I spent the first half of this week in Houston, Texas for the Connexions
Consortium Meeting and Conference. What
follows are my personal reflections.
Connexions
(http://cnx.org) is an online repository of
learning materials — open educational
resources
(OER). Unlike many other OER repositories, Connexions has a few
characteristics that work together to expand it’s reach and utility.
While it was founded by (and continues to be supported by) Rice
University, the content in Connexions is larger in scope than a single
university, and isn’t tied to a particular course the way, say, MIT
OCW is. Attendees of the conference came from as
far away as the Netherlands and Vietnam.
In addition to acting as a repository, Connexions is an authoring
platform: content is organized into modules, which can then be
re-arranged, re-purposed, and re-assembled into larger collections and
works. This enables people to take content from many sources and
assemble it into a single work that suits their particular needs; that
derivative is also available for further remixing. At the authors’ panel
at the conference, we heard about how some authors have used this to
update or customize a work for the class they were teaching. [UPDATE 5
Feb 2010: See the Creative Commons
blog for information
on this, and thoughts from the
author “Dr.
Chuck“ (Charles Severance), who
was on the authors panel. ]
Finally, Connexions is an exemplar when it comes to licensing: if you
want your material to be part of Connexions, the license is CC
Attribution 3.0. While
OER is enabled by CC licenses generally, this choice provides a lot of
leverage to users. The remixing, re-organizing, and re-purposing enabled
by the authoring platform is far simpler with no license compatibility
to worry about. Certainly you can imagine a platform that handled some
of the compatibility questions for you — and the idea of developing such
a system based on linked data is intriguing to me personally — but the
use of a single, extremely liberal license means that when it comes to
being combined and re-purposed, all authors are equal, all content is equal.
This year was the second Connexions Conference, and from my perspective
there were two themes: the consortium, and Rhaptos. The consortium is
actually why I was in Houston. The Connexions
Consortium is an, uh, consortium of
organizations with a vested interest in Connexions: universities and
colleges that are using it and companies that are using the content. And
Creative Commons, who I was
representing at the meeting. I’ve also been elected to the Technology
Committee, a group of
people representing consortium members who will provide guidance on
technical issues† to Connexions. During our meeting on Monday
afternoon there was discussion of a variety of areas. One that we didn’t
get to, but which is interesting to me, is how content in Rhaptos
repositories can be made more discoverable, and how we can enable
federated or aggregated search‡.
Rhaptos was the other prominent theme at the conference.
Rhaptos is the code that runs Connexions:
cnx.org without the specific look and feel/branding. While the source
code behind Connexions has always been available, in the past year
they’ve invested time and resources to making it easy (or at least
straight-forward) to deploy. Interestingly (to me) Rhaptos is a
Plone (Zope 2)
application, and the deployment process makes liberal use of
buildout. It’s not clear to me exactly what
the market is for Rhaptos. It’s definitely one of those “unsung”
projects right now, with lots of potential, and one really high profile
user. I think it’ll be interesting to see how the Consortium and Rhaptos
interact: right now all of the members are either using the flagship
site to author content, or the content from the site to augment their
commercial offerings. One signifier of Rhaptos adoption would be
consortium members who are primarily users of the software, and
interested in supporting its development.
Overall it was a great trip; I got to hear about interesting projects
and see a lot of people I don’t get to see that often. I’m looking
forward to seeing how both the consortium and Rhaptos develop over the
next year.
† If needed, and the evidence to date is that the staff is more
than competent. I expect we’ll act more as a sounding board, at least initially.
‡ This is an area that’s aligned with work we’re doing at CC
right now, so it’s something I’ll be paying attention to.
date: | 2010-02-04 22:15:06 |
wordpress_id: | 1457 |
layout: | post |
slug: | houston-connexions |
comments: | |
category: | cc |
tags: | cc, cnx, IAH, oer, travel |