EDUCAUSE | Open Source

Tune In October 17: Opening Up Education

pkurkowski — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:23:03 -0500

EDUCAUSE Live! welcomes MIT’s M. S. Vijay Kumar, the editor of Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. Published by the MIT Press and the Carnegie Foundation, the book is a collection of 30 essays written by leaders in the open education movement. Kumar will discuss how open access can transform education and what the book’s contributors and their research can teach us. According to Kumar, "a look at the landscape tells us that efforts with open education so far have been largely confined to attempts at improving what we already do. While this is certainly valid, we encourage consideration of approaches that transcend traditional practices, organizations, disciplines, and audiences."

In this free October 17 EDUCAUSE Live! Web Seminar,Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, Kumar argues that we must develop not only the technical capability but also the intellectual capacity for transforming tacit pedagogical knowledge into commonly usable and visible knowledge: that a fresh perspective on resources and relationships available to education is required to enhance our readiness to take advantage of the opportunity presented by open education.

Those unable to attend may wish to visit the archives after the event or browse related EDUCAUSE resources on Open Access, Open Educational Resources, Open Learning Initiative, Open Source, Open Source Policy, OpenCourseWare, Openness, and OSS.

EDUCAUSE Involvement Opportunity: New Openness Constituent Group

cluckett — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:05:19 -0500

EDUCAUSE has launched the new Openness Constituent Group, which focuses on the emergence and adoption of open technologies, practices, policies, and initiatives, and how they affect the delivery and support of education. Join group coleader Patrick Masson, CIO, SUNY College of Technology at Delhi, for the Openness Discussion Session at EDUCAUSE 2008 in Orlando, October 30, from 4:55 to 6:10 p.m.

Oblinger and Lombardi Contribute Chapter to New MIT Book on Openness

cluckett — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:02:11 -0500

EDUCAUSE President Diana Oblinger and Marilyn Lombardi, Director, Duke University’s Renaissance Computing Institute Center, contributed a chapter, "Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education," to a new book published by The MIT Press. Read the free, publicly accessible e-book, Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge.

Latest EDUCAUSE Quarterly Now Available Online

cluckett — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:49:59 -0500

The latest EDUCAUSE Quarterly is now available, with feature articles about an institutional survey assessing learning and scholarly techniques, a faculty development survey for teaching online, collaborative development at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and lessons learned from adopting an open source learning management system at Royal Roads University.

EDUCAUSE Quarterly is also available via RSS feed. Click the orange RSS icon on the EDUCAUSE Quarterly home page to access the XML required to subscribe.

"Open Source Reality": Douglas Rushkoff Examines the Effects of Open Source

agould — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:52:19 -0500

Yesterday, popular culture commentator and "cyberpunk" Douglas Rushkoff gave a talk on "Open Source Reality" at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. This lecture was a fourth in a series on understanding the culture and practices of Digital Natives, or the generation who has been raised with the computer as a central part of their lives.

Rushkoff, who teaches media theory at New York University's Interactive Telecommuncations Program, said the Internet is allowing people to more easily gather information and participate in discussions and debates. He said the open source applications that have emerged from universities in past years have greatly helped by stirring innovation and encouraging dialogue. Rushkoff says that while previous generations were focused on competition and the individual, he believes the Internet has provided a powerful vehicle for networking and building ideas within communities. Indeed, he says today's digital natives are much more attuned to collaboration, whether in school or at work, due to the Internet's collaborative atmosphere.

However, all is not rosy if the participants are not willing to question the sources, information, and history that accompanies any application or website. Just as digital natives previously were early video gamers who eventually learned to write code, it is essential that today's Internet participants not only receive and read the information- Rushkoff says they must learn to write it as well. He believes that access to the Internet, accompanied by a questioning, seeking nature, will allow the formerly passive to become action-oriented. Otherwise, he says, the danger of not learning "the code" is that the code will be used on you.

