OERu/Planning/Technology working group/2014-11-28

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Agenda

  1. review the OERu annual meeting, and reflect on what that means to our activities
    1. 2014 Technology Working Group Report
    2. Community Source meeting notes
  2. updates
    1. New Zealand National Commission for UNESCO project
    2. OERu partners mailing list
    3. Matched funding position for OERu tech support
    4. Strategy for partners working on courses to build snapshots
  3. Alan Levine (http://cogdog.info/), is a Visiting Fellow at TRU Activities - is there OERu common interest?

Notes

Present: Wayne Mackintosh, Jim Tittsler, Timothy McCallum, Brian Lamb (notekeeper), Alan Levine

We reviewed the Group Report and Community Source meeting notes, and affirmed some of the discussion that occurred at the Hobart meeting.

We signed off on the proposal to re-position the OERu partners mailing list.

The matched fund position sounds promising.

Discussion then shifted to considerations on the limitations of the "snapshot" approach, and how some accommodation for partners that prefer to author in WordPress could be made, while preserving the benefits of MediaWiki as the central content repository. Some people find authoring in WordPress to be a superior experience, yet MediaWiki offers the simplest and most robust approach for versioning and forking content between contexts. A fairly freewheeling brainstorm followed, referencing some of the following tools and approaches:

  • Parsoid - "an application which can translate back and forth, at runtime, between MediaWiki's wikitext syntax and an equivalent HTML/RDFa document model with enhanced support for automated processing and rich editing." This application is already in place in the WikiEducator environment, from when Jim installed the Visual Editor.
  • Yoast - which has useful WordPress SEO plugin.
  • Pandoc - "a universal document converter"

With some discussion, the following outline to proceed seemed to emerge: OERu should explore a WordPress Multi-site implementation that integrates LRMI metadata, and use Parsoid to pass WordPress-authored content back to MediaWiki, or at least convert the markup. Tim McCallum will scope out and write spec for a WordPress theme/plugin development, which can be supported from OER Foundation funds.

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