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).
In spare moments in the past few weeks I've been revisiting browser search plugins. I've created plugins for CloudEngine/ Cloudworks, iSpot, the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, and The Open University. I thought I'd jot down what they are, why they're useful and how I'm integrating them into my projects.
I've proposed a mini-project here, for IET to host an experimental embedding service on behalf of The Open University. This will serve a similar purpose to Embed.ly (api.embed.ly) and Oohembed (oohembed.com), and act as a proxy on behalf of other embed or service providers, for example, YouTube, LAMS, Prezi and Google Docs forms.
Johannes Brahms
Angela Caesar · soprano
David Kirby-Ashmore · baritone
John Byron and Anna Le Har · piano duet
Bill Strang · conductor
Thursday 7 April 2011 · 12:45pm - 2pm
Please note the earlier starting time
Admission free
All welcome
The Open University Choir · A German Requiem, Brahms, on Wikipedia
A colleague of mine asked me the other day at Dev8D if there was a list of all of The Open University's free/ open source contributions. I had to say that as far I knew there wasn't.
So, I've started this list on Delicious, using the tags ou opensource project. Note, I have also added tags for license where I can find one (eg. gpl for GNU General Public License), OU department (lts), technologies (svn, java) and wider projects (moodle).
Note that the tag ou does not necessarily imply that The Open University is the founding, sole, or main contributor to a project!
Feel free to add anything that I've missed. It's interesting to see what licenses we're using, what projects we're contributing a lot to (Moodle fairly obviously!) and so on. Enjoy...!
