Hi,

the OER-Hackday #oerhack is in Manchester next week and I thought I’d update you all on some of the things going on (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/devcsi/oer_hackdays/index.html).

We're now full with 41 participants coming along to explore, hack, and plan stuff around OER. We've got a mixture of academics, learning technologists, repository managers, developers, and librarians.

We're coming from UK institutions such as Harper Adams, Oxford, Notttingham, East Riding College, Leeds Met, Oxford Brookes, Bath, Strathclyde, Leeds, City, Cumbria, Newcastle, Henshaws College, Dundee, London Deanery, the Open University
and other organisations such as Creative Commons, Jorum, the Learning Registry, JISC, Open Michigan, UKOLN, TechDis, and CETIS.

In the room(s) we'll have experience with using and developing deposit tools, harvesting and aggregation tools, discovery tools, APIs, learning materials, repositories, embedding licensing, workflow tools, and publishing tools.

It's a great opportunity to get different tools to work together, to play with prototypes, and develop useful hacks - to make the most of our time we'd like you all to start now.

If you're coming along: tell us your ideas and what you'd like to work on or the questions you have - you can reply to this email, write a blog post, or capture your tweets about it (e.g. use curated.by and post the link). Discuss the ideas here, then head over to the event Google Group (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/oer-hack) if you want to discuss forming teams and practicalities; we'll also stick the ideas up onto http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/OER_Hack_Days.

If you're not coming along: tell us what you think we should be doing and comment on our ideas. If you've got a collection of learning materials send us your rss feeds and oai-pmh endpoints to play with.

Some of the conversation has kicked off already -
Dan Rehak has posted about the Learning Registry: http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/othervoices/2011/03/22/thelearningregistry/
Nick Shepherd has posted his thoughts going inot the day: http://repositorynews.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/musings-on-the-developing-oer-infrastructure/

looking forward to seeing you next week,
John

R. John Robertson
skype: rjohnrobertson
Research Fellow/ Open Education Resources programme support officer (JISC CETIS), Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement University of Strathclyde
Tel: +44 (0) 141 548 3072
http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/johnr/
The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC015263