Along with the other Chris (Hall), I’ll be attending the 2010 Online Conference JISC Innovating e-Learning Conference 2010. Unfortunately, as a paid conference, the materials, session recordings and discussions will not be available to the public until the new year but I thought that I’d nonetheless post links or comments on anything of interest that I see, hear, watch or discover. Maybe Chris will do the same.
Original URL – http://www.flickr.com/95768329@N00/1579132105/ created on 2005-08-11 13:18:28Heather Alderson CC BY-NC 2.0
The first of these are Xpert and Xpert Attribution, both developed at Nottingham University as part of one of the JISC OER projects. Xpert Attribution (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/attribution) is particularly interesting. It is a media search tool that looks for copyright free or creative commons licensed comments and returns them as media objects with attribution added that you can use in your presentations, lectures, etc. The image of our Technium building included here was obtained by searching for Swansea University using this tool.
When you have the image, the tool will add an attribution string to the image itself or return suitable embedding code (as used here, after some adjustment for the purposes of this blog). Results can be also be imported into PowerPoint.
Attribution and use of freely reusable media is vital if you want to safely and legally prepare materials that you want to make publicly available. Xpert attribution makes it easy. There are some limitations: only Wikipedia and Flickr are regarded as having sufficiently robust attribution metadata and licensing to be used as a source. Audio and video media seem to stem only from OER projects in the UK and US.
Xpert (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert)is a search tool that looks for OER objects. This is perhaps more useful if you are looking for complete learning objects to use or adapt for your courses. The search engine could be improved here. I looked for control systems but needed to quote the search term to get relevant hits, and there weren’t many, except those from MIT and Stanford that I already knew about (an opportunity perhaps?).
If you want to follow the conference, the Twitter hashtag is #jiscel10 and I promise to report more goodies as I find them.
