There have been some interesting discussions in forums here recently about exploring ways of mapping open source software and resources more closely to national curriculum coverage.
A few of us are hoping to meet up in London (at the Institute of Arbitrators) from 1:30 to 5:30 on Tuesday 17th February to explore ways in which this site might be used to offer better support to those using, or interested in using, open source software to enhance, enrich or support the National Curriculum, and it would be great to have input from teachers and techies alike.
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Miles.
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We have been doing some work with mapping curriculum to standards/metadata --
While I would love to make the London meetup, it's a bit of a commute :)
We have leveraged the Hierarchical Select module to simplify the task of connecting resources to standards, and we have also used OpenCalais to do automatically tag resources with RDF metadata -- OpenCalais works pretty well, but, like all automated tagging ser vices, the data requires some cleanup.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the problems here are generally less technical, and more related to data entry. Creating good metadata is hard, and it takes time, and it requires an attention to detail that most people don't want to do.
It also requires clean data for the actual standards. If you can get a good csv file with your standards, it simplifies the process of importing them. We have used both taxonomy and nodereferences to contain/map standards to resources -- the best solution really depends on the structure of your standards.
Cheers,
Bill
--
FunnyMonkey -- Tools for Teachers
http://funnymonkey.com
Sorry Miles - away on half term leave but happy to partiipate post-event
Tony
Hi, great idea and would love to attend but away for half term. Would love to get opinions from people using open source eportfolio software.
Well I will certainly be there, with my geek and parent hats on.
I have to apologise but some half-term childcare issues have cropped up that mean I will be unable to make the meeting on Tuesday afternoon.
Alan
We hope to have a flashmeeting extension to tomorrow afternoon's meeting. Reply below or via the contact form if you'd like to join us virtually.
Miles.
Many thanks to all those who came to today's meeting, physically or virtually.
An unedited recording, via the flashmeeting, is online at http://flashmeeting.e2bn.net/fm/fmm.php?pwd=a38660-5409 , with thanks to David Hicks for the camera work. David's own summary of the meeting is online over at edugeek.
Miles.
Just listening to the bit of the meeting I missed. On teacher CPD on Open Source issues, we already have teacher certificates which are related to Open Source. Any INGOT assessor gets an INGOT assessor certificate and has to learn at least the basics of licensing. That is part of the overall strategy. The learners have to know terms like cross-platform, interoperability, Creative Commons etc. so their teachers need to know the same things. If a learner is taking part in a community project or is researching a FOSS project, the teacher is going to find out about what these things are about. In May we will be training 12 teachers who are travelling here from Romania to be trained in Open Source. When asked what they wanted to learn they said how to get and install Open Source applications. We are thinking of running general Open Source training courses for UK teachers but a lot will depend on whether we can get sufficient participation to make it pay for itself. As a QCA accredited, e-skills endorsed Awarding Body specialising in Open Systems we can certificate that work and provide guidance as to how it can be used for the TLA stages system. The big question is whether we can get sufficient interest to cover costs. If SOSP helped with publicity we would do this on a not for profit basis and donate any surplus to any good cause/FOSS resource development thought appropriate.