Sakai 2.0 Review posted on Edutools site

http://www.edutools.info/course/productinfo/detail.jsp?id=262

I don’t normally post notifications of every new review we do on the Edutools site, but in the case of Sakai there has been a lot of interest from this community and so I thought it might be warranted. As always, we endeavor to provide descriptive, non-evaluative reviews of the software within a framework that allows you to compare it with other known quantities and for you to make the judgements yourself. For instance you can view a side-by-side comparison of Sakai 2.0 with Blackboard 6 and WebCT CE 4 and Vista here, or look at it in comparison to some other open source CMS (Moodle, Atutor and .LRN) here. – SWL

BCcampus selects The Learning Edge to power repository

http://www.bccampus.ca/Page514.aspx

Early this year we went (back) out to RFP for software to power a ‘learning object repository’ for BCcampus. OpenSchool BC and the Alberta Online Consortium, both from the K-12 world, were also partners in the RFP.

In May we reached a decision to go with The Learning Edge, an LCMS product from Australia. There were many good proposals, but overall we were very impressed with the maturity of the solution (which given the history became increasingly important), its support of standards, and its interoperation with existing repositories and CMS (all of WebCT, Blackboard and Moodle are supported out of the box). It also comes with a Java-based WYSIWYG editor, which has the potential to greatly assist with re-contextualizing and re-using content from the repository, though in the multi-institutional settings all three organizations inhabit we are cautious about how much uptake of that tool we will see.

Really, though, the fun has just begun; we are now proceeding to get our instance up and running and configured. The challenge isn’t the software – that’s also one of its real strengths, a very powerful administrative interface – the challenge is the process pieces, workflows, schemas, etc. We aren’t starting from scratch, much of the work we did last year will still apply, but I’m also not expecting to get it perfect on the first try. Part of the trick will be devising a reasonable change management process that allows us to innovate some of the interface and logic while still fostering user adoption and familiarity. Wish me luck! We are aiming to open the doors in October, though my expectation is for a ‘soft launch’ that slowly grows. – SWL

IMS Compliance Program

http://www.imsproject.org/conformance/index.html

I could be wrong, but this seems new, and welcome at that. IMS has announced this new Compliance Program which outlines methods for developers of content, services and applications to provide evidence to support conformance claims based on self testing, and in so doing rate the claim of “IMS Conformant.” While we have had the ability to verify SCORM conformance now for some time, this is the first, as far as I know, where claims concerning IMS specifications that aren’t included in SCORM (and there are many) will have some form of verification applied to them. Announcements to this effect should start to circulate later this year as the first products work their way through the process. – SWL

“Finally, a free lunch: The benefits of an open source VLE” – Report on Oxford’s Use of Boddington

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/vle/OpensourceVLE.doc

Worth a read, in part because of it’s brevity, this report synopsizes Oxford University’s experiences over the past 4 years in adopting the open source Bodington system. The report points out that the system was chosen largely because it was a nice fit “in terms of [the] joint honours and open access policy” at Oxford. (Actually, I wished they’d made more of this point; while the use they are putting their CMS to seems maybe a bit staid, they chose a CMS that was appropriate for the uses they wanted, instead of a system that could enable the moon but then get used as a glorified filing cabinet.)

But the argument that the system has largely been “free” to implement is too cute by half. The argument goes that while the system has cost approximately £180k per year in support staff and other costs, these have been largely covered by grants and other funds that were received precisely because of the University’s involvement with this open source project. Some of this effect is valid more widely and deserves accounting for, but there’s also clearly an early- or first-mover advantage in this regard, and the 100th or 1000th adopter would not be facing the same situation (but to be fair, nor might they be facing they same costs, as the product improved). The author acknowledges as much but seems to feel the situation will endure:

Can this be sustained? We certainly feel we can cover from internal resources the maintenance of the VLE in its current state but it could be argued that the development of the product may be in jeopardy as external funds become more scarce or directed to other areas. Yet there is no sign of the latter and indeed the need to develop learning systems in a framework based around open standards is being emphasised more and more.

