Tag: open_source

Unicon provides Sakai ‘Test Drive’ sites

http://www.sakaitestdrive.com/

If you haven’t already had the chance, Unicon has made it even easier to have a look at Sakai 2.1 (just released on December 1, 2005) through their new “Test Drive” sites. The sites, available for free for 90 days, give you access to a demo course and worksite and allow you to change roles so as to see the system from various user perspectives. The background here is that Unicon once developed a CMS on top of uPortal called Academus, but appear to now be piggybacking on offering Sakai support and other uPortal support based on their years’ of experience.

This will not change anyones’ mind who had already decided they were not down with the ‘course managed’ approach, but for those looking for an alternative to their current CMS, this provides one more method to kick the tires, and just in time for Christmas! – SWL

Master’s Thesis on “OS software evaluation model” focused on Course Management Systems

http://www.karinvandenberg.nl/Thesis.pdf

This thesis by Karin van den Berg was part of her Master’s program at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. It does a nice job of boiling down many of the previous attempts at developing criteria for evaluating open source projects (see her references for the extensive list) and then uses as a case study the field of course management systems to try out the evaluative framework. Somewhat unsurprisingly to me, she hones in on Moodle and Atutor as being the top two contenders when these additional open source considerations are factored into the equation; it is nice though to have some substance to back up ones’ instincts.

This piece was quite close to my heart for a few reasons, and thanks to Stuart Yeates posting on the Educause community blogs for finding it. It’s meaningful to me first off because I’ve been looking at these CMS thingies for far too long now through the Edutools project. It was meaningful to me because she cites Edutools numerous times throughout the thesis, and it is nice to get some academic ‘props.’

And finally it is meaningful because for the last year I have been going around giving a presentation that I think basically says a lot of the same thing, though I frame it slightly differently. The jist of that presentation is that making good open source choices is all about picking projects that are a suitable fit with the capabilities and maturity of your own organization, and trying to educate people on what some of the qualities of OS projects are that they can base those judgements on. The presentation was actually a summary of a funding proposal for an “open source suitability decision making tool,” a proposal that didn’t get funded. And I am really glad it didn’t get funded. Not because such a tool wouldn’t be useful. But instead because, as one of the reviewers astutely pointed out, and as this thesis backs up, the judgement of an open source project’s “maturity” is too multivariate (and evolves too quickly) for it to be serviced well by both such a small one-time grant (we were really not asking for much) but also from such a centralized research model as we had proposed. Still, it is really vindicating for me to see basically the same set of criteria brought out in full in this thesis, as it makes me fill slightly less half-cocked (so, what, two-thirds cock’d?) – SWL

Connexions ‘Rhaptos’ Software Released

http://rhaptos.org/

The folks at Connexions have released the software that powers that site as open source code, so presumably you can now run your own instance if you wanted. Connexions is neat in that it shows a working example of learning content as XML being re-aggregated and re-skinned. For me the challenge with its particular implementation is in how the content is created – the Word-to-CXML convertor has got to be a great improvement over asking faculty to hand-code XML (where but at a Science and Engineering school could you even begin to get away with this), but it still strikes me as a barrier to the approach. That said, 115 courses/2000+ modules is nothing to sneer at, so clearly some users are willing to use the current set of tools on offer through Connexions. It should be noted too that the paradigm for reusable content has always been more reusers than original authors, and in this regard, reusing content in other contexts once created in Connexions seems reasonably straightforward.

Tools like eXe offer some glimmer of what an easier to use tool to author learning content that was also XML might look like, but I’m not sure I’m convinced yet. Some will no doubt rejoin about the virtues of RSS in this regard; again, I remain interested but unconvinced. Not of the virtues of XML or of the traction of RSS for syndication of content, but unconvinced that it represents the solution of how to easily author learning content in a format that is then easily findable, re-aggregatable or re-presentable (which I take to be the problem at hand, but maybe I’ve misunderstood). Structured blogging? Again, maybe.

I know that in my own project, our first attempt to get an approach working that made use of an XML database as a backend failed. Our second attempt, which went into pilot last week, uses The Learning Edge. It doesn’t deal with XML-native content at all, mostly because no one has any for us to deal with. It focuses on dealing with what people do have – all sorts of HTML, Word docs, powerpoints, PDFs, Flash movies. It tries to assist with re-use (the ‘re-aggregating and re-presenting’ above) by integrating a WYSIWYG authoring environment directly with the repository that allows people to drag and drop existing content into new collections. We will see how it works. I am definitely not holding it up as the way to do this either; in general I remain unconvinced (and exhausted) by the entire enterprise, and mostly just want to go off and play my bass. – SWL

Presentation: “Licences, Features, and Community: The Path to Sustainability”

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/
2005-07-04/I050704F_OSS_Watch.pdf

Slides from the recent “Building Open Source Communities” conference held in Edinburgh have now been posted. My favourite so far was the above by Jim Farmer of uPortal and now Sakai fame. It’s quite a sprawling piece that covers many aspects of the “business” of open source and higher education. I appreciated the lack of dogmatism and the willingness to acknowledge some of the risks in software development, and also the notion that open source can help customers take care of the ‘core’ by helping to address the ‘context.’ – 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

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

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

LAMS integrations

While it’s already been picked up in various places, it seems useful to note some recent developments with the LAMS system as I am so far not aware of it getting any traction in Canada.

In addition to the recent announcement of some initial integration work between Moodle and LAMS (this walkthrough is a good place to start to understand how the two systems can work together), Oxford University also announced as part of the Tools Integration Project that LAMS had been integrated with the open source Boddington VLE. While Boddington may not have the installed base of Moodle, both of these bode well for the continued uptake of LAMS and for continued practical demonstrations of what using a learning design tool in conjunction with a CMS/VLE as delivery environment might look like.

Anyone know of North American institutions experimenting with LAMS or something like it? Drop me a line, I would love to know (I promise I will sort commenting out on this blog in the not too distant future). – 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

A-HEC Survey on Open Source

http://www.a-hec.org/media/
files/A-HEC_os_survey_report_050305.pdf

Too bad there weren’t more respondents (79 does not a huge sample make) but this survey from the Association for Higher Education Competitiveness presents at least some interesting insight into changing attitudes towards open source. What do we learn – Sakai has a good marketing campaign (at least in terms of name brand recognition), and people who are already interested in open source (I’m questioning the randomness of the sample here) are dissatisfied with the existing offerings almost across the board. Still, the rankings of the predicted successes seems roughly right (though placing uPortal below Sakai in terms of garnering market share just seems plain wrong by definition – Sakai currently employs uPortal). Worth a quick look in any case – SWL