 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the OER Domains Conference. I'm very pleased to be here chairing this session with Jen Jens this morning. He's going to be talking about infrastructure and lightweight markup language for OER in the case for Emacs Reveal. I'm looking forward to his presentation. Take it away. Okay. Thank you, Helen, for the introduction. Actually, from where I'm currently sitting. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. So my name is Jens Lichtenberger. I'm with the University of Münzer in Germany. And in this talk, I'll sketch my free software infrastructure Emacs Reveal to generate OER presentations, such as the one that I'm currently presenting from my browser, and that you can find under the URL shown on this slide, where you can follow along in your browser if you want. Note that in the bottom left, there is a usage help link, and that might help you getting started. So I'd like to take you to a quick reality check. So let's briefly check how we might be using OER, for which we expect the five hours of openness, which go back to a research paper by Hilton and others in 2010. And based on that idea of openness, nowadays we expect the freedoms to retain, to reuse, to revise, to remix, and to redistribute materials. Now, suppose that after this conference, you aim to remix a presentation. And maybe as usual, you obtain a PDF version. So how do you transfer contents into your OER? So copy and paste from PDF is a hassle, and quite likely there will be layout conflicts as well. Maybe you're more lucky and obtain a PowerPoint source file instead of a PDF. But well, maybe you're using Viber Office or only Office, and then likely again, you run into layout problems. And even if you use PowerPoint, then positioning of elements might still be slightly different, for example, in your organization's corporate style, using different fonts. And well, let's say you ignore all that or get around that, and then you revise the material that you copied. And then quite likely, you do that in a silo. So you fix typos, you update contents based on more recent research. And the question is, do you notify the author? Do you collaborate? How? And I'm going to answer those questions based on my approach towards OER. So this is the agenda for these 15 minutes. So first, I clarify basic terms, then explain requirements for OER before presenting IMEX reveal and telling you a bit about sample OER courses, and then concluding the presentation. So concerning basic terms, first of all, there is, of course, OER as a term itself. But in this conference, I do not have to explain that. Instead, just let me remind you of the five hours of openness mentioned earlier, which characterize a culture of sharing, which uses appropriate licensing to overcome barriers of copyright law, granting freedoms to everyone. And in fact, such freedoms have a long tradition in software development under the term free software, which you might know as open source software. And all software that I endorse here in this talk is free software. So you can take that, improve it, redistribute it in modified form. And that is what we also want to do with OER. So my approach is rooted in a version control system called Git. So what's that? First of all, version control systems empower us to manage shared repositories. That is collections of documents with their histories, keeping track of who changed what, when, and why. Importantly, Git is a decentralized version control system, which enables us to work independently on own copies of our documents, even offline, and to synchronize our work with others as we wish and control. In my approach, I use GitLab, a platform to manage Git repositories on the web, where lots of actions can be performed in the web browser. If you do not know GitLab yet, there is lots to explore. I believe that we should learn version control when we learn digital writing. Thus we need to teach it. So this slide contains a reference to an academic paper discussing Git in an OER context and a link to a self-study introduction that I use with my students. Actually earlier this day, I just went through them through Git exercises. And as a side note, the Git introduction mentioned here is an OER generated with Emacs reveal. So those were basic terms. Now let's head over to requirements for OER. So the choice of an appropriate license is crucial for OER, but beyond the scope of this talk. Then the paper by Hilton and others from 2010, which I mentioned earlier, not only proposed the Rs of openness, but also the so-called ALMS framework to characterize the openness of OER. I really suggest that you read that paper if you don't know it yet. And in a nutshell, not only OER, but also the production software and source material should be free and open. That's the essence of that framework. And I have a kind of interpretation of that framework that I described in the German paper, but roughly the ALMS for access to editing tools is best characterized by free software. And it should be extended to include access to OER on any device, also mobile and offline. Also, I suggest to extend these M and S for meaningfully editable and source file access by the concept of single sourcing from technical writing. With single sourcing, we collaboratively maintain documents without the need for copy and paste. So recall that copy and paste, as I said, initially creates isolated duplicates in silos. And besides, we'd like to develop the layout independently of the real contents. And then lightweight markup languages are just text documents and make up for a good starting point. So they pose no barriers to editing. And they allow us to harness the full power of version control systems such as Git. And then EmacsReview is my software suite, free software and infrastructure to create OER presentations and documentation and source code are available on GitLab under links that you see here. With EmacsReview, I generate HTML slideshows like this one. And they can be viewed in standard browsers and include too many features to explain here. But importantly, the requirements that I mentioned earlier are all satisfied. So that means I write presentations in a lightweight market language that is called ArcMode and that is native to the text editor GNU Emacs. So the name EmacsReveal refers to Emacs as editor and reveal JS as presentation framework. And HTML presentations are then generated from ArcMode files on a GitLab infrastructure. And besides, this slide points to a paper describing the approach of EmacsReveal to handle license information of embedded images with machine readable metadata. And on this slide, you see how such an ArcMode content actually looks