User:Vtaylor/OERs to go

Finding good, appropriate OERs has the next big hurtle for OER adoption. There are 1000s of OERs available, but there is little guidance to assist educators and learners who wish to use them.

Why - good stuff out there, lots of willing users

What - need "go to" starting points that yield good selection of relevant OERs from a broad range of sources

How - linkers, agents (known, reputation) - leave trails, comments, reviews, tags - need to accommodate wide range of preferences for creating entries and retrieval


 * OER Commons - formal catalog entries, not all information captured displayed or searchable, some "push" with RSS feeds at high level not granular enough or no activity, nice toolbar button for creating entries


 * OER Handbook - Find OERs


 * Diigo - OER tag - 6000+ bookmarks June 2012


 * Delicious OER tag - approx 9000 bookmarks jun 2012


 * Valerie Taylor 19:12, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

OER Commons functionality is pretty good but has a couple of problems IMHO. The required information to add an OER is extensive, so I won't be adding these casually like I do with Diigo and Delicious. There is no date information in the entry display, no information about the entry creator - these are really important to me when I am reviewing weekly group lists. I also have my own set of tags that I use when I add some of these links to my own groups lists.


 * Valerie Taylor 18:57, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

The Add OER button is great! It is now on my browser bar for handy access. This is looking really promising.

I think curation, agents, trusted reference sources. etc are going to be important. The groups in Diigo provide some of this functionality together with the categorization, aggregation, forwarding, subscriptions. There are other examples for aggregated RSS feeds and the daily emails that Stephen Downes et al provided for the recent MOOCs.

The OER Commons RSS subscribe button would get me anything new in OER Commons - Browse: Subject Area: Science and Technology but not more specific either by other browser selections, and not by the creator of the entries. For example, say I'm only interested in Secondary Physics and I would like be notified once a week if something new gets added. Doesn't look like that is available.

I found a collection that contains a variety of NASA materials. The RSS subscribe button  will add a subscription to the collection. However, in this example the last update was in 2010, so there aren't any new items in the feed. eg. OER Commons - Browse: Collection: NASA GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies during El Nino-La Nina Event of 1997-1998 (WMS)January 15, 2010 11:05 AM

Is there any information about active collecting and collections? I didn't see any dates on the OER entries themselves - it only showed up on the screen for the RSS subscription.

Working with teachers who are new to all this, we need to provide them with a regular, managed stream of OER links of interest to them. Personally, I like having new "finds" from trusted sources about specific topics come as a regular digest by email or RSS feed. The current OER Commons functions are going to provide too much or too little but this will be very helpful over time.

OER Commons does a great job. Thanks.


 * Valerie Taylor 11:32, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

From the discussions on the OCL4Ed discussions, locating OERs continues to be a challenge.

Is there an open functional equivalent of the social bookmarking sites Diigo or Delicious? I use these all the time for my own stuff. http://www.diigo.com http://delicious.com

WE need a way to do a better job of connection OER adopters and learners with existing OERs. In addition to OER creation, there needs to be curation - agents, linkers, taggers adding value by identifying and categorizing OERs for themselves and others. Big lists in WE are ok, but it would be wonderful to have tools that specifically address this collection, categorization, retrieval activity

If there is open software with this functionality, would it be possible to offer social bookmarking of OERs? I looked through SourceForge and found a couple but I can't tell if these do what I think WE need. http://sourceforge.net/directory/os:mac/freshness:recently-updated/?q=social%20bookmarking http://www.trilexnet.com/labs/jumper/

There are already lots of people using Diigo and Delicious. http://www.diigo.com/tag/OER  +6000 links http://delicious.com/search?p=OER  +8000 links

This continues to be an option. The ad-supported versions are free, but I am reluctant to encourage their use to solve an open learning need.