Thanks for coming to our practice talks and giving your input. Conferences are too infrequent an opportunity to connect with people outside our institutional silos. I’ve recently begun a blog to get my research out into the open, http://openeducationresearch.org/ . (The link you included was to my personal/autobiographic blog, and also my name is spelled with a G, “Turadg”.)

If anyone is interested in the details of the study Joel referenced, there’s an entry on the blog with the abstract and links to the full paper. ( http://openeducationresearch.blogspot.com/2008/07/results-from-study-on-open-authoring.html )

Joel is right that teachers weren’t very eager to participate in the experiment and most of the participation came from people seeking the money. The $10 figure he writes is incorrect though. First off, it was designed as a small controlled experiment to test the effect of a particular design intervention and included a pseudo-experimental examination of the effects of participant expertise. Participant motivation was not a question in this study. If it were, offering money would be a pretty silly thing to do, because that’s not sustainable. (If you care, participants were offered $4 per qualifying contribution, up to 3, and the URL was leaked out to reach many more people than intended.)

Crunching the numbers, we found that the design manipulation did not improve the quality of the contribution but it did increase their length. To figure out why would take further work that we don’t plan to do. One interesting result regarding participant expertise was that math teachers wrote better problem statements than anyone else, but their solutions were no better and amateurs’ often were better. This is as judged by two math teachers (blind to the conditions).

Again, thanks for joining our practice session that day and I hope we can exchange more ideas in the future.

-Turadg

When kids are growing up, they may actually *like* eating broccoli, cauliflower and vegetable pizza (we still love that recipe) at home. Eventually, though, they start going to school and realizing that all their friends “hate” veggies. They pick up on the notion from their peers, who likely got it from other peers, older siblings, and even TV (which makes fun of veggies all too often).

It’s an old page and I don’t support it any more. The links don’t work (I’ll probably patch it all up again one day). The code is here:

http://www.downes.ca/code/referrersa.txt

and here’s the Javascript:

http://www.downes.ca/code/referrersjs.txt

Creating a script that will insert Javascript code into a web page using a one-line Javascript is pretty trivial. If you send me the Javascript you want to put into the page (be clear about any variables) I can give you a script.

- re 7, IE greasemonkey support - you’ve likely already seen it, but http://www.reifysoft.com/turnabout.php seems in the ballpark, and with luck your scripts may also be some of the ones that work with Opera (cf. http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/userjs/examples/#greasemonkey)

- I think the javascript you refer to above might be http://feed2js.org/ (but maybe not). Anyways, I think it does what you describe. Stephen’s one used to be a ‘referrer script’, different thing I think. Anyways, I thought the comment was a bit nit picky, and as you say, there are some ways to work around it. Plus it gives people good motivations to use a modern web browser
- If I had a vote, I’d put my hand up for #6, the ability to add recommendations for arbitrary web pages. The solution you’ve developed is great and works with the resources it is intended to (and the metadata it provides) but it would feel more like participatory culture to me if end users were also contributing new resources and recommendations.

Anyways, lots more thoughts coming up to me but I’ll leave it at these short comments for now. Great work!

I would prefer the feature to be browser-neutral. Much more web-based than browser-based.

I realize that he might not have looked at the writeup linked to at the bottom of the OER Recommender home page. To clarify, an OER creator can make the recommendations be browser neutral by requesting requesting the recommendation XML and inserting it into their page before it is served to the user. Right now, that will take a bit of work. I seem to remember on Stephen’s website a Javscript that you can use to insert content from an RSS into a web page. I would like to provide that, but wasn’t able to find it in my brief looking. I could also enhance to recommender service to look at the referrer so that a URL wouldn’t have to be passed to it.