like. So I'm not going to explain all the details here. But instead, first, I'd like to jump back. So this is actually the source code of an earlier slide. So it's this slide here. So recall that was for basic terms. So we've got a kind of structure in these presentations, first level and second level headings. So we are UNESCO definition first level heading. And then you also see different types of boldface and italics and you see literature references. And you can click on that and then you actually are transferred to a bibliography. And this is here how the source code looks like. So for example, references, they actually go to a BibTech file, which you might know from LeyTech. Then I told you that this slide itself was on a second level of nesting. And that is indicated by these two stars here at the beginning by the two stars here at the beginning of the line. So you see the citations here. And so that there is a little bit to learn about this type of markup. But I would say that it's not particularly complicated. Of course, it takes some time getting used to this. But then you can really focus on the contents without really having to worry about the layout of the slide as it is created afterwards. So I publish my material at oer.gitlab.io and I'd like to invite all of you, take a look, maybe contribute, maybe join forces if you like that particular approach. As I said, the strength of this use of lightweight markup language is that contents can be specified independently of layout considerations. And so content experts do not have to be layout experts as well. And remixing is possible independently of layout conventions. That should simplify collaboration across organizational boundaries. Then ART mode has something called an include mechanism. So what you see on this slide is another teaching resource that I use with my students. It's about Docker, whatever that is. But what you see here is that so that will result in some presentation for the students, for self-study. And you see that it consists of several parts. And I'm free to choose which one to include for what purposes. And also these different parts can be improved independently from each other. And then afterwards being brought together. And as I said, the important use series, they can updates and improvements do not have to exist in isolated silos, but can be maintained in a shared repository following the ideas of single sourcing from technical writing. In addition, when thinking about OER, as I said, we need to think about license considerations. And IMAX review adopts licensing recommendations of a review of the reuse project. It's a project around software development, but still the ideas are quite simple. So in the source files, I just include license headers, such as those that you see here, a line indicating copyright and then also what type of license I'd like to share that under. And then in the presentations, license information is generated automatically in human and machine readable form. Well, so that was a quick tour through IMAX reveal. Now let's see what did we actually gain. So I started out with this reality check. Suppose you'd like to remix a presentation after this conference. And I said that, well, maybe you obtain a PDF version. Now with the approach that I presented, well, you don't have to worry about PDF anymore. Instead, you can focus on the contents that you'd like to remix. Then I said, well, maybe you obtain a PowerPoint slide source file. Well, in this case, well, let's exchange lightweight markup languages, which you can edit with any software and which can then be rendered into different target formats. You just talked about HTML presentations, but PDF, for example, is also possible. Then I started out with revising the contents in a silo. And I presented an approach to you that is rooted in collaboration using version control systems that really scale up in software development to projects with thousands of people. So that is what I wanted to present to you. I'm through with the slides. Thanks for your attention. And I'd like to hear whether they're questions. Thank you so much, Jens. This, I think, is still leaving me on the very edge of my comfort zone. I think there are so many people that need to hear this presentation. And I think, and I'm hoping you're willing to share it in the Discord channel as well. And some of the links to the GitLab and the paper that you mentioned in the presentation would be very helpful. So, Martina, I hope your question was answered. And I'm very happy to see Jonathan here. I was just sending you a tweet and hoping that you would connect. So I think this was important with some of the work that we do with Creative Commons and the copy-paste nightmare that is created with Creative Commons licensing. Also, maybe adding to the question by Martina, I mean, this presentation that I'm showing here right now is created from such a lightweight markup language. So the presentation that I showed in between, I had this tiny snippet of source code, how that really looks like in my editor. And I'm currently viewing that from what's presenting that from my browser. And with the link on the first slide, you could also follow along in your own browser. So that is an example. And as I said, if you go to OER.GitLab.io, then also you find resources that I generated with this approach. Thank you for that. There's a question whether that is only for presentations or also textbooks. Well, you can, this art mode, I use that for all my writing. I also use that to write papers. You can also, so the typical approach there would be that you translate the art mode sources to latex files and then generate PDF from there. For example, for this presentation, there's also a PDF version that is generated automatically via latex translation. Yeah, let me try actually there is something hiding here. In this, I don't think that I can paste something into the chat here. So I can see the comments, but I don't see an area for really pasting. So if you go to... Sorry, Janice, if you post it in the private chat and I'll do copy and paste into... I'll put it in both Discord and maybe on Twitter so people can follow it. Oh, there it is. Got it. Okay, and I'll post this both on Twitter and in the Discord channel. Okay, thank you. Okay, you're welcome. Any other final questions or comments from folks that are in the session? If not, thank you so much, Janice, for sharing openly and giving us a lot of food and a lot of for thought and a lot of new things to learn. I have not explored GitLab before, so this is definitely worth a look. Okay, yeah, thank you. Thanks for inviting me here and it has been a pleasure so far enjoying this conference. Thanks.