OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
Might we build and host in an OPLI a vast video library of master teachers that could be indexed, commented on and parsed? MIT’s new browser shows promise for automatic speech recognition; it is trained only by giving the system some papers written by the lecturer. Once transcripts are created, we are able to access just that part of a lecture to get a quick refresher or memory jog. Or a teacher might use it to slip something into his or her own lecture. Universities focus on both timeless issues and very timely issues. We need to find ways to capture more of the latter so one starts to think of OPLI-based services as a place to come or an infrastructure to use to find out about the latest developments in a particular field. This is in part what we discussed earlier about increasing the granularity of what can be accessed and reused within a resource collection.
An emphasis throughout this report is how can we create material that can be radically repurposed and remixed where appropriate. Key to making the whole more than the sum of the parts is to create some XML[1] schemes with at least a minimal amount of markup capability. How detailed it should be or how it evolves is an open question. Currently, one could argue not only is the whole not more than the sum of the parts; it is more often closer to the difference of the parts—more does not necessarily mean better; in fact, it often overloads us. We need new powerful assists from the merger of social filtering, search, and visual browsing schemes to survive. We also need social software and social sites for critiquing and sharing experience: sharing material + sharing experience = closing loops to make resources better. Some of these resources are very transient, but much of what is done gets repurposed decades later. We need to solve the archival problem in OPLI (others will) but we must recognize that archiving of multimedia material is a problem in itself.
4.4 Some Functional Attributes of an OPLI
Having sketched some of the gestalt of learning in the OPLI-enabled work, we will now list some of the necessary attributes of the underlying OPLS.
- Extensible—we are in a turbulent embryonic stage although middleware projects like Globus[2] are making headway. Google and YouTube are not solutions or even initial platforms, but they will evoke and provoke our imaginations.
- Remixable—discussed earlier.
- Repurposable—automatic scaling and transcoding between wall-size screens and mobile PDAs.
- ↑ extended markup language
- ↑ http://www.globus.org/
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