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We have been working on a project with San Jose State University, the University of Puerto Rico and Unicamp (Brazil) to make an online presentation re-use system. You can play with it at (External Link) . Right now you can upload a presentation, have it converted to the alternative format, a sequence of images with an auto play facility, Flash for inserting as a tutorial, and pick up a presentation and give it live with live voice and collaboration tools (the latter still experimental). We are working on making the assets within the presentation reusable, as well as building tools to extract semantic information from the slides. The last piece is a presentation mashup utility that is still under development and not yet available on the site.

You can tag, and blog the presentations as well. There are plugins for KEWL3 (and other Chisimba applications) as well as one available for Moodle that you can download from my site at (External Link)&action=viewsingle&postid=gen13Srv30Nme10_1445_1212344985&userid=1563080430

(sorry for the long URL, I need to turn on short URLs but keep forgetting).

We are experimenting with this because it makes commonly available tools suitable for preparing reusable content, and it makes no difference if you use proprietary or FOSS tools, the results are still available.

We have only scratched the surface of these opportunities. I can imagine doing something similar for other types of media as well. Could thinks like that help to make otherwise not-reusable content into reusable forms? BTW, we could do the same thing for PDFs given a month or so to work on it. Would that be useful? Is this a useful approach to generating Free Content? Or are the media types changing too fast for this to be useful? Thoughts?

27. derek keats - june 5th, 2008 at 12:35 pm

P.S. It does not work for PPT 2007 just yet.

28. derek keats - june 5th, 2008 at 12:43 pm

I like the analogy of self-learning that Patrick made to self-taught programmers.

I think it’s already happening, especially in technology. Many contributors to open source projects are self taught programmers who found a tool that satisfied a need, then began development for personal use.

This is certainly true of most of the people who contribute to our software projects. I guess I can use myself as an example: I have never taken a course on anything to do with technology, but am the CIO of a university. But we have not gone for accreditation of our learning. On the other hand, the community in which we operate recognizes that we have learned something (otherwise I would not be here writing this). So perhaps a part of Education 3.0 is not accreditation per se, but “demonstrated community recognition of learning achieved” or something of that nature. Thus, passionate learner + F/OER + community = Accreditation 3.0.

29. wayne mackintosh - june 5th, 2008 at 1:58 pm

Derek —

Chameleon is VERY cool — one of the few web conferencing services that is working out the box on my Ubuntu. Kudos to the Chameleon team.

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Source:  OpenStax, The impact of open source software on education. OpenStax CNX. Mar 30, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10431/1.7
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