 We don't have slides because we've tried three laptops and we can't get it hooked up here, and I'm pretty worried about Doing this without them, but we'll do the best we can It's a little bit about who I am I'm Kathy Fletcher. My background is that I spent four years with Connections as the project manager and technical director of Connections and there are a variety of lessons that I learned connection if you don't know Connections is an open repository anybody can publish learning materials to Connections and Anybody can view and take and use Repurpose those learning materials, and that's where I spent four years of time one of the things that I learned there was that you really want to concentrate on your strengths and Connections did try to be everything to everybody and so There was a technical philosophy that you know if you had something you wanted to do some project you wanted to do well, of course you would come to Connections and do it and That doesn't always work because that doesn't empower the community to build new tools that are going to interact with it with your system So for this last half a year and coming up I've been a fellow with the Shawworth Foundation and basically the foundation Funded me to spend a year or Spend a year looking at how to create an ecosystem of tools and services around open remixable repositories like Connections So we're still Trying I'm gonna have to cage down you can keep trying but I I have to remember where I am So the fellowship is about creating an OER roadmap For an ecosystem around there we are and it's really a technical plumbing kind of issue I'm going to try to keep the talk a little bit higher than the plumbing level But it really is about plumbing And the thing about plumbing is the plumbing itself is boring But the glass of water at the end is really nice. And so that's what we're trying to get to and The the particular a lot of folks around here who will look at who are thinking about Interoperability and and plumbing issues like I am in particular I'm concentrating on one piece of it because that was the piece that was completely missing a connection So the peace I'm Concentrating on is publishing. So I've got some great content. I want to publish it to open repositories How do I do that with that thing to go learn their tools? So the you know the other side of plumbing or search and discovery it might hearable I don't even know if I'm on or not Okay, well, whatever it is. It's working if I'm too loud. Tell me and I'll turn something off So I'm concentrating on these remixable OER repositories that you would be seeing right here Visualize these repositories so repositories like connections where anybody can do textbook like material repositories like Open assessment banks and there are a few around. There's one full marks There are various other people looking at I want to get great test questions And I want to bank them and make them available for not only teachers and learners But also for people who are creating interesting tools and assessments and learning analytics from them Something like the library that's collecting, you know a page for every book ever written and any of those books That can be gotten in an open way the library is going to be a way for you to get them And they're also doing things like allowing you to check out books that are not open Worked examples one of the things that was an example that Jim Shelton gave that would be another piece that It's it's a it's very heady to have a bank of really nicely done worked Examples that you can then insert into your own content things like Dura space all those institutional archives d-space e-print archive ARX IV e Those kind of repositories with the pedia with the media comments We have something but not what I'm talking about OCW YouTube all of these repositories in various states of openness And the real thing that I'm working on is making those repositories Remixable connections is remixable, but you have to buy into the entire connections philosophy So how can I build some plumbing that makes that remix ability easier to support? Yeah, that's exactly what we need to do we need to do mirror mode and we'll be done because that was my To give me We were so close I really think that we were one step from it When you've had when he has a purple here, then I think all we needed to do is do the mirror I There we go, okay there Okay, this is good enough to give an idea Okay, so so what are the what are the things that make a repository? Remixable And I'm going to show A hand-wrought picture, so I think there are four things that really help to create a repository That's a remixable repository. It's easy to take content from reuse it and publish content back So modularity helps a lot and if you think of something like test banks and worked examples They have inherent modularity and that makes them each of those individual problems is quite reusable So that modularity is important because then you can hook different modules together and create a new hole The other thing that we want is something that's pluggable It's in some sort of editable format so that I can put these pieces together and even more important so that I can take it And I can translate it from English to Spanish. I can add a new example into it I can create, you know, I can hook it up to chemical models that I found from somewhere else So that plug ability and then something that we all know about, you know You need some ability to to as a community share content and know that it's safe to share If you're trying to do more than, you know, fair use or fair healing and then one other piece that I think Is important for teachers and learners to you know, to different extents But some sort of permanence of that content that you know, it's not going to disappear I think things like YouTube have it good enough, you know, it's permanent enough But the old web where somebody's personal web page some teachers personal web page I think it's something really fantastic, but they switch schools or whatever they stop, you know, that blog disappears That I think we need a little bit more than that sort of permanence We need a little more than internet and provides inherently Once you have this kind of remix ability, then you also have the ability to learn anywhere because you have content That can be put together. It's pluggable. You can create a new book out of it You can see it online. You can work with accessibility tools You can use Daisy readers Braille readers and you can print it out in PDF So those are the some of the wins you get by supporting remix ability So I'm going to go through all of these and I need to read all of that The idea is once we have some remixable open repositories Then what we can do around that is build this ecosystem of other tools that do not have to live in the repository itself That's one of the things that I learned from connections Connections with not going to do everything it needed to be able to support other tools and services around it So