[Open-education] Open Education Handbook available on Wikibooks

Wed Dec 17 12:47:22 UTC 2014

On 17/12/14 11:33, Barker, Phil A wrote:
>
> Yep, there are lots of platform dependent ways. Booktype, the platform
> that the handbook is hosted on at OKFN, has some support for cloning.
> But not everyone is going to use the same platform, and yes, there is
> no standard for OER content. By saying it was a problem I didn't mean
> to imply that it was solvable, and even if it is solvable won't be
> solved until the pain caused by forking is greater than the effort and
> sacrifices necessary to create and adopt a solution.
>
> Did you mean OAI ResourceSync ? It's worth a look

Booktype does support cloning, but one key limitation is that is doesn't
preserve information on who has made which edit to the book (perhaps
that's asking a bit much at this stage).

My vote would be for epub to be the most likely candidate for an
exchange format which would facilitate such a federated approach.
There is a bit written about the work we did on this for the Libre
Graphics Research Unit here.
http://lowstandart.net/index.php?entry=entry120911-005039

Why epub? Well it's self-contained and export to epub is already
supported by many online platforms for to allow reading on ereaders /
tablets. For example Media wiki can do it.

It's importing where things become a bit more tricky.
However Pressbooks.com already allow you to import epubs into their
writing platform based on Wordpress. And Booktype allows you to import
epubs too.
There seem to be a lot of code libraries that allow for easy reading and
conversion of epub so that's already a head start.

I'd love to see more research and practice based study on what a healthy
interacting system of educational resources would look like in an
accessible federated writing system.
I can imagine webs of teachers collaborating on resources, forking them
for particular audiences and remerging the advances made.

nice one
Mick

-- 
Mick Chesterman - mick at flossmanuals.net
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@onefuzzyduck [twitter]

http://clearerchannel.org - training and freelance work
http://flossmanuals.net - Free Manuals for Free Software

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