All posts in Mediawiki

Another Tool For Open Content

Posted March 12th, 2008 by Bill

I just came across this tool for Mediawiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Send2Wiki

This extends the possibilities for using mediawiki as a remixing engine for open content repositories that are otherwise closed. I particularly like the pdf to wiki functionality.

OER's: Publishing is the Easy Part; Now, Let's Make Them More Usable

Posted February 17th, 2008 by Bill

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I've been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php

Open Content -- Musings

Posted October 3rd, 2007 by Bill

I've been thinking about Open Content recently for a few reasons -- As he does with many things, Jim Groom had a great post over on his blog about his experiences at Open Ed 2007.

Here is a lightly edited version of my comment on his post:

On days when I'm feeling cynical, I can't get around the sensation that some of the motivation driving the discussion on "issues of scalability, sustainability, localization, and other infra-structural issues" has less to do with scalability, sustainability, and culturally competent/translated content than it has to do with controlling the flow of content, or slowing the process while businesses figure out how to make money off of licensing.

Look At That Doggy In The Window

Posted May 25th, 2007 by Bill

David Wiley recently posted on what some folks are calling Open Educational Resources, or OER's. This post extends my comment left on David's original post.

In his post, David starts by examining the difference between producers and consumers of Open Educational Resources, with an emphasis that Good Things '„¢ start happening when the Consumers become the Producers through the magic of wiki-style group editing.

He suggests that one of the impediments to broader re-use of OER's results from the original R living in a strict context -- ie, the R came into existence because of a specific educational need in a specific educational place, and reusing the R will be difficult in part because no two contexts are alike.

DIY: Private Video Sharing for a school, a district, or an organization

Posted April 7th, 2007 by Bill

I've been involved in a couple conversations recently about setting up tools within institutions to maintain video archives. Andy Rush wrote up a post describing some great work integrating Wordpress and Mediawiki; and on a listserv discussion about tools for sharing video, I mentioned that this could be done using Drupal. My remark prompted Miguel Guhlin to ask The Question: How would you do it?

So, here are a few ways to get this done. As with any technical solution, the best approach will be determined by the combination of an organization's mission and their technological resources. At the risk of stating the obvious, all the tools discussed in this post are Open Source tools, and available under a GPL or LGPL license.