Most will agree that applications, networking sites, and accessible information that encourage action, rather than passivity, are commendable. However, it is incumbent upon the participants that they develop a greater sense of history and background before simply acting. The ability to network and make a difference is fine, but not if the participant is uninformed or simply pushing forth the agenda of a self-selected, narrow network. One of the audience members at Rushkoff's talk suggested the phrase, "Those who do not know history are damned to repeat it," was outdated and inaccurate. She said now is the time for us to "write history" and not focus on the past. A man identifying himself as a historian said later that it is vital that people have a concept of what has taken place in the past in order to better understand the present. He disputed the notion that the generations that went to the movie theaters and later watched televisions in their homes were merely passive recipients of the media's influence. Rather, he said people may have not understood the mechanics of the film projectors or televisions, but they had opinions and arguments on what media was directed at them.

The ability to explore a plethora of sites does not equal intellectual curiousity, nor does it prevent the participant/student from suffering from ideological or educational insularity. So, the notion that the Internet has made some sort of demarcation between the passive and active, depending on a person's generation, is not quite accurate. While Rushkoff is hopeful that technology and networking will result in greater teamwork and dialogue, there are folks in other disciplines who would not seem so hopeful (see Putnam's Bowling Alone). Furthermore, what does it mean for a society when the students have excellent Internet skills, but cannot place the American Civil War in the correct century?

Perhaps the concern is not so much with the applications themselves. It is with the approach we take when we get caught up with the novelty of easier communication, and forget the substance and power the Internet can wield for each of us.

(The thoughts expressed in this blog are not necessarily reflective of the positions taken by EDUCAUSE or the higher education community. They belong solely to the blogger.)

Podcast: Community Source Software: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?

gbayne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:46:16 -0500

This hour and seventeen minute podcast features a panel discussion from the EDUCAUSE 2008 Enterprise Conference in Chicago. This lively discussion, "Community Source Software: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?," includes:

Laura McCain Patterson, Associate VP, Information Systems, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Richard Spencer, Acting CIO and AVP IT, The University of British Columbia
Brad Wheeler, VP for IT, CIO, and Professor, Indiana University
Session moderator: Andrea Di Maio, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, Inc.

Community source is designed to coordinate the work of different user IT organizations sharing the same purpose and requirements. An alternative to commercial applications and custom development, it gives users control and shares risk across peer organizations. Although several such public sector communities exist and yield great promises, many struggle with achieving critical mass and a viable business model. This panel compares and contrasts community source with more traditional software sourcing options and explores critical sustainability success factors.

New EDUCAUSE Quarterly Reports on Top Higher Ed IT Issues

cluckett — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:00:10 -0500

The summer 2008 EDUCAUSE Quarterly spotlights the complete findings of the 2008 EDUCAUSE Current IT Issues Survey as well as feature articles on open source software in education, a first assessment of a learning studio, and student use of clickers in library presentations.

2008 EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Closing Session: Leading Ahead of the Curves by Brad Wheeler

llarsen — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:50:27 -0500

Leading Ahead of the Curves

Brad Wheeler, Vice President for IT and CIO, Dean, & Professor, Indiana University

[EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference Closing General Session, March 19, 2008]

The slides for this keynote are available at http://www.educause.edu/upload/presentations/MWRC08/GS02/Leading-Ahead-of-the-Curves-Wheeler20080319_inked.ppt

A podcast of the session is available at http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/podcastleadingaheadofthec/46500

NOTES

Brad Wheeler began his talk on technology leadership with reminisces beginning in 1993 when he was an associate professor at the University of Maryland and Mosaic was the hot new tool and the Web took off.

Adapting the well-known “and then a miracle occurs” cartoon, he changed the text on the blackboard to show a sketch of “Campus Cyberinfrastructure” -> “then a miracle occurs” -> ”Cloud Computing Nirvana” and said that we can be the miracle in leading ahead of the curves but we need more explicit information in the miraculous step 2.

The Curves we must lead ahead of and balance are:

Technical possibility is where coolness is the key factor. Investors for innovations keep the frontier moving forward. However, for a CIO, technical possibility is not the question but rather technical maturity. When charted against time you end up with a set of steps up rather than a smooth curve.
Social desirability is where “Gotta have it” is the key factor. Social expectation is now a flat line at the top of the chart. Millennials want new technologies immediately. When academic organizations say that you can only upgrade and make changes every few years there are questions to answer for when you can test and when you can deploy - we can’t always wait those few years before implementing. The curve is really a set of steps again. The CIO needs to decide where and when it’s right to buy-in to the new technology.
Economic Feasibility is a matter of dollars where, over time, a product becomes less expensive so you do have a downward curve.

