Fortnightly Mailing

Omeka - Open Source platform for collections and exhibitions

According to its web site, Omeka, currently at version 0.9.0 (a "public beta") is an Open Source web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online:

"Designed for cultural institutions, enthusiasts, and educators, Omeka is easy to install and modify and facilitates community-building around collections and exhibits. It is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content rather than programming."

With thanks to Tristram Wyatt for pointing to this Inside Higher Education article about Omeka.

Selecting content for OpenLearn - an insider account

Guest Contribution from Andy Lane, Director of OpenLearn

Note. This post arrived as a comment on Is the Open University making the right content open in OpenLearn?, but is published with Andy's agreement as a Guest Contribution.

Seb recently added to the debate as to whether the OU was publishing the right content on OpenLearn. In particular Seb said:

"I think that if the OU does not use OpenLearn to showcase its best stuff, the OpenLearn initiative risks being judged as some rather pedestrian content sitting in a (possibly) innovative environment. That would be a major missed opportunity."

On my part I an unclear as to what he thinks the 'best stuff' is or should be and what is the 'missed opportunity'. As Director of OpenLearn I can take full responsibility for what we have published and explain why we have done so, and make some comments on what I think he might be getting at.

It was always part of the plan that we would publish material from our existing courses and not write new stuff nor significantly rework the existing stuff. It was about opening up some of the wares from across the breadth and depth of what we have that our students study and generally find very satifactory giving the OU's results in the National Student Satisfaction surveys. And it is about exposing such material to both learners and teachers to make what they want of it.

eLearning Reviews - classy abstracts service from the Swiss Centre for Innovations in Learning

eLearning Reviews, from scil, describes itself thus:

"elearning-reviews provides those interested in research on elearning with concise and thoughtful reviews of relevant publications. The most important goal is a well-balanced selection of seminal publications as well as interesting up-to-date publications from the various disciplinary perspectives. Our goal is to further the development of elearning as a scientific, research-oriented discipline, and as a tool for innovating higher education as well as corporate education."

Managers learning at work is a good example of the kind of abstract produced. The number of journals monitored is long and comprehensive. You can keep an eye on it via its Monthly Newsletter, or by subscribing to its RSS feed.

Vacancy for Director of Development with the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)

Some readers of Fortnightly Mailing may be interested in being Director of Development with the Association for Learning Technology. The closing date for applications is 6 March 2008; and if you know of people who might be interested, and suited, please tell them.

(Disclosure: I work half time for ALT.)

The New Curiosity Shop Online College - Guest Contribution from Noel Chidwick

I needed a change. After twenty years in a Further Education college I thought it was about time to try something new, come out from under the stifling blanket of institutional life.  I am fascinated by the potential of online distance learning, but I watched with despair how colleges and universities were shedding their general interest courses in favour of  training for the job market, and how adult learners were becoming sidelined. In Scotland, the number of distance learners in FE dropped from over 27,000 in 2001 to under 13,000 in 2007. In a recent response to a consultation paper to the DFeS NIACE claim: “1.4 million places in publicly-supported adult learning in England have been lost over the last two years.” I thought it was time to stop talking and start doing.

Luckily, my friend and colleague Arthur Chapman, who also spent twenty years in the same college, agreed. After careful planning we built the model that is now the New Curiosity Shop Online College.

Why do so many e-learning initiatives fail?

I missed this 152 page report [2.7 MB  PDF] by Per Arneberg, Lourdes Guàrdia, Desmond Keegan, Jüri Lõssenko, Ildikó Mázár, Pedro Fernández Michels, Morten Flate Paulsen, Torstein Rekkedal, Albert Sangrà, Jan Atle Toska and Dénes Zarka when it was published in November 2007. Thankfully a reader sent me this link to a well and independently written review of the report by Ingrid Schönwald. The report (several of whose authors are anything but recent arrivals on the e-learning scene) is based on analysis of a large number of e-learning initiatives from different parts of the world, including a handlful from the UK.

The recommendations section, on pages 127-143 contains a comprehensive series of practical guidelines for success. The seven that flowed from the report's analysis of 10 failed initiatives - headlined below - and on pages 139-143 of the report, are particularly interesting, as much because of their obviousness as anything else:

1. Realize that hard-nosed market research is essential for the success of any e-learning initiative;
2. Plan carefully for and control carefully the revenue and expenses. Seeding funding dries up quickly;
3. Choice of courses and their accreditation is crucial;
4. Define precisely the relationships of your initiative to existing providers and define precisely the institutional model you will adopt;
5. Plan carefully to manage both educational and business activities;
6. Avoid top-down political and boardroom initiatives;
7. Avoid consortia of institutions that compete with each other and the consortium.

Harvard researchers voting on whether to publish scholarly research free on the Internet

Via the Sloan-c mailing list, here is the lead-in to an article in the 12/2/2008 New York Times by Patricia Cohen:

"Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost. 'In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,' said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. 'It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.'"

Blackboard v Desire2Learn: Joint Final Pre-trial Order

Here is the Joint Final Pre-trial Order [130 kB PDF] which summarises, in 16 clear pages,  the main issues that will be tested in the patent trial due to start on Monday 11 February in Lufkin, Texas. Expect a result by the end of  February.

Is the Open University making the right content open in OpenLearn?

Amended 9/2/2008, 10/2/2008, 4/3/2008

Donald Clark takes a fairly well-aimed swipe at the quality of the content being made freely available under the Open University's MIT OpenCourseWare-inspired OpenLearn initiative.

Several readers of Fortnightly Mailing will know the current ins and outs at the OU, but when I wrote about Open Learn in 2006, the OU planned to put about 5% of its materials into OpenLearn (as compared with MIT's decision to make the whole lot open); and poking about in the materials that have been made available you get the impression that the OU has been cautious about what to make open, allowing its laudable experiment to take place with only its more mundane content.

A further problem is that the implementation makes the material unpleasant to use on screen, especially if you are scan-reading it rather than using it, as it was designed, for learning. For example the course I looked at was broken down into very small chunks, and the latency between pages, with a typical "broadband" connection, was far too long for convenience.

The impression you get is that there was internal pressure from those saying "but we depend on people to pay for our courses, we cannot risk putting some of the 'top sellers' into Open Learn".

I think that if the OU does not use OpenLearn to showcase its best stuff, the OpenLearn initiative risks being judged as some rather pedestrian content sitting in a (possibly) innovative environment. That would be  a major missed opportunity.

Firefox uptake around the world

Twice today I encountered academic web sites that did not work at all in Firefox; in both cases these were sites that simply could not afford to have users struggle with them.

It is some time since I looked at figures for the uptake of Firefox as compared with Internet Explorer and other browsers:  when I searched I found this interesting map in a late 2007 article on the French company XiTi's web site.

Scroll down the article for a much wider range of informatively organised data.