Challenges

JLeRN Challenge 1st Prize: Sponsorship up to £250 to attend the conference or other tech event of the winner’s choice.

JLeRN Challenge Runner Up Prizes: 2 prizes available of £50 Amazon vouchers each.

Are you interested in capturing, sharing, mashing up or otherwise using paradata, AKA data about the use of open educational resources?

Are you thinking about exploring where and how teachers and learners are using resources, or sharing them via social media, or what they are saying about the resources?

The JLeRN Experiment has a challenge for you!

The idea of the Learning Registry is to be able to share and mash up paradata, or data about the educational contexts and usage of learning resources:

“The Learning Registry is an open source technical system designed to facilitate the exchange of data behind the scenes, and an open community of resource creators, publishers, curators, and consumers who are collaborating to broadly share resources, as well as information about how those resources are used by educators in diverse learning environments across the Web.” — Learning Registry website.

For an overview of the Learning Registry architecture, see this blog post.

The JLeRN Experiment at Mimas is running an open test node for JISC and the UK HE/FE community, as part of the Learning Registry project.

At this stage, it’s a proof-of-concept investigation; none of the software or specs are locked down yet. So this Challenge is an open invitation to do something with paradata for educational resources (within the broadest definition possible), and to involve a Learning Registry node at some point in your thinking or process.

For more information, please read the Challenge Guidelines below, after which you can contact Bharti Gupta at Mimas at

Bharti [dot] Gupta [at] manchester [dot] ac [dot] uk

with further questions, please note that there will be JLeRN Paradata Challenge webinar:
Mon. 6 Feb., 10:30-11:30, please contact Bharti for further details.

Challenge Guidelines

JLeRN Challenge Criteria: There is one overall criterion: do something with paradata for educational resources (within the broadest definition), and involve a Learning Registry node at some point in your process.

Beyond that, the remit of this challenge is entirely open to your creativity. We’re being deliberately vague because the experiment is at an early stage, but ideas might include:

• a demonstrator of capturing or mashing-up of paradata using your own content or content that has been shared in the JLeRN node or the US-based Learning Registry node; or
• an idea for a service that the JLeRN node might offer for push, pull or mashing up of paradata; or
• a mockup of a tool or add-on to work with a tool you already use to capture social media sharing or learning context paradata, etc.

To be considered for a prize, you must be able to demonstrate to the judges and the community what your application can do by the closing date. This should be a video accompanied by some textual explanation, or other Web-shareable means of explaining and showing what your entry is about or can do. You should also make yourself available for questions from the judges and community during the judging period.

Credit will be given for applications which interact usefully with existing tools, services, or repositories in the OER domain.

Rules and Judging:

- Intention to enter to be registered with Bharti Gupta, JLeRN Developer at Mimas by the start of Dev8D sessions on Wednesday 15 February (she will be running an overview session on Tuesday 14 February during an Open Session).

- All entries must be made available for judging via the Dev8D wiki.

- Entries must be submitted to the wiki and Bharti notified by midday Friday 24 February. NB There will be a Learning Registry / JLeRN session at the JISC CETIS Conference that week.

- Mimas reserves the right to offer no prize or fewer than 3 prizes.

- Judges’ decisions are final and will be announced during Open Education Week (5-9 March 2012). Announcements will be made on the Dev8D wiki, the Jorum blog and the OER-Discuss email list.

- Sponsorship prize will be provided via payment of expenses for the winners’ registration and/or travel and subsistence to the conference or other tech event of their choice, up to £250. Original receipts will be required, under standard Manchester University travel & subsistence expenses rules (e.g. not to be spent on alcohol, sorry!). Some items can be paid for in advance by Mimas. The event must be within 1 calendar year of the prize announcement date.

- In the event that a winning entry is created by more than one developer, the winning team can divide up the prize amongst themselves as they see fit; they will need to make a final agreement with Mimas before booking anything.

- Winners will be expected to write a guest blog post for the JLeRN blog which will also appear on the Mimas blog. This blog entry can simply replicate what is in their wiki entry, or expand on it; as long as we have a permanent promotional record of the winning entries.

- This challenge is open to UK residents only.

Humanities Research Institute (HRI) API Challenge

For this challenge, we’d like you to do something interesting with one or more of the HRI’s APIs – for example, by providing a different view of the data or combining the data with other data / online resources.

The three APIs are documented here:-

Locating London API – http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/api/loclonapi.html
Connected Histories API – http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/api/connhist.html
Old Bailey API – http://criminalintent.org/for-developers/

There is some overlap between these APIs – the Connected Histories API provides access to indexes of several datasets, included those datasets used by the two other APIs but the ways in which the data can be accessed are significantly different. The associated project websites may also prove useful in understanding the requests currently supported by the APIs.

Locating London – http://www.locatinglondon.org/
Connected Histories – http://www.connectedhistories.org/
Old Bailey – http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

Entries should consist of a prototype, or demonstration page or a brief written suggestion. Written suggestions should make reference to one or more specific API queries. Preference will be given to those entries that demonstrate an understanding of the strengths and limitations of the selected API(s).

If your are planning on submitting a prototype or demonstration page, they either need to put the code in a open source repository / provide a URI / provide us with an alternative way of accessing your demo but obviously not if your not providing a written summary. Fundamentally our interest is in getting you to try our APIs and to see what you might be interested in doing with them.

Any questions, comments or suggestions relating to the APIs, whether or not you participate in this challenge, will be gratefully received by Katherine Rogers (k.m.rogers@sheffield.ac.uk) or HRI Support (hri-support@sheffield.ac.uk).

Prize: £30 Amazon Gift Voucher