over the last year or so, there have been occasional mutterings about how we might go about producing 'contentless' courses - that is, courses light on OU sourced content that reuse third party materials, wherever possible. Many courses in the...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:24 PM | Comments (3)

September 10, 2007

Issues With OpenLearn RSS Feeds - Obtaining User Statistics

[UPDATE: the 'issue' with OpenLearn unit content feeds has now been resolved - all the feeds should be working properly now :-)] Last week, I posted on the newly announced OpenLearn RSS feeds, without testing them in anything other than...
Posted by ajh59 at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2007

OpenLearn RSS - Feed Your Mind

A couple of weeks ago, the OpenLearn team released a host of OpenLearn related RSS feeds as part of the latest release of the OpenLearn environment. OpenLearn "Course Unit List By Topic" Feeds This widget can be used as a...
Posted by ajh59 at 09:47 AM | Comments (1)

September 06, 2007

OpenLearn RSS So Nearly There...

I was just about to write a post talking up the release of RSS listings of OpenLearn courses, as well as the far, far more exciting news that RSS versions of the OpenLearn units themselves are being made available (e.g....
Posted by ajh59 at 09:14 PM | Comments (1)

August 15, 2007

"Feeding from Open Courseware" - OpenLearn Conference Abstract

Earlier today, I had to combine a couple of abstracts I'd put in to the OpenLearn Conference for the single speaking slot I've been allocated. Although I normally keep everything, I couldn't track down either of the abstracts for quite...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2007

OpenLearn Feed Annotation Streams

One of the things a few of us have been looking at informally over the last few months are ways of assembling relevant educational content around Open2.net broadcast related content - think "Sleevenotez for education", or something similar. To be...
Posted by ajh59 at 07:51 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2007

Wikipeadia + OpenLearn?

I spent huge chunks of today tinkering on and off with different combinations of Wikipedia and OpenLearn content in wikimindmap style but none of it was very satisfactory. Here are a few things I noticed/tried along the way (nothing more...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)

Re-Presentation and Re-Interpretation of OpenLearn XML Materials

Thinking back over many of my Openlearn doodles, it would be hard to see many of the experiments as remix or reuse examples using any common understanding of those terms. According to the OpenLearn Competition page, reuse and remix are...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:29 AM | Comments (1)

Mapping OpenLearn XML, Pass 2

Okay, so here's a second pass at mapping the links contained in an OpenLearn Unit, partly in response to Stephen's general criticism (which I totally agree with) about the misuse of mindmaps for simply "listing" things without any structure. This...
Posted by ajh59 at 02:23 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2007

OpenLearn Unit Link Map

My feedreader seemed to be full this morning with posts about wikimindmap, which produces a mindmap view of Wikipedia content. At first I thought this was doing something really clever, but a tiny bit of digging suggests they're just link...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:22 PM | Comments (2)

June 20, 2007

OpenLearn Content via a Wiki

When OpenLearn first launched, one of the things I fully expected the playful folk out there to do was to migrate the content into a wiki - just because they could.... As far as I can tell, this hasn't happened...
Posted by ajh59 at 08:15 PM | Comments (3)

June 01, 2007

OpenLearn Remix Competition

Reuse or remix units - and win a prize! We're setting a challenge to educators worldwide to reuse and remix OpenLearn study materials. The aim is to inspire creativity, collaboration and cost reduction in course production, enabling wider access to...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2007

Disaggregating an MIT OpenCourseware Course into Separate RSS Feeds

Picking up on a couple of points raised in An MIT OpenCourseWare Course via an OPML Feed, I've atomised the MIT OpenCourse Course CMS.610 / CMS.922 Media Industries and Systems, Spring 2006 a little further and replaced some of the...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:39 AM | Comments (1)

April 22, 2007

An MIT OpenCourseWare Course via an OPML Feed

Over the weekend, I noticed that MIT OpenCourseWare courses were offering a "Download this Course" option. Intrigued, I immediately grabbed a copy of the CMS.610 / CMS.922 Media Industries and Systems, Spring 2006 course and had a poke around inside...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:04 PM | Comments (1)

