OER Gathering

A developer event on harvesting, aggregating and collecting OERs, held at Strathclyde University, Glasgow on 22 June 2010.

This was an opportunity for developers to
 * learn more about a major European project working building tools for the discovery, recommendation, and annotation of learning materials.
 * explore the issues in incorporating third-party OERs in a repository,
 * explore the technologies available for the dynamic thematic collections envisaged by the OER phase 2 call for proposals, and
 * investigate what needs to be done to implement these technologies.

Goals
We had two over-arching goals for the day
 * 1) solve small interoperability niggles on the day
 * 2) identify and clearly describe larger problems that can be solved over the next ~3 months (without extra funding!)

Overview
The aim of the event was to support developers using collections of open education resources in some way. The event was run in collaboration with the iCoper Project to explore two related areas of technical work:
 * collecting and using third-party OER content in your repository.
 * providing collections of OERs.

Before the event John posted a call for information so that participants could tell us a bit about their background and  what they were interested in exploring.

The event comprised:
 * Introductions, 2 power points slides and 3 minutes each person, covering who they are and what they want to do during the day (i.e. what system/technology/spec they would like to show/work with).
 * Birds of a feather sessions (esentially free-form, open group discussions)
 * Final plenary discussion/summary.

On the day of the event a Google presentation was used to record notes, including the introductions from all participants and information shared on the day.

There is also an archive of Tweets from the event (and a summary of who tweeted).

The report for the meeting is available on Phil's blog.