If this is the case in the U.K., good for them. It doesn’t feel quite the same in either Canada or the U.S. but perhaps I am just not in touch with the sentiment of the major funders. In any case, the document is a good read and their choices I think sound regardless of the stirring of the pot with the claim of ‘free lunches.’ – SWL

Sakai 2.0.0 Release Available

http://www.sakaiproject.org/index.php
?option=com_content&task=view&id=255&Itemid=258

A lot of folks have been waiting for this, and here it is – the Sakai project have release version 2.0, which amongst other things includes a Gradebook feature in addition to updates to the Samigo assessment tool. I am undertaking a review of Sakai 2.0 for Edutools right now that we will hopefully have up in a few weeks, and so should have a much better idea by then of what is actually all there. – SWL

Major implementation of .LRN Open Source CMS

http://dotlrn.org/news/one-entry?entry%5fid=101407

Just to follow up on last week’s posts concerning adoption of some open source apps that have been unfairly dissed as not being ‘enterprise ready,’ this news story from the .LRN site reports that The Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) is moving their approximately 200,000 students onto the .LRN platform. – SWL

The Costs of Teaching – New worthwhile blog ” Lanny on Learning Technology”

http://guava.cites.uiuc.edu/l-arvan/blog/lannyexport.html

I have long held to the tenant that technology, especially computer technology, makes process manifest. As much as some of the conversations we are having now in higher ed are the result of new possibilities that technology innovation have enabled, many of them are also conversations about very long standing practices and processes that progressive technologization has brought to light, made manifest, and thrown into question. So for me, the fact that the ed tech community talks about a myriad of topics that are not directly technological (e.g. pedagogy, intellectual property, access, power and control in the institutions, intellectual freedom, etc) is, far from being aberrant, critical to our field and one of the reasons I chose to work with technology in the context of higher education, rather than some other context.

So it is with great pleasure that I came across the above blog, Lanny on Learning Technology, by Lanny Arvin, an educational technologist at UIUC who came to ed tech from the field of economics. (Some will remember UIUC as the home of NCSA’s Mosaic, as well as the originators of a very early CMS, Mallard, so quite a prodigious lineage there). The reason for my little digression above is that Lanny’s recent posts have been on issues dealing with the costing of education, and from my perspective such posts are of great interest as this is clearly one of the factors we need to consider in our technology choices, and also an issue that the technology is making more and more manifest. But don’t get the impression that all of Lanny’s posts are on economic topics – his post last month concerning “how many CMS is enough?” was in part what led me to write recently on “Moodle and Mission Criticalness.” Great to have another distinct voice on the scene. – SWL

Blender – Open Source 3d Rendering Software

http://www.blender3d.com/cms/Home.2.0.html

I’ve noticed a number of folks picking up on Inkspace, a new open source SVG editor, and rightly so – the development of open source apps that are not infrastructural or aimed back at the development community itself is exciting and growing at an incredibly rapid pace. But frankly I was still blown away to come across Blender, an open source 3-D rendering program, as I hadn’t expected to find this level of sophistication in this type of application available as open source quite yet.

A quick read of the software’s history offers an explanation and is a fascinating case study – the software has been around for some time, and the rights and code were bought by a group of ex-employees and enthusiasts after a public fund-raising campaign explicitly so it could be released as open source. And their e-shop offers another vision of how, given the low overheads now to create online stores and create products on demand, open source projects can create small revenue streams to fund at very least expenses like website hosting and bandwidth costs. – SWL

Another Commercial Partner for Ed Tech Open Source – The Longsight Group

http://www.longsight.com/open-source/sakai

I take the formation of companies like this to be indicators of increase health and viability of open source educational technology initiatives. This Ohio-based company is supporting a suite of apps similar to another U.S.-based firm I’ve mentioned before (in this case they support Sakai, OSPI, uPortal, Drupal, Stanford CourseWork, and CHEF, though one might expect a change in regards to the latter two as Sakai matures). – SWL

Athabasca University to adopt Moodle

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=24831

Michael Penney, the Coordinator of the Courseware Development Center at California State University, Humboldt, sent me an email recently in response to my post on Moodle and “Enterprise Readiness.” The note pointed me to this post on the Moodle discussion boards (again, just use the ‘Guest’ login if you don’t already have an account.) I wish I had an official announcement from Athabasca to point to, but this seems an authentic enough interaction to constitute more than heresay and rumour, and thus seemed worthy of a post. If this is in fact as stated, then it would certainly be a feather in the cap for Moodle – Athabasca has long been consdered a leader in distance education in Canada, if not worldwide, and one would hope that their adoption of Moodle both sends positive signals about its qualities and that additional innovations will result as well. – SWL