June 2008

How much food has changed

Posted by karen on June 25, 2008 in Uncategorized

croissant_01.pngIn working on the kids open dictionary, I expected to find out a lot of interesting things. (This is one of the things I love about working in education.) Here’s one that came up today. Our eating habits have changed enormously in the last 80 or so years. These are all words that did not appear in the 1913 dictionary:

pizza

hotdog

hamburger

sushi

teriyaki

bagel

croissant

meatball

naan

burrito

taco

quesadilla

cheesecake

I’ll leave out all the kinds of coffee…. :)

Thanks to FoodTV.com for helping with ideas for this. What others can you think of? If you find any that aren’t in our dictionary yet, email them to us.

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Dictionary goes live — come play!

Posted by karen on June 23, 2008 in Uncategorized

The Kids Open Dictionary builder is now live!

Please try it out and enter a word or two. Whatever you do doesn’t have to be perfect; others will jump in and refine as we go.

In case you missed it, this is the first completely open, public domain-licensed dictionary designed with kids in mind. We intend for the final product to be used by a variety of OER producers, web sites, book publishers, hardware manufacturers, teachers, students, and others.

In a lot of ways, this is one of the most needed components for many OER projects and is a great mass collaboration project. Please join us!

dictionary scren shot

Tags: dictionary | oer
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License info for images - metadata

Posted by karen on June 20, 2008 in Uncategorized

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to record information about an image’s license, attribution, etc. In the past, I have used not-very-efficient techniques such as recording this info separately in a text file and sometimes trying to include it in the file name.

A friend recently recommended storing this in the Properties Summary. (Right-click an image; choose properties; click Summary tab and Simple.) What a simple and useful idea. I am going to start recording the following (slightly modified from CC suggestions; see below):

  • License: [include license and license URL]
  • Attribution URL:
  • Attribution name:

Here’s an example. (You can download it to view the properties.)

That reminded me that I’d heard that Creative Commons suggests a standard for metadata. They suggest something called XMP — Extensible Metadata Platform. In reading more about this, it appears that you need special tools, both to create and to read this. (I’m not entirely clear on this though; I spent almost an hour looking for an example image and couldn’t find one. If anyone knows of one, please post a link.) Possibly not very feasible for the “mass” audience. The good news is that doing this makes content machine-searchable as open content.

For now, I think I’m going to stick with using properties for this.

What other ideas do you have?

Tags: oer | metadata | licensing | images | photos | clip art
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What is most important about OER?

Posted by karen on June 12, 2008 in Uncategorized

globe-w-labels-small.JPG

I am facilitating a series of hands-on workshops to help educators to learn about the value of OER. What topics do you think are most important to spread this movement? Licensing issues? Available resources? Wiki editing skills? Open source tools?

Tags: oer | licensing | wikis
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Kids dictionary goes beta!

Posted by karen on June 8, 2008 in Uncategorized

We’ve released the beta of the kids dictionary builder. Yay! The tool is a sort of combined database and wiki, with functionality to “freeze” final definitions at some point and output the actual dictionary in a variety of formats (ebook, web, PDF, etc.). It was written in a combination of mySQL, PHP, and Python.

If you would like to help beta test this or participate in the building (even writing one definition will be a helpful contribution), you can sign up here or send us an email.

There have been a few days this month when I’ve wondered if creating a free, open kids dictionary was an overly ambitious project, but mostly it’s been very rewarding, and I have high hopes that lots of people will participate, and we’ll produce a great tool for anyone who wants to use it.

The dictionary builder will launch more publicly in late June. So stay tuned for another update then.

Tags: dictionary | kids dictionary | oer | open
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