April 20, 2007

Innovating from the Inside, Outside

A couple of weeks ago, the OU hosted a workshop with several external consultants about OUr visionary future web strategy (presumably?) Martin Weller gave the heads-up, Stowe Boyd (one of the consultants) added a bit more detail - like suggesting...
Posted by ajh59 at 03:47 PM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2007

OpenLearn Unit Search Hub

Picking up on the previous post, I knocked up a Yahoo Pipe that will use an OpenLearn course unit as an outlinks search hub, demonstrating an automated way of extracting value from a course unit: OpenLearn Unit Outlinks Search Hub...
Posted by ajh59 at 05:53 PM | Comments (1)

OpenLearn Releases Promo Video on YouTube

Stuart Brown tipped me off yesterday to what I believe is the first 'official' institutional upload by the OU to YouTube - and it comes from the OpenLearn team: OpenLearn - free educational materials from the OU Back in February...
Posted by ajh59 at 09:34 AM | Comments (1)

April 03, 2007

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,...
Posted by ajh59 at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2007

Towards an OpenLearn XML (Re)Publishing System

This post is place for me to pop down a link or two to some bits and pieces I've been tinkering with over the last couple of days relating to various transfomations of OpenLearn XML. If I get a chance...
Posted by ajh59 at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2007

The OpenLearn_daily Shop

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'...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2007

Search OpenLearn Anywhere

Just a quickie - I created a Dappit application to search OpenLearn (OpenLearn Search Dapp) - which took all of 10 minutes - so you can now search OpenLearn and get RSS or XML formatted results. I also knocked up...
Posted by ajh59 at 06:44 PM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2007

OpenLearn Content Searchable...

A lazy post this one - the OpenLearn search tool now searches the content of all OpenLearn units (although as far as I know no RSS/web feed of results is available - something I'll try to knock up using Dapper...
Posted by ajh59 at 07:38 PM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2007

OpenLearn Courses Teasers on MySpace

Not of my doing, this simple (and one would like to think effective?) strategy for using the blogging tool on MySpace on the 'official'(?) OpenLearn MySpace page: Generate a teaser question and point to the OpenLearn course that covers it......
Posted by ajh59 at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2007

Downloading OpenLearn Units Directly

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...
Posted by ajh59 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

OpenLearn_daily

I've just set up an OpenLearn_daily website to act as a point of reference for the feedcycle versions of OpenLearn courses that I have - and will continue - to generate. You can find the site at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/openlearndaily. As well...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:32 AM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2007

OpenLearn on your Desktop

The Grazr blog has just turned up this neat web widget to Mac widget, so I couldn't but not give it a go with an OpenLearn course feed in a Grazr widget: You can find the widget here: OpenLearn T180_8...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2007

Video Sharing LabSpace Resources

In part prompted, albeit informally, by a couple of people associated with OpenLearn, I've popped one of the L120 French Ouverture MP4 video resources onto a couple of video sharing sites (YouTube and motionbox). There has been a quite a...
Posted by ajh59 at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2007

Navigating LabSpace

One of the problems I have with the way Moodle is being used for LabSpace/OpenLearn is the truly horrible navigation scheme that has been adopted within a unit: which I tried to improve upon using a variety of OPML widgets...
Posted by ajh59 at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2007

More OpenLearn RSS Feeds...

A quick pointer to a handful of RSS feeds I've just generated from OpenLearn/LabSpace content. Quite a few of them have audio and flash movie resources in them which has raised a few interesting questions I'll post about later (already...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:36 PM | Comments (1)

January 03, 2007

What I Want for the New Year...

... is to find a way of using the lazyweb effectively to get all those OpenLearn tools I really want to play with built quickly... For starters: an RSS2wikitext converter, that will allow me to use webfeeds to seed a...
Posted by ajh59 at 02:54 PM | Comments (1)

November 27, 2006

OpenLearn Daily Learning Chunks via RSS

Several bloggers picked up today on FeedCycle, a new web application for managing serialised RSS feeds: A serialised RSS web feed enables a subscriber to receive, perhaps on a daily basis, sequential episodes from within a series of episodes. The...
Posted by ajh59 at 05:02 PM | Comments (2)

