Monthly Archive for April, 2006

http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/index.html

To keep going on the apparent ‘open source repository’ theme today, this JISC-funded project appears to be using Fedora and Sakai to investigate automated population of metadata based on contextual information provided by the portal environment, to examine the boundaries of personal versus institutional digital resource management, and to develop some workflow aroud common repository tasks based around Service Oriented Architecture. Phew. Fedora is a different approach than DSpace, though both originated from the library/institutional repository world, and yet in my earlier investigations it too seemed to also have some limitations to its effectiveness as a LOR. Early days yet for this project, but maybe some promise in moving it closer to serve those (and other) needs better. And you just gotta love the name. - SWL

http://cwspace.mit.edu/docs/ProjectMgt/Reports/
DLF-Spring2006/MIT-CWSpace-DLF-Spring2006.ppt.htm

For a long time I’ve been asked about available open source learning object repositories, and specifically about whether DSpace could work as a LOR. My answer regarding DSpace, up to now, has always been - well it depends on what your use cases are. If you didn’t care about things like IMS Content Packages and learning object metadata, then sure, maybe it could work, but it always seemed like a stretch, that those asking the question were looking to adopt a system because of its license but not because of its functionality.

In this regards, I had always held out some hope on the CWSpace project. As I have mentioned before, CWSpace is a project looking to archive the educational materials found in MIT OpenCourseWare using DSpace technology, and in so doing provide a valueable extension in functionality to DSpace itself.

With the presentation above it looks like they are making some progress - it details how they plan to deal with two major issues, mapping OCW’s object model to DSpace’s object model, and improving the interfaces to DSpace to make them more conducive to working with living (not archived) materials. NOTE: this presentation really only useful for standards geeks and other interoperability weenies (like myself, I guess). Not for the faint of heart.

It’s unclear to me whether they are shipping code yet for this, but it is still encouraging to see some progress, and for me really encouraging to see the library/institutional repository crowd take seriously the differences between their standard use cases and the ones from the LOR world; a big step forward from the red flag that’s been waving from the DSpace site for years claiming it can accomodate ‘learning objects’ (whatever that meant). - SWL

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2006-04-10-12/

Lots of value here for decision makers and others struggling to make arguments for the adoption of open source in higher ed (and lots of ‘Stevenote’ inspired presentations for those tired of reading lots of text on slides). Too many to really go into detail, but I quite liked “Your Open Source Strategy Sucks!” (catchy title!) and really appreciated the honesty that was apparent in James Dalziel’s Lessons from LAMS: The highs and lows of going open source. - SWL

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ERS0602

Being just a pleeb who doesn’t work for anyone with an EACR membership, I’ve only been able to read the public ‘key findings’ document from this recent ECAR study, “Identity Management in Higher Education: A Baseline Study” (and hey, I’m not really complaining that much, it is nice that they make the highlights available for free). So maybe the fuller report speaks to some of my concerns, but what I found striking about this report was the apparent disregard in the institutions surveyed for many of the internet-wide identity projects currently struggling to be borne (e.g. sxip, openID, etc.) Actually, that’s not surprising at all, we’ve longed seemed to prefer to invent (or at times re-invent) our own wheels in higher education, thinking our situations to be so different or needing to ‘own’ the results for academic or political reasons. Where this gets interesting for me, though, is the whole push within what I call the ‘loosely-coupled learning tools’ camps for instructors and students to simply adopt free or centrally provided services that exist out on the internet already (e.g. flickr, blogger, etc.) This push is not going away, nor should it, but it currently drives many IT directors and other campus service providers nuts.

It was about 2 months ago now, during the course of a private conversation about ‘loosely coupled or openly integratable leearning management systems,’ that I half-jokingly threw out the intellectual stink bomb that campuses could in the future easily turn to service providers like Google or Yahoo or Microsoft for their central identity services. It was literally a few days later that announcements about Gmail offering domain-wide hosting services (and I thought Microsoft too, but maybe this was old news, I can’t find the reference). Don’t get me wrong, I am not ADVOCATING this as a solution, only saying that a) you will see more offers like this from big ‘free’ players outside your organization to start coming ‘inside’ your organization, and along with the free services come implications of who owns what and where should it reside, so you had better already thought through how to talk to your CIO/CEO/President about this, because on a sheer cost basis it is going to be hard to justify why not and b) it is a GOOD thing for institutions to start to consider that their students have lives and identities that preceed and extend far beyond the time they attend their institutions, and that being able to easily fit into that student’s online identity (rather than the other way around) is going to be an increasing expectation.

So, good overview of the state of affairs in higher ed, and maybe the full report touches on some of these issues, but it didn’t read like a vision for the future for me. - SWL

Apologies for these administrative posts - my email’s back up. Thanks to those who tried to work around the outtage. - SWL

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/sale/

“This short paper analyses their content and shows that a requirement to deposit research output into a repository coupled with effective author support policies works in Australia and delivers high levels of content. Voluntary deposit policies do not, regardless of any author support by the university.”

Kind of says it all. Or does it? A lot of people interpret the lessons of Web 2.0 to be “only services which allow people to do what they already want to do (and don’t make them do stuff they don’t want to do) will be successful.” This seems fine to a point, but isn’t it possible that sometimes there do need to be behaviour changes? Or is it that any solution that requires coercion to get behaviour changes hasn’t found the right value proposition for its users? - SWL

http://door.sourceforge.net/

OK, I know NOTHING about this, so don’t even ask, but it seemed like something of interest (if you are still flailing away at that LOR hobgoblin) - an open source Learning Object Repository written in PHP and using MySQL as the backend which supports both the IMS metadata and content package specifications. Looks exactly as uninspiring as every other LOM-based, forms driven LOR, but if that’s what you want, well then at least it’s open source, right? Can you tell I’m having a LORrible day? (grimace) - SWL