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Some Minor Observations on Reusing OpenLearn Content

Internet access has been somewhat fractured for me this week (and will continue to be...), so I scheduled several posts for the Digital Worlds blog to try can keep the daily delivery thing running...

To write several posts that would get me a few days ahead, I needed to cut down on the production time for each post, so I tried a little experiment writing one post based around some OpenLearn material: Representing Analogue Sound Files in a Digital Way.

The post actually pulled in material from two sepearate OpenLearn courses: “Crossing the boundary - analogue universe, digital worlds” (in particular the section Crossing the boundary - Sound and music) and “Representing and manipulating data in computers” (in particular the section Representing sound).

I re-presented the material in a single block quote, and used a general copyright notice at the end to qualify its use: "Copyright OpenLearn/The Open University, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence".

Here are a few observations arising from the exercise:

1) "absolute linking" makes seemless embedding/reuse of material difficult. For example, diagrams were referred to by figure numbers:

One technique I used to address this issue was not to really refer to figures directly at all, instead using the flow of the document to take the reader from the text into the image:

It's also worth noting that the HTML of the OpenLean materials uses relative links to image assets rather than absolute links:

Rather than grab copies of the images to host them locally, I actually pointed the image source URLs at the URLs used in the OpenLearn units. Whilst this does mean that OpenLearn can track the use of the image through my materials, it also means that I am trusting OpenLearn not to change the image URLs - if they do change, my materials break.

2) References were made to previous sections using absolute references:

To preserve this sort of absolute reference, one approach is to contectualise it within a reference to the original reference:

3) the material in the two units was stylistically different in the use of headers:

4) with reusing material from two units, how should the content be referenced? In the re-presentation I used, it is impossible to say which part of the blockquote came from which openlearn unit. I also needed to add filler material to join the extracts from the two OpenLearn units, and this is embedded within the blockquote.

The major problem with reusing the content in as light a touch way as possible was having to adopt the voice and teaching line of the original unit authors, as well as finding workarounds for 'incremental'/backreferenced teaching (e.g. "think back to the methods we used for...").

Finding relevant content was also an issue. Leaving aside the matter that I used my own OpenLearn custom search engine (and in particular the 'resources' search refinement) to discover resources on the OpenLearn site, rather than using the OpenLearn search engine itself, finding material that could be taken from OpenLearn and inserted into the Digital Worlds storyline without breaking that storyline too badly could have been easier.

For example, the OpenLearn site is architected at the unit level; finding related resources across units is not really supported within the site other than through free text search (though I think they are trying to experiment with tagging).

Reusing the content did save me some time though, and I'll be looking for opportunities to do it again. Having a good awareness of what material is in OpenLearn would make this easier - knowing when to look to OpenLearn for material with a high likelihood that something relevant will turn up, for example - so on my todo list is a content recommender that will do content analysis on blog posts as I write them, and then pull in OpenLearn recommendations related to those content analysis terms (c.f. serendipitwitterous).

I'm not sure how much OpenLearn content is relevant to Digital Worlds though? So as part of another uncourse blog experiment, this time for a chunk of a module I have to prepare for another course, I'm going to try to reuse as much OpenLearn content as possible.

The topic is visualising data, and the uncourse blog experiment site for it is here: Visual Gadgets (starts next week, hopefully...;-)

Tags: digitalworlds, openlearn, visualgadgets

Posted by ajh59 at April 17, 2008 11:08 AM