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OER Recomender
David Wiley recently announced COSL’s release of OER Recommender, a Firefox plug-in that inserts recommendations for related open educational resources into the one you are viewing. It’s easy to install (though I did manage to get lost once in the three steps), and right now, OER Recommender (apparently) indexes about 20 OER repositories, including MIT OpenCourseWare.
What’s not revealed by any information I could locate is how the recommendations are generated, but my guess is some sort of automated RSS keyword matching. I’m guessing this because there are recommendations across the entire MIT OCW publication, something not easily done manually. This is important to know, as it provides some context for what you’re looking at. The recommendations aren’t, for instance, the recommendations of other educators or students (though I’m sure COSL has it’s eye on such a system of recommendations as well) but rather a high level these-two-thing-have some-sort-of-relationship-so-you-might-want-to-take-a-peek. I’m looking forward to playing with it a little more to see what it points out.
