[Open-education] open-education Digest, Vol 9, Issue 13

Fri Apr 25 21:38:14 UTC 2014

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Am 25.04.2014 15:07, schrieb Megan Beckett:
> Hi everyone

Hello, Megan, hello list.

Well, a challenge. Let's see, whether I figure out, how to read all
those messages :)

> I actually just put some thoughts down this morning and thought it tied in
> really well to what Tore said about OER being closed from an accessibility
> perspective.

When speaking about accessibility, I always wonder, whether people have
humans with disabilities in mind or are speaking about how much a
resource is reachable on the web. Maybe we need another term for the
latter one.

> I propose that when creating/authoring/aggregating OER/open textbooks
> for reuse, the final step should then be to disaggregate it into its
> component parts to allow for easy and accessible remixing (ie. make up
> then break up!).

You mentioned LaTeX in your blog article. Well, it's possible to embed
extern content in LaTeX, too. For example, in my thesis I load the code
from outside into my document (with highlighting and everything). Same
holds true for CSV files, which I visualise in LaTeX internally. So it's
possible, to offer raw data for crunching outside the final document.

In terms of accessibility, LaTeX is (sadly) a bad choice as it is hardly
possible to compile a Tagged PDF (proof me wrong, if it changed!). The
upside is, .tex is always human readable in opposite to, say, a .docx (I
would prefer .doc over .docx for cross compatibility whenever doable).
One has to decide, which point is more important.

> Here is an image I made to illustrate it graphically: (not sure if this
> will come through on the mailing list, but it's on my blog)

It came. As attachment. But, please, let me remind you, that attachments
cause traffic on the servers so it's discouraged to do so.
At least for mailing lists.

> And, if you don't want to go through the whole blog post, you can just have
> a look at our Siyavula photostream, where I have put all of the
> illustrations I had commissioned for our Natural sciences books, the photos
> I took, and the concept maps I created. This is my first step to "breaking"
> our open textbooks down again to make them more accessible for remixing. I
> hope everyone will benefit from all of these CC-BY science illustrations
> and concept maps!
> https://www.flickr.com/photos/121935927@N06/sets/

Here it becomes interesting.
Recently I'm thinking much about decentralisation (since one hacker
named it “broken by design” - but that's another story).
What do you do, if Yahoo! (owner of Flickr) goes down one day? Or shuts
down? Every internet giant falls. The past teached us this lecture.
So isn't it more prudent to trust in decentralised (and free & open)
alternatives? Say, GNU MediaGoblin: http://mediagoblin.org/
Sure, Flickr is famous. I'm using it too for my blogs. But especially
Africa is known for mesh networks. I'm surprised they aren't pushed in
your example!

I'm for redundancy. Decentral networks encourage that. Just some food
for thoughts.

> Kind regards
> Megan

About 20 Minutes to midnight!

Have a nice weekend :)

André

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