MOCSL - Retreat Report

Project Name and Start Date
Making OpenContent Support Learning (MOCSL), October 2006

Project URL
http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/mocsl/

Brief Description of Project Goals
Making Open Content Support Learning (MOCSL) is a set of smaller tools designed specifically to advance the state of the art in supporting end users’ abilities to find educational resources, localize and reuse educational resources, and close the feedback loop between end users and content authors.

The tools are in various stages of development and will release for public use over the course of 2007.

Participating Institutions and key people
- Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University
- David Wiley, PI, , http://davidwiley.org/
- Justin Ball, Technical Lead, http://justinball.com/,
- George Mason University Zotero Team

Highlights

• Ozmozr received several great reviews on its alpha release in January 2007 on Web 2.0 sites like Mashable!, with over 200 users signing up in the first week. ContentLicensing tool for Plone has been adopted by the Plone4Artists project.

Milestones and Deliverables
Last 12 months:

• Launched Ozmozr.com Alpha
• Released the ContentLicensing product for Plone that makes it easy for Plone users to use Creative Commons, GFDL, and other open licenses, and embeds all content metadata (including license metadata) within Plone documents as RDF
• Finalized the data storage/access system we will use for all RDF-based projects

CY 2007 Anticipated
We will release the following additional MOCSL tools in 2007:

• Scrumdidilyumptious is a tool that allows a user to express a relationship between any two resources viewable in a web browser, and store and access these relationship expressions later either as HTML, RSS, or RDF.
• MakeAPath is an add-on to Scrumdidilyumptious that will both let users create paths of arbitrary length (stored as individual URI to URI relations) and will automatically generate paths based on all relations expressed by system users.
• Send2Wiki is a tool that allows users to send OERs directly into a wiki with the push of a (bookmarklet) button in order to build derivative works.
• Annorate is a tool that allows users to rate and make notes on web pages.
• OER Finder is an extension of the OCW Finder (http://opencontent.org/ocwfinder/). The Finder will provide a novel interface into the aggregated RSS feeds provided by different OCW and OER collections.
• Resource Recommender is a Didily- and Ozmozr-enabled web service that recommends new resources to people.

Community
Current Status

• Ozmozr.com has been publicly available for less than two weeks but has a user community of 200.
• Our ContentLicensing tool has been adopted by the Plone4Artists project (http://plone4artists.org/tour) and is in use by all eduCommons and Plone4Artists users.

Contributors

• Users – See above
• Plans for development – Ozmozr source code will be placed on SourceForge as the “OzCode” project. ContentLicensing product will be placed in Plone products repository on Plone.org. We will use conference presentation, blogs, and other channels to recruit contributors.
• Progress toward those plans – ContentLicensing product is currently in the Plone products repository. OzCode will be up on SF.net by the end of January. We have already begun advocating the ContentLicensing product, and will begin advocating OzCode once it goes online.

Sustainability

• Plan – We are in the very early stages of creating a sustainability plan.
• Progress toward plan – None to date

Synergy Opportunities with Other Orojects

The Zotero project at George Mason University, which is creating a Firefox Extension that will help users create, manage, and use bibliographic data for scholarly books and articles, has expressed an interest in using Didily to store its relations data. Relations between two sources like “Book 1 is an Italian translation of Book 2” are perfect candidates for storage in the database. Utah State University and George Mason University have already agreed to share data both directions. We will harvest publicly accessible Zotero data in Ozmozr, and George Mason University will also be able to harvest publicly accessible Ozmozr data. This data sharing will be done in support of a recommendation service.

Because the goal of MOCSL tools like Send2Wiki and Annorate is to “take the tools to the content,” there are a number of opportunities for synergy with OpenCourseWare and Sakai. Both of these projects could easily add MOCSL functionality to their sites that would provide benefits to their end users.

There are also interesting opportunities to export RDF from MakeAPath and Didily directly in VUE 2 once RDF is supported.