Wheeler has a box where he keeps prognostications and quoted an article in Campus Technology (Oct 23 2007) about five factors they said will have a synergistic effect. There are many who provide these predictions but because of the fog factor we begin to dismiss them. He described how CIOs feel as Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream.

Wheeler said the main question is:

“Can our actions substantively affect the shape of the curves or do we just adapt as they are revealed?” and asked are we only an industry that reacts to the curves or do we have the wisdom and ability to shape the curves?

His Curve bending examples were

open educational resources/scholarship
search of certitude
community source
licensing terms

Leading ahead of the curve loops us back to Scholarship 2.0 and the rise of IT, digital repositories, and electronic collaboration in achieving and improving the quality of the scholarly endeavors of research, teaching, learning, and service.

He closed by saying that we need to come together and collectively be the miracle to lead ahead of the curve.

In the Q&A, Wheeler answered questions on

supporting those who still want face-to-face
how to leverage across campuses (higher education) so everyone benefits including less wealthy institutions
outsourcing email and integration of applications
open vs commercialization of courses.

=======================

The slides are available at http://www.educause.edu/upload/presentations/MWRC08/GS02/Leading-Ahead-of-the-Curves-Wheeler20080319_inked.ppt

The podcast is available at http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/podcastleadingaheadofthec/46500

Flickering (or is that Flickring?)

wallen — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:09:33 -0600

I teach a survey of art history class. I use digital images in the classroom and online. While I have several thousand of my own images, my collection is far from comprehensive in chronology and in geography. Arkansas State University twice purchased digital images under a contract with Saskia and others that places severe restrictions on where and how the images may be used (they may be seen only by faculty and students of the university under a secure sign-in system).

I discovered that Flickr has a large store of digital images that may be used for educational purposes. Of these hundreds deal with art and architecture (mostly architecture and sculpture, but with some surprisingly good images of paintings). I never prepare a presentation for my students without checking the holdings of Flickr. Additionally, when I find a particularly good source of images, I bookmark it in del.icio.us so that I may quickly find the collections (under imagearchive) and also share what I have found with others.

The image resources on the web, especially those that offer material unrestricted or under a Creative Commons license.

CNI Podcast: An Interview with Julian Lombardi, Executive Director of the Open Croquet Consortium

gbayne — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:36:51 -0600

In this 15 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Julian Lombardi, Assistant Vice President at Duke University and Executive Director of the Open Croquet Consortium. Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices.

Dr. Julian Lombardi is the Assistant Vice President of Academic Services and Technology Support with Duke University’s Office of Information Technology, Senior Research Scholar with Duke University's program in Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS), and an adjunct professor with Duke University's Department of Computer Science. He is also one of the six principle architects of the Croquet Project, executive director of the Open Croquet Consortium, and a co-chair of MacLearningEnvironments.org. A former biology professor, Lombardi combined his interests in information technology, complex systems, and the phenomenon of emergence in biological systems and began designing and developing computer-supported collaboration systems involving self-optimizing massively multiuser online 3D environments in the mid-1990s. He eventually founded VIOS, Inc. in 1999 where he acted as the venture capital-backed company's first CEO and then Chief Creative Officer/Software architect. From 2002-2005, he managed a learning technology research and development group in University of Wisconsin-Madison's Division of Information Technology.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2007 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

CNI Podcast: An Interview with Alex Chapin, Principal Curricular Technologist at Middlebury College

gbayne — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:53:42 -0600

This podcast, from the Coalition for Networked Information Fall 2007 Task Force Meeting, features an interview with Alex Chapin, Principal Curricular Technologist at Middlebury College.

