This afternoon I attended a fascinating live tour in elluminate, of the Xpert attribution service.
During their work on the BERLiN project (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/oer/berlin.aspx) it was found that clearing copyright materials was taking a disproportionate time, so a tool was created to help academics and students find openly licenced material and apply proper attribution. The idea was to make the tool able to fit simply into their existing workflow, without major changes.
The search function uses Flickr and Wikipedia as they provided the most reliable results in terms of rights clearance; however it was decided that even with a fair degree of confidence in the sources, they should build an attribution tool rather than copyright clearance tool.
Project funding requires the outputs to be available for at least two years, and they align with University policy so the tool should be around for the foreseeable future.
There were questions about how the tool could be integrated with VLE’s, though as Nottingham uses WebCT, so Blackboard and moodle might have to wait. Pat professed an interest in developing a WordPress plugin, and for those that can’t wait there is an API available.
The tool is available at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/attribution/
For more info on the Xpert Project follow Pat on twitter @xpert_project @patlockley
The recording of the elluminate session will be available to #jiscel10 delegates later this afternoon, it’s well worth investing half an hour in.
