Download ppt - OER10

Lisa Rogers, [email protected]
Rob Pearce [email protected]
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Project overview / Search demo
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The premise:
◦ the conventional approach and why it’s creaky
◦ the distributed approach and why it’s creaky
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Technical development
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Demo of the distributed Search “Supersearch”
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Further work
[email protected]
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce
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OER – take teaching resources, clear legal
ownership issues, give them away for others
to use as they wish. A new take on an old
idea
OER project encouraged release OERs using
innovative web services, e.g; YouTube.
Also put all your stuff in the JorumOpen
[email protected]
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce
For more on IPR:
An OER Amnesty (Presentation 1022)
today at 16.20, the Bowering Room
by Alex Fenlon
©Wit, used courtesy of Wit
used under this Creative
Commons license
[email protected]
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce
[email protected]
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce
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The OER pilot project for Engineering
disseminates its resources, where possible,
through YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, Vimeo,
Scribd and others.
Instead of building (yet another!) local database
of these resources to create a cross search
service, I decided to investigate using the “APIs”
from each service, as well as third party tools
such as Yahoo! Pipes and Google custom Search.
This paper summarises the progress so far.
[email protected]
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce
YouTube
Scribd
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Plan “A” – a conventional
databases: Lo-Risk
Web 2.0
websites, e.g
YouTube
◦ Pros: normal approach,
◦ well understood,
◦ easy to control,
SlideShare
(Databases)
Flickr
Vimeo
OER
Materials
from the
project
Open Jorum
(Database)
◦ Cons – data repeated in many
different places
◦ time consuming
◦ data always inconsistent or
◦ out of date
[email protected]
Project web
pages on
Engsc website
(Database)
Partners’ web
sites
(Links or a
Database)
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce
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Perfection:
◦ one source of data, so easy
to control / better version
control
◦ some guarantee of a
consistent service
Web
sites
YouTube
Scribd
Open Jorum
(Database)
SlideShare
Flickr
◦ no duplication
◦ quick to update, lopropagation delay
◦ data always consistent
[email protected]
Vimeo
OER
Materials
from the
project
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce

Plan “B” – compromise, the Supersearch
◦ Pros: reduces repetition
of info to a minimum
whilst still meeting project
requirements
◦ saves potential users from having to
visit multiple sites
The Internet
◦ can provide better answers
◦ one-stop-shop for resources
and project dissemination
◦ pulls together multiple media that
should be linked together
◦ provides partner specific materials’ views
YouTube
Scribd
Partners’ web
Super Search
Web 2.0
websites, e.g
YouTube
SlideShare
(Databases)
(Links or a
Database)
Flickr
Vimeo
◦ Cons: depends on consistent
service levels from free services
◦ time consuming
◦ “APIs” not consistent
[email protected]
Open Jorum
(Database)
OER
Materials
from the
project
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce
[email protected]
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce
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Google provides a custom search engine facility. Results can be limited to a list of predetermined
websites or can be filtered by keywords. This search engine limits the results to the following
domains.
Flickr http://www.flickr.com, Scribd http://www.scribd.com, SlideShare
http://www.slideshare.net, YouTube http://www.youtube.com
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as a demonstration the project produced:
http://www.google.co.uk/cse/home?cx=007182910873444472376:bdz1enadj3a
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search limited with keyword “engscoer” which is the identifying tag for the project.
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irregular results, for example, results may appear in the refined results though not be present in
the unrefined search results. This does however seem to be gradually improving over time.
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easily extensible; more sites could be included without too much difficulty.
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using labels, could refine a search to photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Photo Bucket.
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Cons: Options for embedding limited to JavaScript embed code. Results a little inconsistent, lack
of fine control over look.
[email protected]
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce

Yahoo pipes is described as “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate and mash up content from
around the web”. The demonstration pipe is available here
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=3046acdeb4f3af164c7abc1ed83a388a
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for Scribd and SlideShare, the pipe pulls in RSS feeds from these sites of resources tagged engscoer, then filters
these results based on a keywords in the title and/or description.
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for YouTube an RSS feed URL is constructed based upon the project tag and keywords entered in the query. This
seems to be more effective than filtering an existing RSS feed.
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for Flickr, the Yahoo! Pipes Flickr module was used, allowing users to perform a query to find a particular number
of images, matching their search criteria as well as the project tag. This again seems to be an effective
mechanism.
the output from Yahoo Pipes can be delivered as an RSS feed, JSON or PHP. JSON and PHP allow much more
flexibility in which metadata elements from the results are displayed, though this requires more advanced
programming skills than the Google CSE embed code.
example of yahoo pipe output embedded within a webpage http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/engscoer/yahoopipe.php
Cons: Can be complicated, slow, depends on a free “none core” Yahoo service, RSS feeds may only contain the
latest 20 items therefore older resources would be overlooked. Embedding options limited, results a little
inconsistent, lack of fine control over look.
[email protected]
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce
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APIs provided by the five main file sharing platforms.
each API requires the search query to be formed in a unique
way, differ in the way the queries are performed and may
not return all the metadata fields that are required.
a certain amount of effort is required to configure each API.
Luckily, as these services are popular, there are community
developers who have created PHP clients for some of the
APIs.
this became the approach of choice. tabs are in fact
separate web pages, when a new tab is clicked upon, it
performs the search for that service, rather than in he
background.
[email protected]
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce
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Bring results more tightly together – grouping by
url, tags etc.
Extend search to cover multiple subject
Speed it up by using less web services!
Wait until Google catch up with “Deep” web
Eventually Jorum will support SRU
The Internet continues its progress
towards becoming a global
computer network with better
data interchange protocols
©Kevin Zollman courtesy of Kevin Zollman,
used under this Creative Commons license
[email protected]
1059 Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to
best present OER materials. Rob Pearce