Making Connections – User Generated Content

John  Woodthorpe also talked about user-generated course content. Their product is fOUndIt at http://foundit.open.ac.uk – while it crosses over with similar tools (digg and perhaps a bit of del.icio.us) the use is around a community and the way in which a course “stub” gets extended to gain content through learner activity. The rating and commenting looked good. Suggestions were to rapidly scale this up, and how to manage the competitive and collaborative elements in recommending sites. As long as finding the resources is not the main point (analysis is). The site is separate from OU systems that releases some control but gains in terms of how people interact. The work on Openid that was part of OpenLearn and now needs to feed into the BioDiversity lab could well help this mix of OU and open systems.