Tag: open_source

OSS Watch – UK-based Open SOurce Advisory Service from JISC

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/

Via another great article from Wilbert Kraan at CETIS comes mention of this new service, Open Source Software Watch (OSS Watch), aimed at providing “neutral and authoritative guidance about free and open source software” to the U.K.’s higher education community. They are not focusing on a single type of open source application, but rather the gamut that can be found in the open source world, which makes a lot of sense as the issues in adopting any particular piece of open source software share much in common. This is a welcome addition to the service from OpenSector the news service which focuses more broadly on open source as it applies to the public sector.

Take a look, too, at the ‘style’ links at the bottom of the page – nicely built standards-compliant website that allows you to view the page in multiple formats at the click of a button (my guess would be by using the Cocoon engine). – SWL

Logicampus – new open source CMS

http://www.logicampus.com/

New open source CMS that was the result of a joint project between Tap Internet and Tarrant County College in Texas. The PHP-based system is quite full featured and will be quickly comprehensible by anyone who has used any of the more ‘content-focused’ style CMS.

Note I have added this to the ongoing list of open source course management systems, which has moved from its previous location. It can now be found as a wiki page at http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/
EdTechPost/OpenSourceCourseManagementSystems

Atutor 1.3 released – now with IMS content packaging

href=”http://sourceforge.net/forum/
forum.php?forum_id=328649

New releases of existing CMS don’t usually warrant a posting, but this one’s maybe an exception – the folks at the University of Toronto’s Adaptive Technology Resource Centre have been working hard to develop a full featured suite of accessible online learning and communication tools. Their latest effort is to include IMS compliant content packaging utilities for creating interoperable learning objects into the existing Atutor LMS. The software is PHP and MySQL-based. Where the software really excels, as might be expected, is in being immensely re-skinnable/reconfigurable to adapt to almost any device or user need. It is worth taking a look at if only for that reason, as an object lesson in adaptable, accessible design. – SWL

My Sourceforge Project Feed Subscriptions/RSS for product and company news

http://www.bloglines.com/public/EdTechPost

For what it’s worth, here are the feeds (displayed in the amazing Bloglines public interface) from the course management/authoring tools/eportfolio projects that I follow on Sourceforge…
Continue reading “My Sourceforge Project Feed Subscriptions/RSS for product and company news”

Another open source CMS – Interactive Learning Environment

http://virtualschool.edu/ile/

Again new to me but maybe not new (why does no one put dates on their pages!), an early version of a new open source ‘cms’, this time in part notable because it is written in Ruby.

Also, you may or may not have noticed that I am slowly moving over some of the more trafficed resources from the old site. So far I’ve reposted the list of open source course management systems, which I am now trying to keep more up to date. More to come. – SWL

Open Learning Management System (O-LMS)

http://www.psych.utah.edu/learn/olms/

New to me is this java-based open source ‘LMS’ from the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah. This system is designed to support “vigorous shared knowledge communities” and as such focuses very much on communication and collaboration tools and seems to recognize the role of shareable learning content though it is unclear to me what kind of actual functionality it offers there. One thing that seems slightly unfortunate is to base an open source project on Oracle and Solaris, but this may well have been what was literally at hand. – SWL

Hands-on Segue Demo Available

http://www.opensourcecms.com/
modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=74

There’s been a little buzz over the last few months about using blogs as replacements for CMS, and this open source example from Middlebury College is sometimes held up as an example. So I was happy to see that you can get administrator access to a hands on demo through the invaluable OpenSourceCMS site. Thanks to Charlie for the post reminding me to keep going back to this site. – SWL

Freeing computers in schools: Free software in education

http://www.opensector.org/1063723220

Another piece similar to the one I posted on yesterday concerning the relevance of Free and Open Source software to education. It focuses even more so on its relevance to developing nations, and points to an excellent report by Niranjan Rajani on behalf of the Finnish government that also has details of the progress of open source in  Africa, Asia and South America. – SWL

– via [Open Sector]

http://www.icampus.ucl.ac.be/LINUX/
document/quatrequarts.html

This paper by Thomas De Praetere of the Université cathlolique de Louvain in France, the original home of Claroline, puts forward some arguments on why open source is so successful, particularly in educational institutions. I know this might surprise some – I’ve had many educators complain to me about their inability to get open source in the door of their institution – yet I believe what this paper claims is true, that the ‘education sector’ is still one of the greatest contributors and adopters for open source, and given the inverse trend of institutional funding levels to licensing costs, will likely remain so. The article is in French, but the google translation’s not too bad. – SWL 

Government gives One Million Euros towards Claroline development

http://www.claroline.net/news.php#28

This summer Claroline released version 1.4 which has many new features, not least of which is an ever expanding list of languages it supports. Their credits page also has the look of an open source CMS project that is actually taking off! This recent announcement of additional investment is great news for this project, and for open source CMS in general. – SWL