Presentation given to the start-up meeting for the JISC HE Academy UKOER phase 3 programme. Covers some of the technical initiatives with which CETIS suggest projects should consider engaging. They are resource aggregation, resource description with schema.org and LRMI, SWORD deposit and the Learning Registry.

1. JISC CETIS and UKOER3
Phil Barker <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk>
JISC CETIS Learning Technology Adviser
http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

2. About JISC CETIS
 JISC Innovation Support Centre: Educational
Technology and Interoperability Standards
 provide strategic technical advice to JISC, supporting
its development programmes
 representing JISC on international standardisation
initiatives
 support various JISC Programmes
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

3. Highlights from CETIS OER phase 3 support
 The technical guidelines & requirements will be similar
to phases 1 and 2
 There will be some commentary on where we think projects
haven‟t engaged with these as we expected.
 Look out for a blog post.
 We will try to promote innovation around OER projects
through informed engagement with new & upcoming
initiatives.
 Informed about degree of speculation/risk
 That‟s what I‟ll be talking about here
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

4. ‘Informed about risk’
Hype Cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

5. Some Initiatives for OER projects to think about
 Aggregating & showcasing
 Microformats/microdata/schema.org/LRMI
 Attribution and tracking
 SWORD
 Learning registry & paradata
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

6. Aggregation for the nation!
 Want to showcase the output of UKOER, so that
funders know how good it is
 It‟s remarkably difficult to find where the outputs of
some individual phase 1 and 2 projects are.
 Need some way of automatically pulling out the
resources that come from the UKOER projects
Suggest:
 Project tag
 RSS feed
 Project “set” within a larger collection
 Low risk, basic action.
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

7.  Make it easy for people to find
your resources
 Make it easy for machines to find
your resources
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

8. Learning Resource Metadata Initiative
 A profile of schema.org microdata mark-up
 Allows the human readable (self-)description of an html
resource to be marked up as machine readable
metadata.
 For example ... imagine this presentation as a set of
web pages.
 It is obvious that the title, author, licence and some
other resource description stuff should be displayed
prominently in it.
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

9. JISC CETIS and UKOER3
Phil Barker <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk>
JISC CETIS Learning Technology Adviser
http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

10. ...
 To some people it would be obvious that there should be
machine readable metadata
<head>
<title>JISC CETIS and OER</title>
<link rel="schema.DCTERMS"
href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" />
<link rel="DCTERMS.author"
href="http://people.pjjk.net/phil#id" />
...
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

11.  But Google, Yahoo, Bing (among others) don‟t trust
invisible metadata.
 However, their computers would like some help in
understanding what is displayed on a web page
 So they promote schema.org, as a means of marking
up the meaning of displayed text.
 Microdata semantics.
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

12. Schema.org microdata semantics
<body itemscope itemtype=‘http://schema.org/WebPage’>
<h1 itemprop=‘name’>JISC CETIS and UKOER 3</h1>
<p itemprop=‘author’
itemscope itemtype=‘http://schema.org/Person’>
<span itemprop=‘name’>Phil Barker</span>
<span itemprop=‘email’>phil.barker@hw.ac.uk</span>
...</p>
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

13. But is an OER more than a web page?
 Is there anything that you would want to say about an
OER that is education specific?
 Learning resource metadata initiative: apply and extend
schema.org to learning resources.
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

14. LRMI
 Funded by Gates and Hewlett foundations
 Backed by Google & Microsoft
 Led by Creative Commons and the Association of
Educational Publishers
 Focussing on identifying a small number of education
specific properties of a learning resource
 What is it
 Who is it for
 What is it for
 What does it teach/assess
 ...
 http://www.lrmi.net/
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

15. Risk Assessment
 Little effort involved assuming you can control the
HTML mark-up generated by your CMS / repository.
 Marking resource descriptions using schema.org
microdata may help search engine optimisation.
 Perhaps will help with some types of resource more than others
 LRMI specific mark-up is more experimental, we would
like to work with some first adopters.
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

16. Attribution and tracking
 The copy&paste HTML licence information from
Creative Commons comes with semantic mark up
 Enables tools like OpenAttribute
 http://openattribute.com/
 Building on that CaPRéT project has build an attribution
tool
 Also includes a tracking gif in copied text
 http://capret.mitoeit.org/
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

17. Learning Registry
 Trying to help people find the right resource by
facilitating the exchange of value judgements about
resources.
 Technical protocols for the aggregation of “paradata”
Paradata: annotations, comments, ratings, „sharings‟
likes, tweets about, +1s, recommendations and
warnings
“Social networking for learning resources”
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

18. Infrastructure
http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/othervoices/
Image from Dan Rehak “The Learning registry: social networking for metadata”
http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/othervoices/2011/03/22/thelearningregistry/
2011/03/22/thelearningregistry/
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

19. Learning Registry
 Development funded by US Dept of Education since
2010
 Community launched last week (~ public beta)
 Defines API by which nodes interact and through which
data can be put into the network
 Current nodes are based on CouchDB running on
Amazon
 Jisc have announced experimental node
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

20. Jisc launches Twitter project
Amber Thomas, Jisc programme manager, said: "This
international collaboration will see us contributing the
UK's expertise to the Learning Registry. We are
working with Mimas and Jisc CETIS to support the
registry's vision of gathering together the
conversations, ratings, recommendations and usage
data around digital content.
Guardian government computing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/government-computing-network/2011/nov/09/jisc-launches-twitter-project
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

21. Assessment
 Speculative
 People who are gathering or might use „paradata‟
should think about whether they could help test the
learning registry concept
 Evaluate data format for paradata
 Provide paradata
 See whether learning registry has relevant paradata
 Don‟t bet the farm on it
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

22. SWORD
 Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit
 Based on ATOM Pub
 SWORD 2 supports CRUD
 Supported by a number of repository platforms and
tools
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

23. SWORD Background
 SWORD development project supported by JISC
 JISC also funded miniprojects for SWORD v2 tools
 Connexions, cnx.org
 Right-click deposit
 Intralibrary have demonstrated a SWORD-based
„share‟ app for mobile phones
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

24. Assessment
 Fairly well established in some contexts.
 May enable resource dissemination by helping
workflow; especially where deposit is close to
creation/repurposing.
 Would require some effort if existing repository and tool
implementations don‟t align with OER context.
 Explorative
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

25. Contacts
CETIS Web site: http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/
OER work: http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/topic/OER
Phil Barker: <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk>
Lorna M. Campbell: <lmc@strath.ac.uk>
R. John Robertson <robert.robertson@strath.ac.uk>
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

26. Licence and attribution
This work is licenced under the Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported. To view a copy of this
licence, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a
letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite
300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.
By Phil Barker <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk>, JISC CETIS
<http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk>
OER 3 programme start-up mtg, Birmingham, Nov 2011
By Phil Barker, Licensed under Creative Commons attribution only licence, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/