Alex Chapin is an Educational Technologist at Middlebury College. He has been directing the development of a number of innovative web applications including systems for content management, digital assets management, assessment and knowledge bases. He is the multimedia designer of the CD-ROM, Fluent Tibetan, The Dialogues and Vocabulary, distributed by Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, NY.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Mara Hancock, ETS Associate Director of Learning Systems at UC Berkely.

gbayne — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:57:20 -0600

In this 17 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Mara Hancock, Associate Director for UC Berkeley's Educational Technology Services department. Educational Technology Services promotes and supports the effective integration of technology in teaching, learning and communication at the University of California, Berkeley. We are dedicated to service, partnership, and innovation.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Michael Korcuska, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation.

gbayne — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:13:19 -0600

In this ten minute podcast, we feature an interview with Michael Korcuska, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation. Sakai Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the community and development of Sakai, a course management and collaboration system for higher education.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Mark Notess, Development Manager & Usability Specialist at Indiana University

gbayne — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:47:36 -0600

In this 12 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Mark Notess, Development Manager & Usability Specialist at Indiana University. He is involved in several online learning and research tool development projects including the Variations 3 Digital Music Library Project, and Integrating Licensed Library Resources with Sakai. He also co-authored an article with Lisa Lorenzen-Huber entitled, "Online Learning for Seniors: Barriers and Opportunities". He spoke with Carie Windham at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference in Seattle, Washington.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Ulrich Rauch, Director of Arts Instructional Support & IT at The University of British Columbia

gbayne — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:21:27 -0600

In this 21 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Ulrich Rauch, Director of Arts Instructional Support & Information Technology at The University of British Columbia. He has recently been involved in a project called Ancient Spaces at UBC, which uses gaming and virtual world technology to recreate locations from antiquity. He also participated in a session at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference entitled, "Indigenous Cultures: From Observing to Experiencing, from Videography to 3D VR Immersion".

Ulrich Rauch organizes the implementation of educational technologies for instructors, students and staff in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. As the director of a technical and an instructional support unit, and as trained sociologist, Ulrich combines his experience as an instructor with his perspective on learning technologies to research and apply e-learning strategies in support of collaborative learning.

Poke 1.0 afterthoughts

catherine — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 08:45:38 -0600

On 15 November 2007, Matt Riddle and I attended the “Poke 1.0” symposium at London Knowledge Lab organised by Neil Selwyn. Some brief thoughts and notes on the day here: overall, it was a really exciting and energising event, and I felt there was a strong sense of a nascent research community starting to coalesce. Here are parallel reviews by Lewis Goodings and Juliet Eve.

“Poke 1.0” sought to bring together UK-based social science researchers with an interest in Facebook, as an example of an innovative “social networking” application that is currently used by the majority of students in UK higher education. The audience heard a range of research papers, from media consultancy Human Capital's “macro” view, involving web metrics from Nielsen NetRatings, to Sonia Livingstone's “micro”-level qualitative study of UK teenagers’ use of social networking sites. Our paper represented a “mid-point” between these two extremes, presenting a single-institution case study and focusing on Facebook’s impact on staff/student relations at Cambridge. We also demoed a Facebook mashup widget developed by CARET developers Nicolaas Matthijs and Nick Desmet. The widget allows Facebook users to expose personal Sakai VLE resources on their profile (only the owner can see / access their personal resources). So, we've proved it's possible to do it, the real question now is do students want it, and is it desirable, both educationally and in terms of privacy?

The best came at the end of the day, with a really lively discussion on research ethics and methodologies. The problematic bits are always the most interesting... The consensus in the group seemed to be that many of us are finding that many "gold-standard" research ethics guidelines (e.g. BERA, BSA, Assoc. of Internet Researchers) are not adequate to cover this new research terrain. Is it possible, or desirable, to do "covert" observational research in a "semi-public" environment, for example? (There seemed to be some general agreement among the group that social networking sites are effectively "semi-public" environments, despite their privacy settings and access / searchability constraints.) It's early days yet of course and this sense of newness generated a certain collective enthusiasm, alongside the feeling that, to some extent, we're re-inventing the rules as we go along.

Spock's Risky Take on Trust, Privacy, and Identity Management Online

catherine — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 07:38:34 -0600

This post sort of follows on from my musings on Pownce, and the relative (in)utility of the current glut of social networking "services".

