File this under “WPedu is killing it right now”.

The team at the Centre for Educational Research and Development at University of Lincoln (UK) has just announced the first public release of Bebop, their new BuddyPress plugin. Read more about the release and about Bebop itself. (Disclaimer – I have done some consultation for the Bebop project, though I’m writing this blog post outside of that consultant role.)

I find Bebop compelling because of what it does, and also because of how it was built. In a nutshell, Bebop is an aggregator for Open Educational Resources, or OERs. ‘OER’ is a term of art among open education folks, referring to learning resources that are available for free use, under an open license. (See OER Commons for a longer definition.) In practice, this can mean anything from videos to lesson plans to games to websites. Bebop is designed to allow members of a BuddyPress community to collect their own OERs from various web services – Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc – for display on their BP profiles. It’s a nice demonstration of how BuddyPress can be used as a tool for aggregating work done elsewhere on the web. It also demonstrates another way in which universities can use a free platform like BuddyPress as a non-commercial, locally hosted home for students and faculty, while recognizing that valuable work happens in spaces not under the university’s control. And from a technical point of view, I like how Bebop uses BP’s Activity component and profile metaphors to creative ends.

Bebop was built as part of a “rapid innovation” project. To put the term “rapid” in context: In the context of universities, projects usually move forward glacially. Getting approval and funding may itself take years, and by the time development begins, the original idea/technology is already obsolete. Bebop, in contrast, was conceived and developed over just a couple of months. It’s great to see these kinds of (relatively) rapid projects happening in universities – they can demonstrate to funders the benefits that come along with a bit of agility and risk and freedom.

If you’re running a BuddyPress installation in a university, you might consider taking Bebop for a spin. Get it from the wordpress.org plugin repo or follow development at Github.