Friday, January 30, 2004

A few reasons why we are interested in OCW #

Ever since the OpenCourseWare (OCW) project was announced, I've wanted to find a way to integrate the Scholar's Box with the increasingly rich materials from OCW. The materials are almost ideal for what we are trying to accomplish through SB: a non-commerical, bricolage-friendly license for the use of the materials (based on the work of the Creative Commons) the puatatively high-quality of the materials since they are from MIT!; the systematic institutional commitment and infrastructure that will make sure that OCW is around for a while projects like Open Learning Support that will provide some social support to undergird the community growing around OCW. We think that there will be interest in a tool that will let users gather/organize the materials in OCW to create new learning materials that they will want to share with others. The Scholar's Box is a tool that we are building to do exactly those tasks. Hence, I've wondered about technical integration issues with OCW. Will there be an interface to OCW that allows for the aggregation and disaggregation of OCW materials? An XML interface that would return the materials in some appropriate XML format? I think that work along these lines are underway -- but it would be obviously very useful for tools like Scholar's Box. Naturally, the use of Scholar's Box for this purpose would work best in the context of a social learning environment. Should we be working with Open Learning Support? Is OLS going to use one of David Wiley's Instructional Architect for that gathering/creating/sharing purpose?   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/30/04; 9:53:55 AM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Open Learning Support meeting today #
I'm currently listening to the online meeting on the Open Learning Support project, headed by David Wiley today. The QuickTime stream started at 9am MST/8am PST.  (I'll have to drop in and out throughout the day.) Some of my running notes are on my wiki.    Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/30/04; 7:26:25 AM from the Educational Technology dept. Discuss