Received any Spock trust invitations lately?

Spock, a self-described “people search application that allows you to see what your friends and colleagues are doing on the web”, could potentially tell us something about the future of metasearch engines—those clunky crawlers that tried, and mostly failed, to bridge the gap between structured web directories like Dmoz, and the chaotic openness of Google’s PageRank™ technology. Although its interface design, a web-2.0-ified “Google Classic Home”, is so trendy that I’m afraid it’s already terribly dated.

The Spock team have got one thing right: web search is now the primary vehicle for information discovery, and the sudden realisation of this (by the media, at least) has created all sorts of headaches for identity management and privacy online.

We, i.e. the affluent, educated, Western audience that remains the dominant internet consumer group, have made search engines, and the companies that run them, immensely powerful because we have enabled them effectively to constitute our interface to the world. Consequently, we have endowed search engines -- and their enabler, internet connectivity -- with powerful social meanings. “Searchability” means potential, openness, connectedness, currency, agency—qualities that are socially desirable in early 21st century cultures; or at least, the “globalised” cultures of the developed world.

Spock’s positive appeal to consumers is to tap directly into these powerful social meanings. Its negative appeal to consumers consists of using the language of risk to talk about identity management on the web:

“The first step towards managing your online identity is putting the information you want seen about you online. That allows you to control what is being said about you. The second step is staying up to date on new information about you as it appears.” (Spock blog)

Both aspects of Spock’s appeal, positive and negative, come at absolutely the right time for the consumer market: in education, careers advisors are trying to convince students of the need to “clean up their profile”, while teachers, counsellors and youth workers grapple with issues around cyberbullying; in the media and political spheres, the risks posed by ID theft loom large.

So, no argument on my side that managing online identity is important, and becoming increasingly more so. But if you already have an online identity, and if you proactively manage your online identity by publishing indexable information that allows others to locate you, then I don’t see value in the “service” Spock provides. Instead, I see considerable risk.

If you read through Spock’s Terms of Service, it becomes immediately apparent that the Spock folks are terribly worried about two things: the currency of the information on Spock, and the potential for individuals to create profiles that do not belong to them.

Like many, if not most, social networking services (e.g. StumbleUpon, Flickr), Spock is largely reliant on its user community to create value. The first cause of anxiety for Spock, of course, is that if Spock user profiles become out-of-date, then Spock is a useless “non-service” and people will just go back to Google. So, Spock talks tough, threatening to terminate your service if you do not maintain your information.

The second worry for Spock is that a user profile might not “authentically” represent an individual. Again, Spock is totally reliant on users to co-operate in this way to create a community of trust, because Spock itself cannot guarantee identity, and if users do not trust the identities they find on Spock then Spock again is exposed as a useless “non-service.” Doing a couple of sample searches on Spock for people that you already know have a well-established web presence reveals an intrinsic problem for Spock: Spock can and often does generate multiple search results for a single individual, just as happens on the “open” web via a traditional search engine.

Spock tries to solve this problem by encouraging users to consolidate these results into a single profile, by “claiming” them. In this way, Spock is asking users to help conserve its overall aim of having one Spock profile represent a single individual.

But why would you choose to help Spock by doing this? One of the things about the web in general is that information has a short life, and that is exactly what enables people to retain some control over their privacy. What if I change my personal or career goals, leave an organization or group of which I was a member, or move to a different city? Life happens, and people reinvent themselves all the time. But that might not necessarily mean that I want to reject or withdraw “obsolete” information about me – at times, it’s best to just let it alone, and let new information take its place.

It’s not especially useful, and it could even be dangerous, for a company to try and create a public expectation that “identity management” equates to an individual actively “controlling” all the personal information that is available about him/her on the web. And I can’t help thinking that it’s naïve at best, stupid at worst to think that an individual can solve the problem of managing his or her online identity (which consists of a complex mish-mash of information, some generated by the individual, some created by others) by creating Yet Another Profile on this type of system. At this stage, Spock’s goal of a single profile per user looks fundamentally incompatible with the way people—and the web in general—works.

