Developing tools to record and annotate research presentations and workshops

CREW (Collaborative Research Events on the Web) aims to improve access to research event content by capturing and publishing the scholarly communication that occurs at events like conferences and workshops. The project is developing tools to enable presentations and similar sessions to be recorded and annotated and enable powerful searches across distributed conference and related research data. Searches will yield results within written documents such as abstracts and papers and also in rich audio-visual content, such as clips from presentations, questions asked at a talk or Twitter messages during presentations.

The project is a collaboration between the Universities of Manchester, Bristol and Wales, Bangor and is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the second phase of the Virtual Research Environments (VRE) programme. The project builds upon the success of Iugo and Memetic by developing and integrating these technologies and embedding them in a variety of authentic research settings, including Intute, a national JISC service to provide access to web resources for research to UK universities, the Institute of Health Sciences, which promotes health sciences research in Manchester and scientific visualization research groups.

Project website: http://www.crew-vre.net/
Intro video (5mins - good overview): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceFaFA4WUJc

Some write-ups and reflections on the OpenEd09 conference

"How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education" by Anya Kamenetz http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/who-needs-harvard.html

"Open Ed 09 – My debutants ball" by Dave Cormier http://davecormier.com/edblog/2009/08/15/open-ed-09-–-my-debutants-ball/

"OpenEd 2009 Recap" by Cole Camplese http://www.colecamplese.com/2009/08/opened-2009-recap/

"On the open education experience" by D'Arcy Norman http://www.darcynorman.net/2009/08/20/on-the-open-education-experience/

Not quite sure what to make of Alan Lavine's "Amazing Stories of Openness" - lots of links to other blogs http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/

"Open Education - crossing the chasm?" by Chris Clarke of Talis http://blogs.talis.com/education/2009/08/14/open-ed-crossing-chasm/

"Reflections on OpenEd09" by Lisa Harris Marketing http://www.lisaharrismarketing.com/events/reflections-on-opened09/

"Thoughts from Open Education 2009" by Mary Burgess http://rruoer.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/thoughts-from-open-ed-2009/

"Reflections on OpenEd09" by Kyle Mathews http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2009/08/25/reflections-opened09

Not a write up but a great video (16 mins) from ccLearn http://blip.tv/file/2512680 (even though I'm not on it)

(I'll add to this as I find them)

WikiEducator at OpenEd2009

I made contact with Randy Fisher (aka WikiRandy) at OpenEd2009 and thought I'd add some information here that he sent me, since it is of relevance to networking with the OER community.

Randy works for WikiEducator (http://www.wikieducator.org). Their vision is to create a free and open version of the world's education curriculum by 2015. WikiEducator was a project of the Commonwealth of Learning (http://www.col.org), but has outgrown the home nest - with 10,000 active educators from all over the world and a top 90,000 website in the world. Randy is on the governing council. Now, WikiEducator is co-located with Otago Polytechnic in NZ, and is under the rubric of a nonprofit entity called the OER Foundation. Athabasca University in Canada hosts their servers, the Commonwealth of Learning supports their infrastructure, and they have relationships with tertiary and secondary institutions from around the world.

WikiEducator are exploring different models of openness, including "open philanthropy" (http://www.wikieducator.org/Open_Philanthropy). They are also always interested in pilot projects (http://www.wikieducator.org/Pilot_Projects) to strengthen relationships and see how they can work together and develop internal use cases.

Talis launches angel fund for Open Education Projects

Talis is offering grant funding of between £1,000 and £15,000 for Open Education projects. Aimed at individuals or small groups, the Talis Incubator for Open Education provides angel funding and other forms of assistance for ideas and projects that have the potential to further the cause of Open Education through the use of technology. All they ask in return is that you donate or ‘open source’ the intellectual property generated back to the communities that could benefit most from your work.

The Talis Incubator for Open Education scheme will run for 12 months from September 2009.

The submission deadline for proposals for the first round of awards is the 31st December 2009, with the first awards made towards the middle of March 2010.

The submission deadline for the second round is the 31st June 2010, with the awards made towards the middle of September 2010.

For more info see: http://blogs.talis.com/education/incubator/

Opening lines

I had a quick meeting with Patrick* yesterday in preparation for going to the OpenEd conference next week. He passed on two discs from JISC infoNet so I could have a browse while I am sitting in my hotel or maybe even to pass the time on the flight. I know a little about JISC, but not much, so I thought I'd have a look at their website: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/. It looks like there are loads of great resources there. But straight off I thought I'd follow them on Twitter.

In passing I heard a headline on the radio last night asking people to phone in on the topic 'are you fed up with social networking media?' Some may have tried it out and then become bored, but I feel it is not going to go away. There are certainly fashionable trends on which media to use, though. I guess the clue is in the 'social' part of it - to keep in touch with your friends you need to use the things they use, go to the places they go…

Someone told me that Twitter had been hacked into this week, but as I couldn’t find out any current news stories on it, I'm guessing it was old news from mid July being recycled on the radio because August is always a slack time for news.

*Patrick McAndrew, Director of OLnet