OER Hack Days / Playlist picker

An idea from the CETIS UKOLN OER Hack Days

OER Playlist picker - Building a list of OERs and storing it locally and in the cloud for others to see and build upon
Scenario: When searching for OER open learning material it is difficult and time consuming to find relevant and applicable material for a particular learning objective. People find it easier to look to their subject community or colleagues to find good material that can be reused. There is also the problem of creating and storing a set of material that might be related. If you are looking for audio or video lectures on governance and the Middle East you might wish to search across a few repositories or instituions and pick the lectures that seem to be relevant, perhaps a lecture on democracy from one university and a lecture on african politics from another. You would probably recommend people listen to one talk first to be then followed by a second. So, to help to speed up the process it would be nice to see sets of material, or playlists, that someone else has decided are of good quality and work well togther for a particular subject area, topic or learning activity.

Tools and Interface
Think of a plugin for a WordPress blog or a Moodle/Sakai VLE. The code for the picker would be javascript so it could be reused in different frameworks. The window with javascript would pop up a list of RSS feeds from an OER repository or aggregator. You would scroll through the material, picking and sorting good examples. Once you've finalised your playlist you would give it a name and store and present locally within the platform and at the same time have the option of publishing to a central web service for wider use.

Metadata
Think RSS. An RSS feed of items, each item has standard RSS 2.0 descriptive metadata with a URL to the final resource

Stages in using the OER Playlist picker tool
1) Configure the tool in the admin dashboard by saying which set of RSS feeds and OER repository/aggregator you wish to search against

2) In the host environment ( VLE / Wordpress) launch the OER picker window

3) A Javascript pop-up window will appear which allows you to browse or search and then select a series of OER RSS feeds in this case from an OER podcast collection:

The options you might see:

Filter by type: audio or video or document etc

Search by subjects

Search by keywords

A field for you to enter the name of your playlist

4a) Simplified version - Click on an RSS series to add the feed URL to your deliver framework ( Moodle/Sakai/Wordpress) and then give it a name "An Introduction to democracy" into a local database. Optional to publish onwards to the cloud public web service ( delicous ? google service ? ) where it can be viewed and searched against in a public directory, perhaps with a user generated playlist name and timestamp.

4b) Advanced version - selecting individual items and build up a new feed. Another stage might be to add the individual items to a “shopping list’ building up a new “playlist’ RSS series before storing and optionally publishing to a web service.

5) What the users might see in their local host system such as a VLE ( Moodle / Sakai) or  Blog (Wordpress etc)

An OER RSS feed i.e. Feed title, description, CC licence and list of items (title,description,author,licence)

If the feed was a podcast feed you could might also see

Media player to play the media item in the series e.g.  i a flash media player MediaElement.JS

Album Cover

next stage ?
I have some javascript/html/jquery/css that will provide the interface and functionality for 3) and 4a) if you give it a RSS XML file or point it at a feed of feeds..

could this idea be proofed in WordPress building upon an RSS plugin triggering a view into the Xpert repository and stored in delicous ?

or via a learning registry ?

Who
(list who is involved here--remember to link to/provide contact details!)

Peter Robinson, OpenSpires and Triton projects Oxford. http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk & http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk/triton