Educational Content Sink

In the context of Open Educational Resouces, a content sink is a storage environment designed to receive incoming content from another content sources. This is commonly implemented with a format converter tool, so that the content sink is able to import content from different sources and in different formats. Onc e the content is available in the content sink the available resource can be converted to other formats that might be needed by users. Open Educational Resources cannot not designed to be applicable for all requirements ands constraints (e.g. in different cultural and social requirements of communities in developing countries). So the content itself must be adapted/tailored to local or regional requirements and constraints. E.g. teachers want to use a certain educational content in an Open Document Format, such as LibreOffice ODT Format or as MarkDown Format in KnitR. PanDoc[1][2][3][4] and as a basis for publishing workflows.[5][6][7][8][9] It was originally created by MacFarlane, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley.[10] by John MacFarlane has built-in support for multiple format by allowing wikimedia document format to be converted to large number of output format.

Due to lack of formal definition of "Wikiversity" as a Educational Content Sink (ECS) Wikiversity can serve as either an end-point of storage and it allows in conjunction with PanDoc a bi-direction conversion

* between formats,
* between office products and
* between operating systems

The word sink has been used for both input and output in the industry.

Educational content sink (ECS) is proposed to save editing and adaption efforts for application of the open content in different learning environments.

## Learning Task

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* Use the online interface of PanDoc.
* copy the source of a Wikipedia article of your choice into the input box.
* and select the output format of your choice and press "convert".
* Describe a workflow, how educational resouces and publications can be converted for different use-cases, provide arguments why process of converting into an other format is necessary, and how can users avoid a conversion, if possible!
* Explore Wiki2Reveal and analyse how you can generate a webbased presentation directly from a Wikiversity Page.
* Explore the WikiBook-Creator and explain how tailored books can generated in 15min, that fit to your personal requirements, constraints, learning objectives or your profile in general.

## See also

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* Open Educational Resources
* PanDocElectron
* KnitR \- Dynamic Report generation based on real-time
* Concept of WikiJournal
* Digital Signature of Wikiversity Content for Public-Private-Versioning applied on OER and Open Publications.

## References

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1. ↑ Mullen, Lincoln (2012-02-23). "Pandoc Converts All Your (Text) Documents". The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker. Retrieved 2014-06-27.
2. ↑ McDaniel, W. Caleb (2012-09-28). "Why (and How) I Wrote My Academic Book in Plain Text". W. Caleb McDaniel at Rice University. Retrieved 2014-06-27.
3. ↑ Healy, Kieran (2014-01-23). "Plain Text, Papers, Pandoc". Retrieved 2014-06-27.
4. ↑ Ovadia, Steven (2014). "Markdown for Librarians and Academics". Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian 33 (2): 120–124. doi:10.1080/01639269.2014.904696. ISSN 0163-9269. http://academicworks.cuny.edu/lg_pubs/7/.
5. ↑ Till, Kaitlyn; Shed Simas; Velma Larkai (2014-04-14). "The Flying Narwhal: Small mag workflow". Publishing @ SFU. Retrieved 2014-06-27.
6. ↑ Maxwell, John (2013-11-01). "Building Publishing Workflows with Pandoc and Git". Publishing @ SFU. Retrieved 2014-06-27.
7. ↑ Maxwell, John (2014-02-26). "On Pandoc". eBound Canada: Digital Production Workshop, Vancouver, BC. Retrieved 2014-06-27.
8. ↑ Maxwell, John (2013-11-01). "Building Publishing Workflows with Pandoc and Git". Publishing @ SFU. Retrieved 2014-06-27.
9. ↑ Krewinkel, Albert; Robert Winkler (2017-05-08). "Formatting Open Science: agilely creating multiple document formats for academic manuscripts with Pandoc Scholar". PeerJ Computer Science. doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.112. https://peerj.com/articles/cs-112/. Retrieved 2017-05-25.
10. ↑ "John MacFarlane". Department of Philosophy. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 25 July 2014.