[Oer-community] A reflection

[Susan D'Antoni]

Yes Fred,

The focus of this exploration was to be a map the would identify those
engaged in OER institutional initiatives and perhaps national initiatives.
 A precise definition of "initiative" remains to be srticulated.

The larger issue of "finding" OER is a much bigger challenge and much more
complex and demanding.  It is one the OER community is still wrestling with
and there are, as t you mention, a number of important projects dealing
with the issue.

Early discussion in the IIEP OER Community had the leit motif of copyright
and licenses because the focus then was on creating and sharing OER.  Once
a body of OER became available the focus of attention has shifted to
finding the right resource - the needle in the haystack,  You are sure
there is something out there on the Internet that will help you, but how to
find it. Therefore the interest and work on meta data and tagging comes to
the fore.

The comment made by Mary Lou Forward about a map as a gateway, and entry
point bears discussion.

Best,

Susan

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 8:32 PM, Fred M Beshears <fredbeshears at gmail.com>wrote:

> Susan,
>
> I believe the project you have in mind is a geographic map that shows
> the headquarters of organizations that have formal ORE development
> initiatives.
>
> Is this definition correct?
>
>
> Also, it seems as if there is a fair amount of interest in a far more
> ambitious undertaking: giving would be users of OER a way to search
> for useful resources. This, of course, is very different from what
> you're proposing (I think), and much more labor intensive.
>
> Of course, there is at least one OER meta data initiatives underway
> already:
>
>    Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI)
>    see: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/FAQ
>
> And there may be other OER metadata initiatives that I'm unaware of.
>
> In any event, OER meta data could in theory be used to produce a
> geographic map showing the headquarters of the organizations who
> produced the resources.  Of course, to do so it would certainly be
> useful to have a list of the organizations along with some sort of
> institutional code for each so developers and meta data librarians
> could tag OERs with that institutional code.
>
> Also, some people may be aware of older metadata and learning
> technology initiatives such as:
>
> IMS Global (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMS_Global)
> IEEE   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_object_metadata)
> ISO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_JTC1/SC36
>
> The IEEE/LOM standard could, I believe, work for Educational Resources
> whether they are open or not. So, I need to do some research to
> understand why there's a need for a separate LRMI metadata spec
> initiative.
>
> For now, here's what the LRMI FAQ says about these older initiatives.
>
> ------------------------------
> "LRMI aims to establish a common metadata schema to identify learning
> resources that will complement learning standards, for example those
> encoded in the Achievement Standards Network, including Common Core
> State Standards for K12 (US), as well as all other online learning
> vehicles. Interoperability is a key precept of LRMI. While simplicity
> is necessary for mass adoption and search engine implementation,
> mixing with and mapping to other vocabularies will be possible -- for
> example by mirroring the semantics of existing education matadata
> vocabularies (e.g., Learning Object Metadata) to the extent possible,
> so that explicit equivalences and refinements may be established,
> protecting existing investments in educational metadata made by
> publishers and curators of learning resources and by institutions to
> date.
>
> Additionally, LRMI will begin by examining lessons from previous
> initiatives and real online descriptions of educational resources,
> whether machine-readable or not. In this, we aim to utilize the
> technology-agnostic aspects of the microformats process, described at
> http://microformats.org/wiki/process."
> --------------------------
>
>
> In the spirit of full disclosure, I was UC Berkeley's rep to IMS
> Global for many years, so my views are probably biased.
>
> Best,
> Fred
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Susan D'Antoni <susandantoni at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Dear Mark and Helen,
> >
> > Yourcomments are exactly why we started this discussion with an
> exploration
> > of what use a map of the global OER landscape would be?  The points in my
> > previous message were of course trying to find threads from the messages
> > over the past days.
> >
> > The main problem that was the premise for organizing this discussion was
> > simple.  How do you know which institutions have OER activities around
> the
> > world?  It has become a large number.  But do we need to know where OER
> > institutional initiatives are?  And if we do, can we find that
> information
> > somewhere already?
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Susan
> >
> >
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