[Open-education] Import Lesson

Fri Jul 4 08:06:54 UTC 2014

On 04/07/14 00:56, Raniere Silva wrote:
> I wrote some thoughts about it at
> http://blog.rgaiacs.com/2014/07/02/import_lesson_is_possible.html and love to
> get feedbacks.
Hi there,

I agree that we should totally advocate that OER fit with the idea of
Data Portability.

Unfortunately, this idea seems to have failed to gain traction - I never
even knew there was a Data Portability project 501c3
But alnyway it seems to have died a death along with the Open Web!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataPortability

But the idea is still valid for us in open education land. I'll post
that link to the chapter of the Open Web book on the same subject again
as it's relevant here.
http://en.flossmanuals.net/an-open-web/your-rights-and-freedoms/

Raniere, as far as your blog post goes. I think that technically I agree
with a lot of what you are saying but you could be in danger of over
thinking it. I think that while a git tech approach clearly has
advantages for forking and remerging materials, I think operating it
would create too many barriers for most educators self-publishing
materials.

Rather than try to gather a movement to adopt a new standard. I would
suggest working within the limits of what epub can deliver is a better
approach.

I need to write a better blog post to get across some of the discussion
that happened at this session at the recent cetis conference.

http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/wilbert/2014/06/24/when-does-a-book-become-a-web-platform/

My argument would go something like this.

* most OER are shared by the person / team that writes them
* online courses, Moocs, OER repositories are increasingly the place
where OER are collaboratively written using blog type, wysiswyg tools
which output HTML pages
* format specs like Scorm and metadata standards like LOM are too hard
for self publishers to use
* epubs are the most suitable candidate to allow importing and exporting
of OER into these platform allowing us the freedom to exit and remix
between repositories
* EDUPUB is in danger of bringing a lot of complexity to the equation
and hindering uptake
* let's not get hung up on interactivity - let's get the workflow
working with simple epubs first and use the web coding priciple of
"progressive enhancement" to bring more interactivity to OER
* exported ePubs work well on mobile devices (just saying)
* ePubs - all the way - let's advocate for all VLEs, MOOCs, Blogs etc to
accept import and export of ePubs

Raniere, would you consider looking at coding an import epub function to
the tool you will be using. Can you imagine some kind of workflow with
epub that invites forking and remerging?

Everyone else, is the above argument valid? What are your thoughts? Why
isn't this more common for OER platforms? 

Here are some relevant links to some of the above - I've been playing
around with exporting and importing epubs into various platforms AND
creating epubs from web pages ( very handy)  as part of the recent
Mozilla webmaker training.

  * Mozilla Webmaker
    <http://discourse.webmakerprototypes.org/t/part-three-final-experiment-in-creating-remixable-oers/456>
    - Mick's ePub series:
      o Pt 1 - Create epubs from web pages
        <http://discourse.webmakerprototypes.org/t/part-two-experiments-in-creating-remixable-oer/374/4>
      o Pt 2 - Explore and embed a video into an epub
        <http://discourse.webmakerprototypes.org/t/part-two-experiments-in-creating-remixable-oer/374/4>
      o Pt 3 - Remix and reuse epubs with online editors
        <http://discourse.webmakerprototypes.org/t/part-three-final-experiment-in-creating-remixable-oers/456>

    Tools

  * Booktype at Sourcefabric <http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/booktype/>
  * Pressbooks <http://pressbooks.com/>
  * Grab my Books <http://www.grabmybooks.com/> - firefox plugin
  * Calibre- epub editor <http://calibre-ebook.com/>

-- 
Mick Chesterman - mick at flossmanuals.net
mickfuzz [skype]
@mickfuzzz [twitter]

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

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