Wired Campus covers the use of widgets to share courseware:
Mark C. Marino, a lecturer in the writing program at the University of Southern California, has turned his Web page for a writing course he’s teaching into a series of modular “widgets” that others can easily drop into their own Web pages.
Mr. Marino says that using Web widgets for online course materials furthers the goals of open courseware, efforts by professors and colleges to give away their lecture notes and other teaching materials online.
The article doesn’t mention it, but this is part of a broader movement to find ways to hack simple content embedding for course materials — a slightly older example is the “append wiki page” function that D’Arcy Norman demonstrates in this screencast.
What I find interesting personally is how as professors get used to the open web these tools and behaviors start to develop organically. The page that Marino has constructed out of these is, well, a bit of a design anti-pattern, at least as far as layout and organization. But the culture is right on target — and that’s the more important bit.
Every so often I have a look at making ocw courses by “feedifying” them.
Sites like the Open University’s OpenLearn, which make full content feeds available of their open courseware, can trivially expose their content in third party sites: eg http://openlearnigg.open.ac.uk or in Facebook (e.g. http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive/010778.html ). I also experimented with a hack that lets you embed any single openlearn course unit content page in a widget ( http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive/014352.html ), though it may have rotted by now…
This post - http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/figureground-mashing-up-the-ple-mupple08-links/ - contains links to several old posts where I describe ‘feedifying’ course units from MIT OCW, Yale and so on; some of the demos have rotted (either because they rely on screen scraping, or because URL patterns that once worked are no longer used, or are not used consistently), but hopefully there are enough screenshots in the original posts to get the gist of what was happening.
Essentially, I tried to:
1) generate sets of feeds for OCW courses; that
2) could be displayed in a widget to recreate a sense of the course.
The long term aim was:
1) to identify ‘feed bundles’ that could create the sense of a course (by looking at pre-existing courses and working out how to compose them from separate, individually meaningful feeds); and then
2) automatically generating one or more of those feeds rather than handcraftig them.
Why? To see whether or not courses could be created automatically by bundling together sets of automatically created feeds (e.g. from playlists, saved searches, recommendation engine feeds etc etc)
tony
Thanks for the links Tony. To my discredit, the Mupple presentation has been on my radar for like a week now, and I’m still not fully through the presentation and links (been swamped).
I do think coming up with easy ways to feedify this stuff is crucial to building the demand/use side of the equation, which we just don’t talk about enough. I have no doubt that as Professors start to move to widget ready course pages that they will be hungry for quality content, and the stuff above that’s not suffering from bit rot is where have to go with that. Even when we look at WPMU implementations — the availability of this sort of stuff can make the difference between a tough sale and an instant hit.
Personally, what I’d love to see is basically Seeqpod for OER/OCW — an RSS-based search tool that could build embeddable playlists of content while foregrounding newly available OER.
Although, know you, you’ve probably already built that…
If you ever get the urge to post more on this let me know, I’m happy to highlight any new post that shows these multiple ways of doing this. We are working towards making this blog a daily roundup, we are content hungry
(brainssss….)!
Incidentally (or really not incidentally) it was an absolute blast to meet you at the conference, hope to both see you present again and to hang out drinking over-sized bevys talking open education…