After all the positive remarks one thing – to be quite honest – I would have preferred to be asked about an extra week. Maybe it would have made more sense to include the comment request into the assignments the weeks before. A synchronous meeting in the beginning would been a real thrill

Thanks anyway to Hans and Teemu and all of you that you made it happen!

But my silent picture on youtube I may show here:

P.S. I just found that in the YouTube help:

Can I embed a specific YouTube video on an external site?
People who post their original material on YouTube and allow the embedding function to work are implicitly allowing other users to embed their video on other sites. If a user has allowed embedding of a video, you can embed the video link on your webpage or blog. You can find out how to embed videos here.

Well – I wasn’t asked to activate the embed function while uploading a video – so this is a default. But under sharing option you really get to say this. I tried with my introduction video of post 1 and it works, the video is not longer available as an embedded video.

BTW I liked this one a lot! digital natives – still don’t think all is true but very interesting.

I post this you tube here – hoping that Raquel is okay with me doing that – a very interesting intro into the legal aspects of OER So I think Raquel is on a meeting in Spain which discusses OER in Europe. She definitely works in the University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science.

Liked this one

Anyway this is it: —-

Few minutes later: right – it wasn’t that easy, looks like we got problems with the flash player here. Funny…

Few minutes later: okay, I need a flv file (reason for Umberto Eco not working?) – great! Will be back.

by Umberto Eco

Interesting lecture of the famous writer – but with 70 minutes … way too long! At least not an ideal www format I would say. And unlike youtube, they just offer me a link. I tried to integrate it into the blog but it won’t work. Good thing – it’s under CC.

So unfortunately I got a problem with wordpress and ogg vorbis – it’s not considered as a safe file format even if there’s an audio possibility in the media library, so I’m on my way to look for futher possibilities.

Well finally I created a free podcast site on mypodcast.com which means it has got an ad before my unprofessional voice – but there it is – it’s not filtered or anything, I will look into this I promise. But listen yourself… The bad thing about mypodcast – it did not accept ogg either. I changed it to mp3 which makes me feel bad. I will do some research on that – but that was frustrating. Is it true ipods don’t accept ogg either? Well after this experience it wouldn’t suprise me.

The other thing was – I did link back to the German CC license but there wasn’t a possibility to include the picture which I always find really handy.

For this week I read all about the rule of third in the photo composition guide – when I realised my cheesy camera actually has a cross in the middle and I have to imagine the thirds – still I kept that in mind. I read on and finally I did try the diagonal line (see underneath). I continued reading in wikimedia. Still I’m not convinced if my pictures will ever meet the high quality standards of wikimedia featured pictures – but I think it is still not to bad.

I was waiting for the weather to change but eventually I got myself persuaded that I should just grap my camera and take some photos. Right – this was actually more fun than I thought. I’m not really into taking photos – but today I did actually realize how much more you see when you try to find a motif:

I realized that there were two magnolias in the park

and there were bunnies all over!

So these photos were nothing I really cared about – I just took them. The scene is set in a small park about five minutes from my house. It’s actually one of the few spots in Mannheim which is quite pretty – Mannheim is a heavy industrial town otherwise. The main sight of my town I put on Wikimedia Commons (with a bit cropping etc.) – it’s one of 60 other photographs picturing the same tower - still I thought it might be a bit different with the art nouveau lantern. The tower was used for keeping a water reserve for the town until 2002 or so. More here

Before I put this photo there I had put two photos on Flickr and on their map – they show the building of the art gallery just opposite the art nouveau water tower. It has got a sculpture on top.

I didn’t upload them to Wikimedia as I had read about not uploading photos of sculptures to Wikimedia Commons – so I didn’t. I had checked before – and it seems to be okay for German law (‘freedom of panoram’) but as I wasn’t sure about it – it was explecitly stated that this is different in other countries I decided I shouldn’t use CC licences on them – not to harm anybody else. What do you think?

P.S. I like this sculpture a lot (the Artist is Hubertus von der Goltz)- and I was so happy when I got that bird there! So in the end I spent more time on this then I thought. Taking and editing the photos was okay – i do that quite regulary with the website at work. Playing with the flickr map was fun – and in all I really enjoyed this week’s assignment!

P.P.S Whenever I look for photos I use Flickr – I tried Google CC Search once but you can’t limit it to images, can you? Well in the future it’s definiteley Wikimedia, too.

So Wikipedia – an success story of an OER project. In my eyes it’s the most advanced and experienced OER. It’s wonderful as we can learn of the experiences made there. For example the quality assurance issue – this is in my eyes a crucial point of the OER movement. How do you make sure that the resources are actually high-quality. For me Wikipedia is a very good example where the principles of open source qa were successfully transferred into the open content area – and enhanced with specific points for content.

I was quite puzzled when I read about the interview about the three Wikipedia projects and the way they handle quality assurance and occuring problems. Processes were made by self-governance. A mixture of peer review and awarding system also incl. a “request for deletion” A flexible but somewhat sophisticated model that gained enough stability to let newbies still jump in without doing one week research on how to do it. Similar but still different approaches in different countries as not every wikipedia is similar to the other. They differ in size as well as in culture – therefore what is good for one might not work for the other. But still every wikipedia model can learn from the experience of the other.

It’s a really hard question when I think about the future of Wikipedia – I take three guesses:

• Wikipedia will not go into any commercial direction – no add-on or upgrade features. I think this will be prevented by the editors themselves – as a consequence there will be massive need for money
• Quality Standards will still have to be worked on (and academics should rather go and contribute then hide and complain.

See Speech of Prof. Cantoni on OER