Category: The Rest

Hieraki – Hierarchical Wiki Software

http://www.hieraki.org/

Just one of those things that I stumbled across through a dedicated Google search feed; Hieraki is an open source, Ruby-based (hence the reason you’ve probably never heard of it; many who try Ruby seem to rave about it but it never seems to gain traction versus its competitors) wiki-like system that structures pages by ‘Chapters’ and sub-sections to assist with collaborative book authoring. Someone has even tried building a ‘learning object repository’ named Noc on top of it. Not an endorsement, just a pointer to an interesting experiment. – 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

Invitation to WCET-led ePortfolio Software Research Project

http://www.edutools.info/ePortfolio/notice.pdf

Over at Edutools, where I spend at least half my life, we have been quietly trying out a new model for researching ed tech software and helping people get up to speed on different technology issues. Last year we ran the model for the first time while looking at various Learning Object Repository technologies. We’ve just run the same project a second time, the results of which will be released publicly later this year at the WCET Conference in New Orleans.

In essense, the new model we are trying out is to create a small group of similar type partners (so far we have dealt mostly with state-wide systems and some larger institutions) to jointly investigate a particular type of educational technology using the Edutools comparative analysis model. The challenge is obviously coming up with a common set of systems to look at, as well as a common framework for comparing them given differences amongst the partners. Luckily, each time we’ve run it there has been more accord than discord, and in fact the partners truly seem to appreciate each other’s interests in packages they had not previously considered and on features they hadn’t seen as key.

The other part of the project is to bring the partners together to share their current experiences trying to implement these systems; typically they are all at an early stage (hence the value in participating in the project) but have all done some planning work, and find it valuable to learn how others are tackling the issues. This year we also brought in people from the previous year’s project to speak on what they had achieved in the past year, a hugely valueable set of lessons. Finally we bring in a number of guest experts to speak on topics of the groups choosing – this year it was Ed Walker bringing us up to speed on standards adoption and plans for the future, and Clifford Lynch on whether multiple repository needs could be met through a single system. The irony for me is that while the comparative ‘reviews’ are ostensibly the raison d’etre for the project, the partners are finding as much, if not more, value in the interaction amongst themselves, and with the guest experts. It’s become as much a process of getting more familiar with the domain and its issues as it is about chosing software.

Which brings us to the above item – this fall we (WCET and Edutools) are partnering with the Electronic
Portfolio Action Committee to run this type of engagement, but this time looking at ePortfolio systems and issues. It is great to be doing this in partnership with EPAC as they bring consderable expertise and experience to the issue of ePortfolios. If this sounds of interest, please contact Russ Poulin at WCET at the numbers provided for more information. – SWL

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming

Hi, remember me? 😉 Finally able to come up for air and hopefully start posting again. The last 6 weeks have been absolutely nutty for me – in addition to running and completing an RFP for a learning object repository system here in B.C., I also completed a project to review 6 new LORs through Edutools. On top of that were 8 presentations ranging from ‘state of the CMS union’ talks to ‘practical tips on reusability and interoperability’ (more on all of these in the coming days) with nary a bit of reuse in the presentations themselves!

So without further adieu or explanations, on with the show… – SWL

Open Source Means Just That

Those who know me personally know that the past year was a bit of an uphill struggle. In addition to battling my Crohn’s disease last year, I was the lead on a project to implement a learning object repository here in B.C. based on some code another university had created. The partnership did not work out as hoped, and after 7 months we finally decided to cancel our involvement in the project.

We’ve moved on and should be announcing our choice of software to implement that same LOR in the not too distant future. But when things go the way they’ve gone, the least one can do is try and learn from the mistakes, and hopefully share that learning.

Hence this post. The lesson is exactly what’s stated in the title, and I certainly feel all the more boneheaded for admitting I had to learn it the hard way. And the lesson is this – at the moment you declare a project to be “open source” the source code better be available for download somewhere. Period. None of this “well, we’re just going to get it to this certain point before we release it, but really, it’s open source.” Sorry, no. I understand the desire to get things ‘just right’ before others see it, and the desire to take code that’s been written for a specific instance (and thus probably has all sorts of shortcuts and not-so-great practices in it) and make it more ‘generalizable’ before the public gets their hands on it. But these urges need to be resisted. If you’re serious about something being ‘open source’ then realize that part of the openness means a development practice that’s literally ‘out in the open,’ open for scrutiny (and also for people to pick up on their own, without having to enter into political or economic relationships with you ahead of time.) It’s clear that releasing something that works, or that at least is comprehensible, provides a big leg up for open source projects that are just starting up, so by all means get your code to that point before you declare it’s an open source project. Just don’t declare it to be ‘open source’ and then keep developing it in secret.

I expect there’s a lot of folks who will read this and go “well duh!” Like I said, it feels boneheaded to have to admit to learning this the hard way. I fell for the argument that one could talk about releasing something as open source “when it was ready” while all the while toiling away in private. And yet, the number of projects I continue to come across, that keep doing exactly this (“Yes ours is an open source project” “oh, so where can I download the code from” “oh, it’s not ready for release yet”) leads me to believe I’m not the only one who’s ever been sold this bill of goods. It’s important to do this, not just because literally it’s the very definition of “open source,” but because it recognizes that fundamentally, “open source” is as much about a form of software development practice and social organization as it is about a form of software license (which in the end is simply the precondition for the phenomenon). And while you may feel awkward about making your mistakes out in the open, it’s easier to work that way if you’re already working that way, instead of having to invent a process and openness that wasn’t there from the start. – SWL

TV-B-Gone

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/755e/

Spotted from an ad in sourceforge, this little device lets you turn off any TV remotely. An “educational technology?” Depends on your perspective. A “useful technology?” Well, I travel down to the States a fair bit, and increasingly the TVs in airport lounges are tuned to Fox News. ‘Nuff said? Maybe they could just invent one that would disable TVs from receiving Fox News (god, it galls me just to even write the word ‘News’ after the word ‘Fox’!) – SWL

i d e a n t: Tag Literacy

http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2005/04/tag_literacy.html

I haven’t been doing a lot of ‘me too’ blogging of late (e.g. highlighting what other bloggers have written) but I thought this post deserved a mention, in part because I’m not sure if Ideant is as widely read as it should be. the piece is a worthwhile read for the folksonomies crowd. I like the term “distributed classification systems” – I’ve been using the term ‘dynamic taxonmies’ as my Furl category for such articles, but this term I thinks works better. I don’t have a lot of time for the term ‘folksonomies’ but at the end of the day, it’s hard to argue with a meme. – SWL