Spock is behaving a bit like the banks that try and stop consumers from sharing their PIN numbers, even with immediate family members. Its attempt to make one profile represent “one authentic user” already looks redundant. Try asking kids using Bebo or Xanga not to share passwords, or create new profiles for their friends -- an interesting theme of the recent symposium on Facebook research.

With my academic hat on, I’d say we’ve already got other, better mechanisms to do the things that Spock says it’s offering users. Mechanisms that allow people to selectively share their information with services and with other individuals, and that don’t rely on submitting personal information to a commercial third party provider. I recognise that my bias towards sharing information, and towards open systems and standards, isn't necessarily shared by tech firms or the general public. But if people are prepared to share information with a system like Spock, surely it's worth looking again at OpenID, ClaimID and FOAF for trust and authentication; or Explode as a way to display distributed networks of people. Somebody like Scott Wilson can probably explain this much better than I can; check out FeedForward, his alpha tool for personalized information discovery.

E07 Podcast: The e-Framework for Education and Research

kellywalker — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:46:33 -0600

This 41-minute podcast recorded during the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference features Ian Dolphin, Head of e-Strategy, University of Hull, Sarah Porter, Head of Development, JISC - Joint Information Systems Committee, and Malcolm Read, JISC Executive Secretary, JISC - Joint Information Systems Committee speaking on "The e-Framework for Education and Research."

The session abstract:

The e-Framework for Education and Research is an initiative created by public funding bodies in Europe and Australasia. It coordinates information relating how educational institutions across the globe are using technology to support their strategic priorities and how this can be supported by a service-oriented approach to technologies based on open standards. The session will give an overview of the e-Framework and raise some points for discussion.

E07 Podcast: The 2007 Campus Computing Survey

kellywalker — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:17:42 -0600

This 36-minute podcast recorded during the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference features Kenneth C. Green, Founding Director, The Campus Computing Project speaking on "The 2007 Campus Computing Survey."

The session abstract:

Begun in 1990, the Campus Computing Project is the largest continuing study of the role of computing, e-learning, and information technology in American higher education. The session will present the results of the 2007 Campus Computing Survey, including new data on P2P policies, open source deployment, IT security issues, strategic and financial planning for IT, instructional integration of IT, campus IT standards, course management systems, and Web site services.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Per Wising

kellywalker — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:37:05 -0600

In this 8-minute podcast, we feature an interview with Per Wising, Product Manager, Stockholm University. He discusses open source software development and the state of cyberinfrastructure in Sweden.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Martin Ringle, Chief Technology Office for Reed College

gbayne — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 13:26:34 -0600

In this 26 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Martin Ringle, Chief Technology Office at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. For more than 20 years, Marty Ringle has contributed to the higher education IT profession as a change agent, a collaborator, and an organizer. A deep believer in the role and mission of small liberal arts colleges, his career has been marked by his ability to meld diverse entities into a coherent whole. This interview was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference in Seattle, Washington.

Podcast: Service Oriented Architecture

gbayne — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:46:18 -0500

This podcast features a panel discussion from the 2007 Seminars on Academic Computing. The topic is Service Oriented Architecture and panel participants include:

Jens Haeusser, Director, Strategy, The University of British Columbia
Charles F. Leonhardt, Principal Technologist, Georgetown University
Piet Niederhausen, Web & Data Architect, Georgetown University

The abstract from this session:

This is a review of service oriented architecture from a number of perspectives. The panel will define SOA, discuss its value to higher education, and present use cases on how it can enhance our scholarly and enterprise systems. Challenges in organizing for and implementing SOA will be highlighted including a discussion of using SOA in enterprise open source development as well as distributed environments.

This podcast edited with assistance from Kelly Walker.

Community Development

StuartYeates — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:25:51 -0500

At OSS Watch we've been focusing on community development recently, that is getting people up to speed on how to build a community around a project (usually a software project, standardisation effort or similar).

We've started a Community Development mailing list, the discussions have mainly focused, so far, on RSS and on the use of Google Analytics in education.

I've also written an extensive piece on how to improve a page on Wikipedia.

