Category: @work

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Creative Commons is Looking for Open Education Resources

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.

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Textbending Laws

Recombinant Text – 6.5 Law Making – Textbender is an interesting little project I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while.  The idea is to create a collaborative editing/drafting environment that allows each author/editor access to all of the text used at all points in the process and to assemple, disassemble and reassemble the text in interesting ways.  Now it seems that it has occured to someone that this might be a useful way to draft laws and regulations.  It will be interesting to see if anything comes of this.

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Add Instant Definitions, Explanations to Your Site

AnswerTipsTM are small information bubbles that define any word when double-clicked. An AnswerTips-enabled site or blog means visitors get fast facts on 4 million topics provided by Answers.com when they double-click on any word, without opening a new browser or following outbound links. AnswerTips deliver instant definitions, explanations and facts including biographies, tech terms, geography, pop culture and much more.

AnswerTips™: Information from Answers.com

This is pretty cool. It puts a javascript wrapper around a page and when a word is double clicked info is grabbed from answers.com and displayed in a little bubble. It works pretty well. For an example, check this out on my CALI dev site and double click on your favorite legal term for a bit of a definition. Pretty neat.

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Paragraph Level Embedded Comments for WordPress

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text.

CommentPress

This remarkable WordPress plugin is being developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book.  It adds a high level of interactivity and coinversation to WordPress blogs by allow for comments at the paragraph level with the comments displayed in a floating window.  I think the implications for this in education are astounding.  Imagine providing a text that be readily commented on, paragraph by paragraph by students and teachers.

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New Facebook API Provides Great Opportunity

Facebook Developers | Documentation

The Facebook Platform is a standards-based web service with methods for accessing and contributing Facebook data. We’ve made the methods as easy to understand as possible, and included full documentation to help you learn more.

Given the ongoing popularity of FB, would it make sense to integrate FB features into CALI?  Perhaps FB could provide the groundwork for some of our social apps.

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Managing Faculty Publications In The Digital Age

Technology increasingly drives the evolving nature of the library’s role in managing faculty publications. Libraries not only create physical archives of faculty scholarship, but take on the active role of facilitating immediate access to content. Trends in legal scholarship, including new formats such as blogs and podcasts and the open access initiatives, compel libraries to develop creative solutions such as enhanced bibliographies, searchable databases, and digital repositories to manage access, preserve, and disseminate faculty writings.

SSRN-The Evolving Nature of Faculty Publications by Jan Novak, Leslie Pardo

Via CMLibraryBlog. Good article with an overview of the ‘state of the art’ of faculty publication in the world of blogs and didgital respositories.

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Recruiting Students the Web 2.0 Way

The study also found that 63 percent of respondents said they would read a blog authored by a faculty member as a way to seek more information about students and faculty at a particular institution. While only 9 percent said they had participated in an online chat on a school Web site, 51 percent said they would if they could. Also, 9 percent of prospective students indicated that they had downloaded a podcast from a college or university, but 54 percent said they would if they had the opportunity.

Prospective College Students Receptive to Electronic Social Networking Recruitment Methods, Survey Finds

OK, we hang a survey off of LTL to find out what prospective law students think about this sort of stuff.  Then use the results to get law schools to start moving forward.

Via Library Stuff

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