Three nice convergences underway… and a new map widget in my blog gutter, showing who is logged in to OpenLearn right now as a result:
1. Tony Hirst’s increasing deployment of scrapers, aggregators, pipes, and other tools to make OpenLearn content more suitable for Personal Learning Environments (Tony’s blog: here).
2. Stuart Brown rolls out an OpenLearn NetVibes Universe (blogged: here | universe: here | OpenLearn: here), increasing both worldwide exposure of OpenLearn and private personalization capabilities at the same time.
3. Alex Little rolls out independently-embeddable MSG Map Widgets (blogged: here). The OpenLearn Universe widget you see on the right of this blog is that exact embedded code in action.
Great going, guys! Stuart, I personally would make the ‘webpage’ tab on the NetVibes Universe 100% custom content written by you, rather than recursively embedding the entire site in a frame, since I think your own custom ‘About’ intro will be less confusing than mushing together both styles… just my two cents…..
This is disaggregation and widgetization at work… why does this matter?
- OpenLearn, the Open University’s boldest experiment since it began almost 40 years ago, is gaining ground, and is an important scheme in its own right.
- The Facebook and NetVibes steamrollers are continuing to gain ground at least partly as a result of opening up to third-party widget providers, evidence of the importance (as if we needed reminding) of both social software and ‘roll your own’ customizations.
- Significant experimentation is needed to understand how to leverage the best of multiple worlds, in particular the worlds of open educational resources and social software
- Supporting bidirectional embedding (I can embed third-party content and/or feeds in my own personal site, and conversely a third-party portal or centralised-service site can accommodate the embedding of my own personal widgets) is great source of experimentation, socialization, sharing, learning, and unforeseen consequences: let’s see where this goes!
Technorati Tags: openlearn, oer, elearning2.0, mashup, netvibes, msg, map, widget
July 6, 2007 at 7:31 pm |
Marc,
Whenever I load a page on your blog I get the following error pop-up:
”
http:msg.open.ac.uk:80
The Google Maps API key used on this web site was registered for a different web site. You can generate a new key for this web site at http://www.google.com/apis/maps/.
”
The OpenLearn Live! box is white, as if that is the missing content.
Hope this helps, not hinders,
Mike Lewis