Day: August 28, 2007

Open Education Search – The Hewlett Foundation is working with ccLearn to develop a web search portal of open education resources.  And they are looking for material.  I wonder how 4,000 hours of law school class lectures and summaries would work?  I think we’re going to find out.

From the Open Education Search FAQ

What data are you gathering to enable web-scale open education search?

Most important: Site URLs

We are collecting top level URLs for sites hosting OERs. A well-known example would be http://ocw.mit.edu. A web-scale open education search should minimally index all pages under such a site URL.

Resource URLs

We are also collecting individual resource URLs, for example http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01TFall-2004/CourseHome/.We are interested in individual resource URLs even where we have a siteURL for the resource’s host, as the resource URL may be annotated morespecifically.

Keyword annotations (also known as tags, labels, and subjects, among others)

Both types of URLs may be tagged (or whatever verb you prefer) with keywords. This is optional but desired.

How can I ensure that my OERs are included?

We have one mechanism at present: mass import. In the future we willalso support the import of new OERs via feeds and manual addition ofindividual URLs.

Mass Import

If you have lists of OERs or OER sites in any textualformat (that includes XML and XML dialects, such as OAI), we can importfrom these formats. Send the file(s) or URL(s) to Creative Commons CTONathan Yergler: nathan@creativecommons.org. An example would be a URL pointing to an OAI file. It is very likely in this example that we can use dc:subject values as tags.

Contacts

For purely technical questions, see Nathan Yergler above. For allother questions, contact ccLearn Executive Director Ahrash Bissell: ahrash@creativecommons.org.

technorati tags:Hewlett_Foundation, CreativeCommons, ccLearning, Classcaster, CALI