OOKL – explore the world around you

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful resource for the world if every zoo, botanic garden, museum, art gallery, historic house, archaeological site, sporting venue, library and religious site published information about 8 important objects in their collection.

Why 8? because it’s small enough that it will take no more than a morning for someone working in a venue to accomplish – but when aggregated, it represents something truly valuable for every learner out there.

Register NOW and upload 8 objects today.  The world wants to LOOK at your collection.

Please share this message with every venue you know.

After 2 months of design and 3 months of development across several continents, 32,923 cups of coffee, 72 swearing contests, Britain taking the first gold medal in an individual winter sport since time began, meltdown of the ice caps – the OOKL iPhone application is now live on iTunes.

The good news doesn’t stop there. It’s FREE to download. Set up an account on OOKL and you can blog away for free. If you use OOKL at a participating venue to learn about their collection then a fee might apply.

Download it from iTunes app store and let us know what you think! If you don’t have an iPhone you can see what it looks like here.

OOKL is pleased to announce it’s involvement in two separate university projects:

The Out There and In Here (OTIH) project has been awarded funding from the Research Councils UK Digital Economy Programme under the ‘Research in the Wild’ call. The project team, led by Dr Anne Adams, will develop the use of mobile technologies and interactive tabletop displays to support collaborative group work between field and lab based geology students.

The Museum Studies department of Leicester University is also running a project using OOKL. This initiative is led by Dr. Giasemi Vavoula who has a particular interest in the application of new learning technologies in a museum context.

Want to increase access to your collection on your website. Problem solved. Put an OOKL badge on your website and visitors will be able to search through your collection. Log in, click on ‘Resources’ and choose from the three options.

Have you used an OOKL badge already? We’d like to hear your feedback.

Crowd-sourcing is defined by Wikipedia as ‘an activity normally performed by an employee of an organisation which is undertaken by a group of people or community in the form of an open call or mass collaboration’.  Ok, so the notion of people coming together to help achieve a common aim where the benefits extend beyond the group is as old as… but web 2.0 makes is a lot more feasible.

As OOKL’s aim is to help  venues publish their digital content it makes a lot of sense for us to introduce tools so that venues can enable their network (friends, volunteers, enthusiasts, academics, secondary school or university class) to create content on their behalf, while always remaining in control over the content.|

To start crowd-sourcing your collection today read this.

We’re very excited about our latest project – OOKL will be available on the iPhone in January 2010.  No pressure, of course, on the development team here over Christmas.

Why should OOKL on the iPhone matter to our venue partners?

- Visitors will be able to use their own device to engage with your collection
- All you need to do is publish your digital content, attach labels to some of your objects and put up some point of sale material
- When visitors pay to access your content on their iPhone, the whole transaction takes place on the device (so there is no impact on your front of house staff)
- We’ll be starting with the iPhone but expect to roll it out to more devices in 2010
- You earn 60% of the net revenues (after Apple’s fees and local sales tax)

LATEST NEWS: Congratulations to the development who finished the app before christmas as promised. It’s been submitted to a Mr S Jobs so we now wait with anticipation.

We have been scurrying away in the lab over summer and are pleased to announce that you can now export OOKL presentations to powerpoint. This means that students can now take photos, collect venue objects and record sounds on the mobile and press one button to download all their memories to a single powerpoint file that they can then adapt to support future course work. We think that’s pretty cool. I’ve attached a sample powerpoint presentation which you can compare with the online version. More power(point) to the people!

OOKL is teaming up with the education team at Whipsnade Zoo, part of the Zoological Society of London, to help young people engage with the animal world and have fun too. Did you know that european bears can run thirty miles an hour and climb trees too…

OOKL has introduced a new feature that helps venues to create digital content for their collections. How? Log onto an OOKL mobile phone with your curator password. Take a picture of an object. Describe it. Save. Repeat for more objects

Now log onto the website and look in ‘my store’. For each object press copy to ‘venue store’ and finish editing. Save. OOKL will automatically assign each one a code that you can attach to the object.

Job well done – have a cup of tea.

OOKL will be used by the North East Museums Hub to support learning at Laing Art Gallery, Hartlepool Museum and the Beamish Museum.