Just to take some thing Richard said and mention it slightly out of context
archived materials subsequently made “open” for example. These can be very difficult to reduce,edit etc.
A rich source of learning materials can be found in PowerPoint and OpenOffice presentations, but probably Powerpoint mainly given the prevalence of its use. In addition, these common tools lend themselves to making simple tutorials.
We have been working on a project with San Jose State University, the University of Puerto Rico and Unicamp (Brazil) to make an online presentation re-use system. You can play with it at http://chameleon.uwc.ac.za. Right now you can upload a presentation, have it converted to the alternative format, a sequence of images with an auto play facility, Flash for inserting as a tutorial, and pick up a presentation and give it live with live voice and collaboration tools (the latter still experimental). We are working on making the assets within the presentation reusable, as well as building tools to extract semantic information from the slides. The last piece is a presentation mashup utility that is still under development and not yet available on the site.
You can tag, and blog the presentations as well. There are plugins for KEWL3 (and other Chisimba applications) as well as one available for Moodle that you can download from my site at http://www.dkeats.com/index.php?module=blog&action=viewsingle&postid=gen13Srv30Nme10_1445_121344985&userid (sorry for the long URL, I need to turn on short URLs but keep forgetting).
We are experimenting with this because it makes commonly available tools suitable for preparing reusable content, and it makes no difference if you use proprietary or FOSS tools, the results are still available.
We have only scratched the surface of these opportunities. I can imagine doing something similar for other types of media as well. Could thinks like that help to make otherwise not-reusable content into reusable forms? BTW, we could do the same thing for PDFs given a month or so to work on it. Would that be useful? Is this a useful approach to generating Free Content? Or are the media types changing too fast for this to be useful? Thoughts?
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