Repositories and open content

Following on from the comments earlier by Niall, Fiona and Mary about repositories, whether you like 'em or not, funders seem to! There are many projects around the world developing repositories, some built on open-source platforms, others proprietary; some hosting free (or Creative Commons) content, others not so free; some holding basic text documents and or PowerPoint slides, some with rich, interactive multimedia; some publicly accessible, some not....

Certainly they can be useful in helping in the mad rush to find materials ahead of a deadline, or help with random browsing and sampling of content produced by others, but whether the 'learning objects' within will enrich the student experience or go the way of clip art collections, is up to how they are used (and any intrinsic value or 'affordances' for learning).

In projects such as Ireland's NDLR, much of the emphasis is now on building 'communities of practice' around subject areas to motivate teachers to share their materials with each other.

Anyway, for interest, some repositories and content collections that were mentioned in the conference and around the coffee were:

• Ireland's (fledgling) National Digital Learning Repository - donations of material welcome!
• The UK's Jorum
• Rice University's Connexions
• MERLOT - the big one in the US, collections of URLs more than objects per se
• MIT's famous open courseware
• The UK Open University's open courseware project OpenLearn
• The OpenCourseware Consortium
• Scottish Cultural Resources Across the Network (Scran) - membership but free for schools

Enjoy.