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Since it was at ULU, two doors down from our new home in Senate House, we had no excuses not to attend the JISC “Deposit Show & Tell” Event for applications and projects dedicated to making life easier for repository depositors. Like many of the JISC Developer Happiness/Rapid Innovation events, the format was a combination of short, informal presentations and discussions, and a chance to meet old and new faces on the Repo Scene.

As you’ll know from my previous post, the CLASM project is developing a plugin to enable direct deposit from Moodle to any SWORD-compliant repository. Our specific use case is to support management of CLA materials for teaching, but there is no reason why the Moodle plugins that James has developed couldn’t be adapted to deposit pretty much anything available in a Moodle VLE into a repository.

Luckily I don’t even have to write it up, because James has already written an excellent account on EL Blog, so please check his report out if you want to know more.

For the second year running, ULCC organised a successful and interesting Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) conference, held on October 2nd at the Royal Geographic Society in Kensington. The programme had a particular focus on two hot topics, Cloud Computing and Social Media. There is a wealth of information on the FOTE website, including slides and videos of the presentations. The event was widely Tweeted, live-blogged by Andy Powell, and ran in parallel in Second Life.

We used the opportunity to include a short presentation about our CLASM project, and I shared the platform for one session with James Ballard, our resident Learning Technologist and ace Moodle hacker. The full video and slides (with audio) of our talk are available from the FOTE website; the slides are also on Slideshare.

I was particularly pleased to make contact with Jane Secker of LSE, who knows more than most about CLA, and I am looking forward to discussing some issues with her, as we try to refine the work done on the CLASM plugins and produce a finished package. Jane also published an excellent account of the day’s events on her blog

The audience was a bit different from the JISC Information Environment crowd I’ve made presentations to before, so my talk was a very high-level overview of repository work in the sector, with a few ideas about where trends and technology seem to be leading us. One particular advantage I see is that interoperability between web applications should enable us to focus on using the “right” tools – portfolio, VLE, blog, repository, etc, maybe even VW – at each stage of the institutional/educational workflow, rather than using over-ambitious and over-complicated systems that try to do everything. “Small pieces loosely joined,” and all that.

Unfortunately, while the slides on the FOTE website include audio, the video there doesn’t include the slides, which robs the talk of some context. I have, by some dark means, managed to create a new version which combines the video and slides and upload it to YouTube. (To keep it short and relevant to DA Blog readers, I’ve only included my part of the presentation.)

We were pleased to learn today that the JISC has agreed to fund our proposal to the Rapid Innovations strand of the recent call, for a project called CLASM: Copyright Licensing Application with SWORD for Moodle!

This will be a six-month project with a double-edged purpose: to develop a SWORD plugin for Moodle, so that it can interact, platform independently, with common repository applications like EPrints and DSpace; and to explore and demonstrate the use of that plugin for managing Copyright Licensed materials in Moodle courses.

The issue of managing CLA materials for VLE courses was drawn to our attention on several occasions by colleagues from other institutions, and the superior bibliographic features of e-repositories seem to offer a promising approach to managing these objects effectively for tutors, students and library staff, while making them available within a VLE, in accordance with CLA terms and conditions.

CLASM will be developed by the same team that developed SNEEP, one of the first JISC Rapid Innovations projects, and we will also be working closely with ULCC’s E-learning team, responsible for our Moodle and Mahara service. This should be a particularly rewarding and fruitful collaboration, since there is huge potential to improve the integration between these three critical educational applications – repositories, VLEs and e-Portfolios.

You can find out more about Phil and James’s adventures in e-Learning at our recently revamped sister blog: El Blog.

Post scriptum, 18th March.

I also learned that, among the other successful bids to the JISC’s Information Environment/e-Research call, were: MERLIN, a text-mining initiative for Institutional Repositories, led by UCL Library; and PhilPapers,  a project led by the Institute of Philosophy, to extend the impressive Philosophy portal currently hosted by ANU. ULCC will be contributing, as partners, to both of these exciting projects.