The quest for sustainability in open courseware

pault — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 11:43:27 -0500

I've been reflecting recently on the subject of open courseware and, more specifically, OpenCourseWare following the keynote for the Sakai conference in Amsterdam delivered confidently and enthusiastically by Hal Abelson (a podcast is available). In this post I'll briefly recap some of the core aspects as I understand them and then go on to explore this area, based on personal experiences and ideas I've been formulating at Oxford.

Abelson took a broad view, inviting the audience to go back 25 years and defined programming as a "novel formal medium for expressing ideas." Against that, he got us to consider the aspirations and expectations that we might have had then, encapsulating this in 3 predictions for 25 years thence (i.e. today):

a global encyclopaedia
TCP/IP global
collaborative educational resources

It's the third that has yet to be properly delivered. Starting from consideration of why not, he then developed the rationale leading to the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative and the more recent Creative Commons Learn (ccLearn).

Abelson described OCW and ccLearn as means to building infrastructure for sharing academic pursuits, covering platforms and materials in Sakai, policy structure and media structure, designed in such a way as to protect academic values. The need to beware certain kinds of commercial activities was drilled into the audience: such concerns are, he argued, keen on monopolising and overcharging us. So, in the face of impending monopoly, it was argued that we need OCW, shared repositories etc, in order to be taken seriously at national and international levels. The IPR issue highlights a tension between the commercial and academic world. He urged everyone that we shouldn't leave it to the publishers to control, and by way of illustration mentioned that universities can have a policy on publication that insists on the right to retain rights and publishers should be sought that allow reasonable IPR.

Enter Creative Commons' ccLearn:

Our goal is to make material more "interoperable," to speed up the virtuous cycle of use, experimentation and reuse, to spread the word about the value of open educational content, and to change the culture of repositories to one focused on "helping build a usable network of content worldwide" rather than "helping build the stuff on our site.

It's new to me and one month on I've subsequently tried to find out more. I certainly haven't searched far, but ccLearn still seems largely hidden, with little information available: someone who hears about it might well type cclearn in Google and would find cclearn.com, the 'Center for Creative Learning,' which has also taken the domain cclearn.org. I found it difficult to come across much of substance regarding ccLearn - just a few snippets, e.g. a mention on Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. Of course, as it's a Creative Commons project, you could go to the creativecommons.org site, but when I entered cclearn site:creativecommons.org in Google only one match was returned! At least it informs us that they now have an Executive Director - Ahrash N. Bissell - congratulations to him :-)

The presentation itself flowed swiftly with ease until ... there was a big anticlimax at the end when the economic realities became evident - in Q&A at the end he admitted that the average cost of preparing an MIT course the OCW way is around $15,000-$20,000, mainly down to legal concerns apparently.

Indeed in a subsequent session, 'Open courseware, pedagogy , Social Practices and Tools,' which elaborated on OCW initiatives, major problems with the current OCW were identified:

too expensive to create OCW sites
little or no automation
no connection to CLE
only large institutional commitment can get OCW off the ground

OCW is a meritorious activity and undoubtedly makes a major contribution to making more visible the academic enterprise - the Webometrics 'World University Rankings' provide some indication of this with MIT sitting on top of the table (whereas Oxford lies many places beneath). It can be argued that these are very limited measures, but Web visibility really does count.

Given that it's worthwhile, but costly, how might there be economic sustainability? One might look for inspiration to open source software (OSS) generally and follow the example of seeking revenue from support, certification etc., but I expect this has already been covered. More specific to the educational context, the Open courseware session expressed the hope that the next generation of OCW, dubbed OCW2, will reduce cost by employing graduate students, trained to understand licensing, and enabling them to share in the academic sphere. To enable this, they are looking at incentive structures, trying to get early buy in. The graduate helpers are called Digital Scribes whose engagement can work positively to foster "co-creation" and "communities," but I think graduates may well swap and change how they earn enough to get by, so can't always be depended on. We also heard that from another point of view, OCW may be regarded as filling out the long tail of publishing (a phrase coined by Chris Anderson), as illustrated by Amazon, which is able to sell at least one copy of every book, no matter how obscure, thus offering a chance to support specialisms (J.R. Hartley would be pleased!) and I guess Lulu is another good illustration. However, overall, I'm not convinced this will be much better.

