Hi folks

At the risk of wading in at an inappropriate point - I would like to point you all to two recent blog posts, which I hope illustrate clearly the need for open APIs on which to build customised services.

I am not talking about individual teachers here, I am talking about embedding OERs at curriculum level, so that we take away as much technical interaction as possible, dynamically pushing the right resources to the right people at the right time.

The first is a post by me, the second from a colleague, both based on a meting we had here at Newcastle recently.

http://www.medev.ac.uk/blog/suzannes-blog/2011/jan/31/brandin-repositories-oer-marketing-and-awareness-raising-some-thoughts/
https://learning-maps.ncl.ac.uk/blog/post/dlms-as-a-substrate-for-academic-content/


Similar discussions are being had with the NHS eLearning Repository, and I had two very good meetings this last week with the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) incorporating NHS Evidence (both of which have HUGE amounts of content, currently not openly licensed) and with eLearning for Health.

We are not talking about individuals creating custom searches here. we are very much talking about developers working wither at University or more likely in our case Faculty/School level. That will only every attract a small number of clinicians and academics. We are talking about much deeper much more embedded, more transparent ways of encouraging people to engage with content, which is meaningful to them in their everyday working lives, and which doesn't involve having to learn new things. It's only when we can push content at people will we see massive numbers of people using and engaging with open content, in my humble opinion.

I would welcome further discussion on what Tony and I have said and how it relates to previous posts in this thread :)

All the best

Suzanne
--
Suzanne Hardy
Senior Advisor (Information)
Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for 
Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine
Newcastle University

email: [log in to unmask]
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_________________________________

eLearning in health conference: collaboration, sharing and sustainability
in the current environment 27-28 Jun 2011
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On 17 Feb 2011, at 16:33, Patrick Lockley wrote:

> Short answer - No I don't mean that
> 
> Long answer
> 
> You could be - A person, A librarian, An OER enthusiast, A VLE admin person, A blogger, A subject centre, A repository manager, and you could make a search tool purely for yourself
> 
> Provide could mean - via a site, as an API service, via an embeddable block of code, via a URL, via emailed results, via twitter
> 
> OER - Open licensed materials
> 
> The only difference would be that the creator would take some role in curating the content set
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Open Educational Resources [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Scott Wilson
> Sent: 17 February 2011 16:08
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: An Ideal OER search Engine
> 
> On 17 Feb 2011, at 15:46, Patrick Lockley wrote:
> 
>> So you want to provide your own OER search facility
> 
> Not sure what is meant by "you", "provide" or "OER" here...
> 
> Do you mean "So, as a University you want to provide your own search facility for your own content - and those of selected partners - which you market as OER"?
> 
>> 
>> Brief Spec
>> 
>> You want to choose the sites that are searched
>> You want to be able to limit / refine the search by x,y,z
>> You want the results to display where? And how?
>> Do you want the search to be provided from a URL - say www.google.com/pats_search_tool/?
>> Or embeddable as a widget - html for your site?
>> Or as both?
>> Would you want the search to present data in other ways for other users (so an API could underpin it all)
>> Would you want search logs to be maintained
>> Would you want results chosen to be maintained
>> Embeddable social media in results
>> The url could also provide an RSS of all it's content
>> 
>> Anything else?
>> 
>> Maybe this is a google doc / wiki issue?
>> 
>> 
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