CaPRéT Alpha Ready for Testing

We’re pleased to announce that we’re releasing a CaPRéT alpha for testing and feedback! Take a look at: capret.mitoeit.org. CaPRéT was developed by Tatemae and the MIT Office of Educational Innovation and Technology.

What is CaPRéT?

Teachers and students cut and paste text from OER sites all the time–usually that’s where the story ends. The OER site doesn’t know what text was cut, nor how it might be used. Enter CaPRéT–Cut and Paste Reuse Tracking. OER sites that are CaPRéT-enabled can now better understand how their content is being used.

When a user cuts and pastes text from a CaPRéT-enabled site:

• The user gets the text as originally cut, and if their application supports it the pasted text will also automatically include attribution and licensing information.
• The OER site can also track what text was cut, allowing them to better understand how users are using their site.

For the alpha, we’ve built upon Pat Locksley’s OpenAttribute Chrome extension to find and parse embedded license information. So if there’s license info that we can parse, and you paste the text into a destination that supports the rewritten clipboard, we’ll display attribution and license information.

Testing CaPRéT

The alpha has the basics working, but it *is* an alpha release so not everything’s perfect.

We need your help to:

• Test it out, does what you expect?
• Paste text from CaPRéT enabled sites into a variety of locations, does it work the way you think it should?
• Add the javascript code to your website, and make sure you have an embedded Creative Commons license. Does it behave in unexpected or unusual ways?
• Suggest additional features or customizations of the attribution and license display.

You can test it for yourself at capret.mitoeit.org. The code is available at https://github.com/tatemae/capret under a MIT License.

Please provide your feedback via Github’s Issue tracker for CaPRéT.

Demo

To demonstrate how easy it is to use, I took the CaPRéT code snippet and inserted it on my personal blog. So if we’ve done our work right, it should just work.

Test it out by cutting and pasting text from this page!