This week COSL is hosting a OER Interoperability sprint at its offices in North Logan, UT. This sprint is a follow on to the OER Interoperability meeting held at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, CA on December 10-11, 2007. This sprint is being attended by people from Connexions, ccLearn, MIT Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, OCW Consortium, Open Learning Exchange, OER Commons/ISKME, Open University, and Purdue University.

The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning is sponsoring a two and a half day sprint to develop working code demonstrating interoperability between Open Educational Resource projects. This meeting is a follow-on to the OER Interoperability Meeting that was held at the Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, CA on December 10-11, 2007.

Please tag related content with OERInterop2008 (More photos).

Here is the attendee list

COSL and enPraxis are pleased to announce the release of eduCommons 3.0.2. This release provides migration support for eduCommons 2.3.1 users, as well as minor bug fixes for eduCommons 3.0.0-final. Migration allows previous eduCommons adopters to take advantage of numerous new features that come with Pone 3, including inline editing, versioning, link checking, presentation mode, and much more (full list of Plone 3 features). eduCommons OpenCourseWare management software is currently use by over 20 major institutions worldwide (list of adopters).

The eduCommons team is pleased to announce that eduCommons 2.3.1 has been released. This release included complete refactors of migration for eduCommons, as well as proper migrations and uninstall functionality for alldependent products.

Internationalization has also taken a big step forward with this release. Numerous i18n (internationalization) bugs were eradicated, opening many doors to non-English OCW providers.

eduCommons, and all of it’s dependencies are available in one package at http://sourceforge.net/projects/educommons/

Seth Gurell, a graduate student at Utah State University, has created a collection of screencasts on how to use eduCommons. They short segments include explanations such as uploading a zip file, adding an image, and understanding workflow roles. These screencasts are available as part of the new eduCommons documentation section.

The eduCommons teams is pleased to announce the release of eduCommons 2.3.0.

Features of interest include integration of MOCSL tools (Annorate,
Make a Path, Send 2 Wiki), support for MIT Content Package imports,
improved RSS support for Departments and Courses, Course download for
anonymous viewers, and mass copyright clearance and licensing change.

For a list of included changes, please read here :
http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/educommons/releases/2.3.0

The demo site (http://demo.eduCommons.usu.edu) will be updated within 24
hours to 2.3.0.

Spread the word: tell your friends, loved ones, and neighbors!

Open Education 2007: Localizing and Learning
Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University
Conference dates are September 26-28, 2007

Submission deadline is May 18, 2007

Conference Themes
For the first several years our field focused on content production and content licensing. Today, there are thousands of full university courses and tens of thousands of learning modules available as open educational resources under open licenses like those offered by Creative Commons. However, our work isn’t finished; we’re simply nearing a checkpoint.

If our open education efforts aren’t supporting learning, we’re failing as a field. Period. And as we are beginning to understand how to produce and license content, we have to turn some of our attention to how this content is used by learners and teachers. How do they change, adapt, and localize it for their specific needs or the needs of their specific students? Do open educational resources support learning in ways different from non-open resources? In what concrete ways do open educational resources support learning?

OpenEd 2007 will focus on:
* Localizing open educational resources
* Learning from open educational resources

Acceptance announcements will be made by July 31, 2007. If your session was accepted for presentation, we strongly encourage you to submit a full paper for publication in the conference proceedings. Accepted full papers (5-10 pages) are due no later than August 17, 2007.

All submissions (short description, abstract and full papers) and presentations must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

For more info please see the conference website or email conference at cosl dot usu dot edu.

An interesting conversation was published today about Curriki, an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. Bobbi Kursham is Executive director of Curriki, formerly the Global Education & Learning community (GELC) on Java.net and President of Educorp Consultants Corp. I also recommend her blog, although it has not been updated recently.

The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL) has organized the Microlibraries Project, making over 20,000 Project Gutenberg books available at minimal cost through a simple print-on-demand system. The books are stored in a compact format and converted to a print-ready format (PDF) when they are accessed. All 20,000 public domain books fit on one DVD, so an internet connection is not necessary. The Center phone cards plans to give away 5,000 books to students in rural elementary schools in the 2006-7 school year.

Continue reading ‘Microlibraries Project: 20,000+ books available on demand’

Ozmozr (a microformat-aware aggregator/resource sharing/social site) has been getting a fair amount of press since it’s alpha release last week, but some people seem unclear about how the site can be used. This article is an attempt to go to the source (the creators) and pull together some details about what Ozmozr is all about.

Continue reading ‘A Closer Look at Ozmozr’

• Many front end UI Enhancements
• Auto-citation generation (from metadata) displayed inline with documents and included in skinless content. Simplify conformance with Attribution terms of Creative Commons licenses for those who build derivative works.
• Social Bookmarking Dropdown. Help users bookmark and later find OERs hosted in eduCommons using popular social bookmarking services.
• Expanded support for IMS Content Packaging, including a transform engine that can translate from popular IMS CP formats to and from eduCommons.
• Updated internationalization support, with translation updates for a predetermined set of languages.
• Support for content translation using the LinguaPlone product.