Location

In an effort to be more open about what we're doing as we're doing it, I (Doug) am going to be liveblogging our regular OLnet team meetings. Some things may not be entirely clear or understandable, but this should give you a view in to what we're doing as we plan to do it. Do bear in mind that these are partial, incomplete and sometimes downright inaccurate notes captured at speed and do not reflect a final considered view of the OLnet project - or indeed any of the individual mentioned.

Present: Doug, Sara, Tina, Kasia, Engin, Liam, Elpida, Patrick, Andreia, Anna, Canan, Nick

1. Updates

Patrick - has sent off a book chapter with Grainne and Yannis on the work that we did with Yannis when he was here as an OLnet Fellow. Will be preparing for various presentations.

Andreia - attended two webinars. One at Delft on starting an OER initiative, many useful contacts. Another in Brazil, she's trying to recruit participants for Portuguese-speaking conference. Preparing for conference in Sao Paolo later in the month. Also preparing short presentation about virtual workshops for next week.

Anna - circulated blog post on 20 reasons for not reusing an OER, only has 16 - needs 20 and then will post it soon. Talked to Engin about his survey, and Tina about  the collective intelligence project - and in particular the OpenLearn team's publications. Also put some slides on the site.

Doug - talked to Andrew Law about the OU's new open media strategy, and in particular the new openlearn site which will encompass the existing OpenLearn and Open2.net sites, gathering together all of the OU's freely-available resources. Agreed he should do a presentation to us (and others) about this so we can connect well.

Sara - work on organisation for internal conference in June.

Tina - Also talked to Anna about the POCKET and CAPITAL projects and how those can go in. Planned a contribution with Engin to OER10. ALso planning abstract with Giota on another abstract for OER10. Thinking about TESSA and getting papers from there. Monitoring OERLO. Planning final OLnet report, and people's roles and how that relates to our Research Questions.

Kasia - working on her PhD proposal

Engin - Anna demonstrated Cohere and Compendium to him. Was brainstorming his OCW model from his thesis. Second announcement for his survey in Turkey.

Liam - Considering how to map impact of blog posts (e.g. through Twitter). Also tidying up how posts are edited on the OLnet site.

Elpida - Paper accepted to ASCILITE with Yannis and Patrick. Talking to founder of Smart History (a US OER community), very interested in collaborating on her research, and her model. Also in her helping design a survey for their site to see the impact they're having on her users. We'd get access to the data in exchange for designing and analysing the survey for them. Also Hewlett OER Report - they're not using PDF format, they're focusing on granularity - less chunky file formats. So interesting to look at the impact that has. Creating slides for final look of her model, and bullet points to go with each layer and the interactions. Finally, looked at iSpot reputation system, and how we can be informed by game-based environments.

Nick - Upgraded development system to enable collaborative working (with Liam). Prepared code upgrade to go live - plan for downtime tomorrow at 9am. Working on draft T&Cs for the site. All welcome to contribute to developing them if you aren't already. Also working on the EMBED code for Cohere.

2. Revisiting identity statement

This is the statement on the OLnet home page; we want to check (a) that it's saying what we want to say, and (b) more importantly, whether what we're showing on the OLnet site reflects what we're doing and what features we need on the site to enable us to do the job we need to do. And indeed that we fully understand that job!

Key issue: what happens on our site, and what's going on elsewhere, and how we link that back.

A lot of what we're doing centres around the collective intelligence concept. We're funded to try to bring people's attention on to the difficulty of research on OER, and how it crosses over many interests. There are many interesting research challenges along the way. We're less about solving all these challenges as we are about gathering a global community of OER people to address them as a whole.

The open - and best value - way of doing this is to use existing services, rather than trying to get the world to funnel through our OLnet site, and making it duplicate all their services, sites and communities.

We want to work in a re-usable way - so, for instance, when we develop a survey with people, we want to track what we did and make that available for reuse and redevelopment in and of itself.

So this is an unusual research project - we're about getting other people to do things, as well as doing things ourselves.

Some of the tools are very close to us - Cloudworks, Cohere, Compendium, FlashMeeting. We also want to work with e.g. Scribd, FriendFeed, OER Commons, Mendeley, Academia.edu, a whole long list (which is growing!). We need to turn them from 'competing' problems, to a way of joining them together. We could offer a set of procedures and tools to join people working in the same way.

We want to bring people in to OLnet as well - but it is 'as well'. We need to solve the integration problem ourselves - we can be an early use case. We can encourage people to do this

We're in a good position to do this, with Elpida's social site survey showing us what there is, and Liam and Nick here to give us the technical support to help us integrate it where there are difficulties.  One good example of this type of approach was deciding to use YouTube (and embedding them where we want) instead of installing streaming video capability in to our site. Another is Liam's work turning OER in to Mind Maps.

The tools we have are good, but don't cater to everything we need. So we'll need to use others - e.g. Ning - but then the (research) data a group creates by working together reside outside, and aren't necessarily reliable. If we host everything ourselves, we'll only get a subset of the user community elsewhere, and are almost certain to have features that are not as good, because we're not focused exclusively on those features. Could we be a town square for the OER community? Nobody lives there, but people go past on their way to other places and exchange ideas.

Perhaps that particular issue of data retention, and the practicalities of researching using these tools and sites, could become a challenge we address - and building expertise on how you do this, and what systems are helpful in what ways - is something we can feed back to the OER research community.

Liam has set up a FriendFeed room for OLnet, which he'll send round. It can aggregate all sorts of services and accounts, including Tumblr. It also has a generic RSS import and can filter, so can pick things up. It can also be embedded in to the OLnet.org site.

Everyone should keep on with the useful blog posts coming up in the News stream.

We also want to start developing more of a 'Lab' type space on the site.

3. Presenting OLnet

We have a growing bank of slides - from various talks - and a few more recent ones. These are currently on the file share. Everyone here should be able to talk about OLnet and present on it - these slides will help. This is also a beta - so remix and reuse! 

Next week is Open Access Week - and Patrick is doing a presentation then, which he beta-tested in the meeting.

The presentation will be licensed CC-BY-NC-SA, rather than our preferred CC-BY, because many of the images come from Flickr, and many of those specified NC or SA, so we have to pass that on. (He's skipped any that specified ND.) It'll be on Slideshare.

We also need to pick out some slides of ours for the video wall inside our building - volunteers sought to select and tweak slides. Do make sure to include OLnet at the bottom of each. Gill Clough is the contact to get stuff up; there is also a template that shows you where the 9 screens are and the correct aspect ratio, which Phil Downs (and Patrick) have.

4. Conference submission plans

• Outlines for OER10 - deadline currently two weeks before the conference, but they're hoping to bring it forward. Can opt to have it considered for a long paper to be included in JIME. We'll have a big presence.
• Calls of interest: ED-MEDIA, Networked Learning (Fri 13 Nov for full papers 8-10pp).
• OU conference (?internal) in June.
  

5. AOB

Virtual workshops to next meeting.