Software Licensing

So far, all resources in CORE-Materials have been released under Creative Commons licenses. However it has become apparent these licenses are insufficient when dealing with source code for software.

The Creative Commons website FAQ advises against their licenses for software and instead points to the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative for appropriate licenses. Licenses at these websites apply limitations as to how source code is used, redistributed and improved, it cannot be relicensed under a more restrictive license.

HD Videos on Materials for Dental Technology

A series of ten high-definition videos has been released by the School of Clinical Dentistry at the University of Sheffield and uploaded to YouTube. The videos comprise:

• Constructing a plaster model of the dentition [3 parts]
  
• Restoring a tooth (gold crown) [3 parts]
• Restoring a tooth (CAD-CAM ceramic) [4 parts]

 Click here to view the videos at YouTube

Durability of Materials from CES EduPack 2009 Released

We have just released the entire Cambridge Engineering Selector EduPack 2009 Durability package. It is available for download as a single document from Scribd or SlideShare.

The performances of materials in the following types of environment are covered:

• Water & aqueous environments
• Acids & alkalis
• Fuels, oils & solvents
• Halogens & gases
• Built environments
• Flammability
• Thermal environments

Video uploads to YouTube

We're planning to spend some time next week developing an API to allow us to batch upload video clips into YouTube.

JISC-CETIS 2009 Conference

A number of our project members attended the JISC-CETIS 2009 Conference in Birmingham. We came back with plenty of good ideas to enhance the CORE-Materials project.

There was some useful stuff from Charles Duncan at Intrallect on the automatic generation of metadata from texts, which we think can help us reduce the time it takes to manually catalogue our resources. During the session, we also met John McNaught from the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM), who also offered sage advice on the same subject.

Chris Clarke from Talis gave a very good overview on the use of machine-readable data to build linked open courseware.

We also learned from Russell Stannard from the University of Westminster about the successful use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to 'broadcast' the release of new OER content to followers.

Cambridge Engineering Selector

We're working with Granta Design to release the materials data and science notes from the Durability section of CES EduPack 2009. The performances of materials in the following types of environment are covered:

• Water & aqueous environments
• Acids & alkakis
• Fuels, oils & solvents
• Halogens & gases
• Built environments
• Flammability
• Thermal environments

As well as adding the content to our website, we also aim to make the material available for download as ZIP and PDF.