OER18: APIs … Opening for All: A beginners introduction to APIs using Google Sheets
Open Education (OE) has a rich history of using and contributing to techniques, technologies and solutions from other open areas like open science, open source software, open data and open access. Within OER there is also a rich history of developing tools to support the creation and discovery of resources. A core technology often used within these tools is Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). An API is an interface that can be used by a computer programme to retrieve or interact with another application. Many popular online services offer such interfaces including Facebook, Flickr and many Google services such as Google Books (Stephens, 2014). APIs are also available in tools and services such as content repositories. A big advantage of APIs is given they provide a structured means to interact with other services it is possible to create applications that can be reused and repurposed. In this workshop participants will have an opportunity to learn about APIs and how they can be used. Using Google Sheets participants will have learn how to access and use data from other services via APIs using the relative familiarity of a spreadsheet. Starting by using Google Sheets built-in formula participants will learn how to import and query data. From there more advance techniques will be introduced including writing API calls. The workshop will focus on extracting Creative Commons licensed resources which can then be turned into new OERs The goals of this workshop is for participants to see the usefulness and the empowerment of APIs, gaining practical skills in API wrangling which they can build upon in their own work. Given these benefits a number of commentators are highlight APIs as a means to reclaim content often thought locked in other services (Woodward, 2016). As well as the opportunities of APIs this session will hopefully also highlight privacy and security issues such as the availability of data from services like Twitter (Weidemann & Swift, 2013).
![Machina Machinaa
APIs … Opening for All: A beginners
introduction to APIs using Google Sheets
[1895]
+Martin Hawksey
@mhawksey
Lets interfaceCC-BY-NC nikki https://flic.kr/p/5d59EW
go.alt.ac.uk/OER18-1895
19 Apr 2018, 12:05pm – 1:05pm
Room: Waterside 2
Type: Workshop/PanelThis presentation is
CC-BY mhawksey](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/oer18anintroductiontoapiswithgooglesheetsmachinaamachina-181220130451/85/OER18-APIs-Opening-for-All-A-beginners-introduction-to-APIs-using-Google-Sheets-1-320.jpg?cb=1545311154)
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OER18: APIs … Opening for All: A beginners introduction to APIs using Google Sheets
- 1. Machina Machinaa APIs … Opening for All: A beginners introduction to APIs using Google Sheets [1895] +Martin Hawksey @mhawksey Lets interfaceCC-BY-NC nikki https://flic.kr/p/5d59EW go.alt.ac.uk/OER18-1895 19 Apr 2018, 12:05pm – 1:05pm Room: Waterside 2 Type: Workshop/PanelThis presentation is CC-BY mhawksey
- 3. What is an API? CC-BY-SA Aaron Davis https://flic.kr/p/YwvL4D
- 5. .txt Data Formats CC-BY-SA Marcin Ignac https://flic.kr/p/bZebX7 <rss> <XML> {JSON} .csv<html>
- 6. Importing to Google Sheets CC-BY-SA Marcin Ignac https://flic.kr/p/bZebX7 =IMPORTFEED() =IMPORTXML() =IMPORTHTML() =IMPORTDATA()
- 7. Anatomy of a URL CC-BY drmikeh https://git.io/vdh2h
- 8. Public feed Returns a list of public content matching some criteria. URL https://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne Query string parameters Parameter Description id (Optional) A single user ID. This specifies a user to fetch for. ids (Optional) A comma delimited list of user IDs. This specifies a list of users to fetch for. tags (Optional) A comma delimited list of tags to filter the feed by. tagmode (Optional) Control whether items must have ALL the tags (tagmode=all), or ANY (tagmode=any) of the tags. Default is ALL. format (Optional) The format of the feed. See the feeds page for feed format information. Default is Atom 1.0. lang (Optional) The display language for the feed. See the feeds page for feed language information. Default is US English (en-us). https://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/docs/photos_public/
- 9. https://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=mozfest&format=rss Searching Flickr for photos with tags=mozfest and format=rss
- 13. API Nirvana CC-BY-SA Aaron Davis https://flic.kr/p/YwvL4D
- 14. If you have questions you can get me @mhawksey/+Martin Hawksey or via my blog contact form https://mashe.hawksey.info/contact-form/ If you are interested in learning more about APIs I recommend to read/follow API Evangelist, Kin Lane https://apievangelist.com/. Kin has a number of great posts on using Google Sheets with APIs.