November 14, 2006

Online OPML Feed Management

A couple of people have asked over the last week or two whether I knew of an online OPML manager that could be used to create and organise hosted OPML feeds that could then be wired directly into StringLE. I...
Posted by ajh59 at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2006

Annotating Local, Navigable Copies of OpenLearn Content

Early this week I came across quite the most amazing Firefox extension I've seen for some time - Scrapbook. This extension lets you make a local (i.e. offline) copy of a site, and then do various nifty things with it...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:30 PM | Comments (3)

November 01, 2006

Making OpenLearn Sustainable

A couple of days ago I did a search on YouTube for "open university" that turned up a couple of OU adverts, as well as some snippets from old OU TV programmes and a spoof video or two (sometimes it's...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2006

Stringle - Towards a String'n'Glue Learning Environment

How easy is it to pull together a presentational learning environment, I wondered to myself last week? Very easy it turns out, in part becasue of the way the web is turning into a huge logical Lego set via web...
Posted by ajh59 at 08:08 AM | Comments (1)

October 26, 2006

OpenLearn Content via RSS?

One of the great thimgs about the OpenLearn project is that as well as making OU teaching materials available for free via the "OpenLearn VLE", the content can also be obtained in a raw, XML format via the partner LabSpace...
Posted by ajh59 at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2006

Navigating OpenLearn Open Educational Content

So now it's officially live - OpenLearn launched today (read the press release) with several hundred hours of OU distance education teaching materials opened to the world under a Creative Commons Licence (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales). The material...
Posted by ajh59 at 09:38 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2006

Time for an OpenLearnigg (sic) Environment?

I've just been trying to finish of the final report for our NAGTY online academic study group project - which could have gone better, if truth be told - and as I was doing so I started wondering what a...
Posted by ajh59 at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2006

OU Releases Creative Archive Content - but so what?

The OU has just released a couple of dozen video clips from OU programmes as part of its involvement with the Creative Archive initiative. The material is released under five licence conditions: You can't use the material for commercial purposes...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)

August 08, 2006

Wikiversity and OCI/OpenLearn

For a long time there has been an informal Wikiversity project Wikibooks, but this week a full blown Wikiversity project has been announced via a presentation at the Wikimania conference (reviewed here): Wikiversity - center for creation and use of...
Posted by ajh59 at 08:30 AM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2006

Ad Supported Courses

Just a quick observation - perhaps a poor one - but are there big changes - really big changes, I mean - afoot in the world of home computing and the web? For example, Microsoft adCenter launched - Ballmer says...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:56 PM | Comments (3)

March 10, 2006

OU Opens Up Open Content Stream

At last the public announcement has been made - the OU will be getting into open content in a reasonably big way, thanks in part to a grant from the Hewlett Foundation. The Open University revolutionised assumptions about who could...
Posted by ajh59 at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2005

Economics of e-learning

Althought the open offspring of T182 is still offline, internal announcements suggest that the issue of OU Open Content is very much a live matter of debate. One issue that I imagine will be of as much concern as any...
Posted by ajh59 at 08:54 AM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2005

Open Sourcing Course Production

Like everyone else here, (I think....), I make quite a bit of use of the Track Changes functionality in M$-word when collaboratively producing a document, reviewing or suggesting changes to other people's docs, and responding to changes other people have...
Posted by ajh59 at 03:55 PM | Comments (0)

May 27, 2005

Scalability and the Long Tail

Sometimes I come across a blog posting that threatens to fire off a whole stream of thoughts, if only I could dedicate the mental time and energy it possibly deserves. The Long Tail: Eric Schmidt, Longtailer is one such post...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2005

T182 - One Step Too Far?

In a couple of earlier posts, (Open Content OU, Open Content Issues) I mentioned that a no longer presented course had been taken open by the Course Team. It seems this has not gone down too well with the powers...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)

May 01, 2005

Open Content Issues

My original post on the Open Content OU, describing the recent announcement that the OU had joined with the BBC and others in promising to open up content in a Creative Commons style license went little further that just reporting...
Posted by ajh59 at 01:03 AM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2005

Open Content OU

There have been a couple of notable moves by the OU to take content open, one of them announced in a flurry of press releases about the BBC et al. , one of them not. The widely announced move relates...
Posted by ajh59 at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)