JISC-CETIS 2009 Conference

MeLT attended the JISC-CETIS 2009 Conference in Birmingham and came back with plenty of good ideas to enhance the CORE-Materials project.

There was some useful stuff from Charles Duncan at Intrallect on the automatic generation of metadata from texts, which we think can help us reduce the time it takes to manually catalogue our resources. During the session, we also met John McNaught from the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM), who also offered sage advice on the same subject.

Chris Clarke from Talis gave a very good overview on the use of machine-readable data to build linked open courseware.

We also learned from Russell Stannard from the University of Westminster about the successful use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to 'broadcast' the release of new OER content to followers.

steeluniversity Challenge 2010

The next steeluniversity Challenge is to take place for 24 hours from 12:00 GMT on Wednesday 27 January 2010. As well as the guys at WorldSteel, we're working with Mick Steeper of Siemens VAI, Bill Timms of Corus and James Attree & Joe Dias of the Steel Construction Institute.

steeluniversity Challenge 2010

We're working again with the World Steel Association to advise on the development of next year's steeluniversity Challenge. Details aren't to be made public for a little while, so I won't say too much.

Database and webserver technologies for CORE-Materials

In the 'open' spirit of the CORE-Materials project, we're planning to use open-source tools for the database and repository, so we'll be busy with MySQL and PHP.

CORE-Materials

MeLT is to be a major partner in the new CORE-Materials project, based at the University of Liverpool. The one-year project, funded by the JISC, HEA and HEFCE, aims to make a significant number of open educational resources (OERs) in Materials Science and Engineering freely available online under a range of Creative Commons licenses.

MeLT's role in the project is to design and create the database and web-based repository necessary to host the resources, and develop a search engine that will allow users to easily find resources relevant to them. We will also advise on uploading resources to fileshare sites like YouTube, Flickr, Scribd and SlideShare.