Despite appearances, I argue that oEmbed is alive and kicking.
Brian Mearns has put together a document describing some concerns around the oEmbed standard, partly around security. It's generally very useful. The discussion on the oEmbed Google Group goes onto whether oEmbed is dead, and what the alternatives are.
A software component that we had in mind for the Track OER project from early on is Piwik. Piwik is an open-source Web analytics tool, that offers similar features to Google Analytics, in terms of logging page views, and outputting reports.
It offers a number of advantages over competitors:
Its been a long time since I've blogged about the OU Media Player project. So what has been going on? I thought I'd take a brief look back, then look forward...
Last spring and summer we developed an embeddable player based on the open-source Flowplayer Flash-based toolkit. Two designers form Learning and Teaching Solutions here at The Open University, David Winter and Peter Devine created to bold and attractive designs or themes.
The 2011 player hit many of the original aims of the project.
...
Don’t miss our annual Disability Conference being held this year on Tuesday 13th and Wednesday 14th November at Kents Hill Park Training and Conference Centre, Kents Hill in Milton Keynes. Please put the dates in your diaries.
This year we will be looking at working collaboratively to maximise the success of disabled students under the new 2012-13 arrangements.
Secrets of our Living Planet is a nature programme presented by Chris Packham which airs on BBC2 on Sunday evenings. It delves into fascinating and surprising connections between species – the clip I caught last night explored the dependencies between ocean salmon and ancient forest trees in North America.
A photographic exhibition by Hassan Sheikh.
I was in a meeting today of The Open University's accessibility practitioner's group. Louise Olney, a project manager in Learning and Teaching Solutions kindly came to talk to us about OU Annotate, and in particular the work that is being done to improve it's accessibility.
"OU Annotate enables you add your own annotations to web pages. You can create an annotation for an entire web page, like a bookmark, or you can select and highlight specific text. You can add comments and tags to your annotations and, if you wish, share them with others."
"The fifth 'Learn About' fair is taking place on 29th February 2012 in the Jennie Lee Building from 11:30 am - 2:30 pm with some of the fair also available online for remote participation."
These events are fairly informal, but some topics we may like to cover:
* What is OU player?
* What is OU embed?
* What is oEmbed?
* What are the benefits, for developers, end users etc.?
* How can you embed using these systems - in Drupal/ in Wordpress/ using Javascript/ in Moodle?
* What is the status of the project? Future plans?
I have been asked to present the reasoning behind our choice of CodeIgniter over Drupal for the OU player/ OU embed projects.
I will argue that the OU player project provides an ideal case study for why The Open University, including the central IT providing departments should not adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to the choice of information technologies. At present, I think they are in danger of doing this. You may also be interested in Juliette Culver's post, Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter, and Will Wood's post, Agile Ballooning.
First, some background. CodeIgniter is a minimal model-view-controller PHP framework. It is open source, makes full use of the object-oriented programming paradigm, offers database abstraction, an ORM (object-relational-model) layer, and various extension mechanisms including libraries, hooks and helper functions. By default, templating/ views are implemented in PHP, though an alternative templating system such as Smarty could be plugged in. There are many third-party plugins available, and it is a simple matter to plugin other libraries, for example parts of the Zend framework. As a low level framework, its benefits are a shallow learning curve, the promotion of maintainable, well-structured code, small footprint, performance and flexibility (http://codeigniter.com).