On 5 April 2011 11:41, Sarah Currier <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hello everyone,

Friday is looming: the deadline for sharing our proposals for the 3 JISC OER technical mini-projects. I've been wondering how others are approaching this. I'm facing this innovative open approach to bidding with some trepidation- for me, it's my livelihood, so it seems counter-intuitive to put ideas out there where the people I might be be competing with for funding can see them. A tension that echoes right across the open education domain I guess.

On the other hand, mini projects (1) and (2) are so dear to my heart that I can't but press forward! To me the intent behind them represents the culmination of work that many of us have been trying to do for some years now. Well, it's a culmination and, I hope, the start of a new, more productive level of research in this area. If *someone* does it and does it well, I'll be very happy even if I'm momentarily grumpy that it's not me!

I am talking with another independent consultant, Dr. Ian Piper at Tellura, about possible approaches to all 3 mini-projects. Ian and I have been working together for the past year (and Ian was around a lot longer than that) on a large-scale schools-level initiative developing 10s of 1000s of openly available resources for teachers.

We are both very keen on building on that project's work in open vocabularies; quality assurance for metadata; and content and metadata frameworks that are linked data- and Semantic Web-friendly.

Ian's history is (among other things) within the English schools and FE sector, while I've been involved for some years in HE educational metadata, as well as being involved in the Dublin Core Education Community. In DC-Ed we tried gathering use cases to see what folk were doing with educational metadata on the ground (not just OER use cases), but it was clear to me then that a larger-scale survey like mini-project (1) would be useful.

I know Ian has a great idea for the 3rd, open mini-project: to further develop his openvocabs tools: http://openvocabs.org/ - in order to ensure they meet the requirements of those developing and working with OERs. (Ian is at a meeting today so he agreed I could mention him in passing- he's on this list and will be able to answer questions himself). However, we're both sure that there will be a bunch of excellent ideas and tools coming forward for the 3rd mini-project.

For me, I am keen on the first 2 mini-projects, and Ian has the technical tools and expertise to help me with that side of those (I'm the semantic analysis person). On the other hand, there could be someone out there planning an excellent approach to the first 2 projects, and it would be more feasible for me to collaborate with them, if needed?

Anyway, I just thought it would be an idea to put this out there and see what comes back. Is everyone else preparing perfectly formed bids that they are going to post on this list on Friday? Is anyone looking for a collaborator or two? Or is everyone thinking "I hope someone else will bid for this because this work needs doing?".

In any case, I look forward to discussion on this over the next couple of weeks once proposals are in.

Best wishes,
Sarah