one of the one of the big things is that you want to set a double format in your repository Maybe you're supporting XML. Maybe you're supporting HTML but It's going to describe some of these kinds of services. So let's say that we have ways to Talk to these open Repositories if we have good machine tools good plumbing to talk to these open repositories Then we can think of an editor that would be able to publish wherever you want to publish So I create my content. Let me create it in word. Let me create it in Google Docs Let me create it in tiny and see an HTML editor wherever I am Let me create it in my LMS Then I want to be able to at some point decide where I want to publish this to it's I'm happy with it I want to go ahead and publish and share it I should be able to publish it to connections I should be able to take my videos and publish them to YouTube and they are the Berkeley video service Wherever and I want tools that'll help me do that and I also want tools that'll help me translate And I want to be able to get content out of those open repositories Translate it and then push it back in and have that connection between hey Here's the originating language version and here are the 20 other versions of this in different languages I want to be able to find them from each other I Want to have tools that help me to export between these different repositories and okay, so we're going to go through it. So I want to have all of these abilities to talk to Printing services journals social media services and Feedback, so what I'm trying to do is close that loop and make publishing easy and and The the the piece that are concentrated on is okay. They're a standard out there It's already pretty close to being able to give you a simple way to publish to repositories And what I found is that there's a standard called sword, which is simple web Service for offering repository deposit. They had to work kind of hard to get that And it turns out you really don't want your standard named after a real word like that because when you Google for sword Well, you get a lot of other stuff, but anyway, it's a nice simple standard And it's built on the standard that's used to publish to blocks Adam Puff, so that gives you a huge development base Around these couple of standards and sword has a lot of different implementers already, so E prints jurist base d space Archive the pre-print location and it has lots of organizations that are contributing to Especially in the European community There's a lot of adoption of sword, but the the technical committee around that has lots of different energy from different groups For developers if you're trying to write a client that's going to talk to any Repository that implements sword so that you can help somebody to publish You've got a lot of toolkits to start with whatever your language of choice. You can use There are libraries for PHP Ruby Java and Python all already built and available So what I've done with the fellowships step one pick this spec There are probably some things that are wrong with it step two Adapted to OER just a little bit because sword is really was it came out of the repository the institutional archive Kind of more of a library oriented group of Projects and so it's really about I've got something I'm going to deposit it And then it's there in my library for safekeeping forever And it wasn't as much about oh, I might want a new version of that Or I might want to adapt something that already is there and make a derived copy that still knows about its parent so a couple of little pieces added to that to the sword spec in order to do that and Then the third step was to implement it in at least one open repository and I implemented our I Had a development team implement that for connections. Of course, I know connections, so I had connections to connections So now connections unlike, you know all the ten years past you can publish the connections without ever even coming to connections You can use different tools using this this API that helps to do that Now step three and that's the piece that I would love to have some time to talk with folks out here is Building tools that actually use that API that that machine that plumbing to get into open repositories And also getting more repositories to implement the same plumbing so that tools can talk to multiple repositories at once We have a couple of things going we have a client that helps connections authors create their content in whatever format they start in Google Docs word, etc Transform it outside connections into the connections format and take a look does it look good It has the transform worked well and then finally publish it and they can also get a new version You can go out and find somebody's content say I want to drive a copy of that It will do that for you. You can edit it and then push it back And then a simple Translation tool that says okay go give me the public URL for this content I'll get a candidate translation for you and then give you a side-by-side view and let you fill that out And now you can publish it back to connections and it'll keep the the Link to the original source And then some simple things like helping Projects that have been content producers get their content done more efficiently There's a publisher that is developing on a development server and needs to migrate all their content So this plumbing helps to do that more efficiently Teachers without borders has a hundred Spanish translations of content that's already on the web So I'm going to use the API to get all of those translations hooked up with their original sources Open course library and you're going to their talks later on they are publishing 80 something I never get the number jacket right approximately 80 open courses Those will all be on the first half of those are using the API to script them and put them on connections You can find them easy easily there see the syllabus see if you want to use that course and then download it into your learning management system I had some cool pictures I talked with a guy last night who works with peer-to-peer University and he did a mashup Walk well, I didn't even talk to him. He just emailed me and we emailed back and forth a little bit and he created Peer-to-peer University linking to connections modules and Then you know some of these ideas of dual publishing if you're creating really high quality content And you have a branded experience in your bringing people to your site But there are artifacts within that that would be incredibly useful in an open repository like Questions worked examples textbook chapters You could use these kinds of this kind of API plumbing to publish Pieces of that content out into open repositories Those are some of the ideas and I'd be happy to take questions if we have time The speed version of Where I'm trying to get so I'm very interested in talking with other projects about Content that you have and that you're trying to get published and figuring out ways to to help make that easier