EdShare: the wider angle

EdShare is one of the repository exemplars in the KeepIt project, and was recently profiled on this blog. For a broader view of this repository Debra Morris, manager of EdShare, has written an article in Ariadne (confusingly labelled as the April 2009 issue, but it has only just been announced):

Encouraging More Open Educational Resources with Southampton’s EdShare

It’s part history of recent elearning technologies, VLEs and MLEs, at the University of Southampton and part repository description.

The following section is a helpful supplement to our blogged profile of EdShare:

The benefits can be described as follows:

• Content providers would be able simply and speedily to deposit any kind of file (or collection of files) and describe them to their chosen level of detail using metadata or free-form text;
• Content providers would be able to control the access levels to their files (typically ‘institution-only’ or ‘open access’);
• EdShare would allocate a unique and permanent URL which could be referenced by other systems, such as the institutional VLE;
• The free-form text and metadata descriptions of all files lodged in the repository would be found and indexed by search engines;
• Users would be able to browse all items in the repository and download those lodged for open access without the need to be a registered user of the repository;
• Users browsing the repository would see Web 2.0-like tagging and annotation features.