So what would this small person from a small island suggest as an alternative approach?

Allow me to start with a quote from one of last year's extraordinary debates on the governance of Oxford University. It comes from Donald Fraser, Professor of Earth Sciences, who as reported in proceedings from Congregation , 14 November, 2006 stated:

Dynamic knowledge-based businesses are moving away from large, centrally administered monoliths, towards small, self-organising entrepreneurial cells, flexibly connected and practically self determining—just look at the campus models of companies like 3M, Google and Apple.

What does that mean to me as someone who works in academic support? The message I read (and readily agree with) is that academics rather than administrators are the ones who, along with their colleagues and peers, are in the best position to determine what they should do with their academic activities - in terms of how it can help them, their department, their field of study and their students. In the context of the debate as a whole, he was arguing against the motion because it contained proposals that were seen as increasing central control over the academics in ways that would threaten their independence and autonomy. From this, I infer that essentially that academic endeavour starts internally and is facilitated by an inter-networking mode of operation. If you look at the origin and flow of ideas, it often starts wthin one individual, spreads to a group and then more widely. It's a fact not just of research, but of teaching and of any other activity. Institutions need to support this as best they can, particularly as individuals are becoming increasingly mobile, moving from one institution to another.

This view of academic freedom doesn't deny the institution and its overall mission, but it does ask for a light touch, in terms of how academic enterprise is directed and also in terms of general bureacracy, particularly the legal aspects. I guess this is one of the major issues of OCW and I wonder if OCW2 really lessens this. I think a basic lesson to take from the governance debate (I'm not sure I could grapple with many of the subtleties) is that we should seek first to clarify principles: the professor is the academic authority who should drive the decision-making subject to the authorisation of the institution. In order for this to work effectively, the authorisation should be devolved, which is actually the traditional way in which Oxford works. If it's not suitably devolved, then you get a lot of overhead, so that institutional approval becomes necessary for very small steps, making things very expensive.

Such a devolved view can then transfer much of the responsibility to individuals, requring them to focus especially on basically two main issues:

appropriate use of content that you haven't produced yourself
deciding on the rights you wish to grant to content you have produced

If these issues are addressed as early as possible in the course creation lifecycle - by determining what's needed in the way of permissions and what should be granted in the way of rights - then that should save a lot of resources later on. With the right training, by the time materials are published the first time in a course management system, the main licensing issues and policy should already be resolved so that when it comes to making available as open courseware, the main effort is technical. This is dependent, I think, on authorisation at the highest level established as early as possible, ideally at the outset, so that it is quickly devolved. The kinds of authorisation I have in mind is a policy document on the kinds of licensing that are permitted, how the University is identified with each publication, specifically giving academic members the rights to publish according to Creative Commons licenses subject to various terms and conditions. Gaining authorisation itself may not be easy, though, as the institution will likely require strong arguments as to the benefits of making content free to use and repurpose - ICT staff may already have had a taste of this in trying to persuade their institutions to let them release software under an open source license.

Assuming processes can be put in place, what does this mean for implementation?

The OCW presentations I've attended have conveyed the sense that OCW is a long way from just open educational content - I certainly got that impression from the Educause '06 presentation Open Sharing, Global Benefits - The OCW consortium where open educational resources - were defined in terms of digitised materials offered freely and openly to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research; whereas open courseware are specific kind of educational resource materials, which have to be organised around a course, though the duration is open. There's a lot of emphasis on process and, in particular, OCW requires that content must be IP-cleared: every contribution gets passed through and checked - sometimes it is removed or replaced where it is felt that copyright has not been granted on at least some content. When I stepped back to reflect on openness in open courseware, I could see quite a few severe hurdles to surmount, some of which seemed unnecessary. Such a heavyweight approach has led to some consideration of sustainability in terms of a few institutions managing the processes, hosting OCW content, and selling this as a service: Wolfgang Greller sees this is an opportunity for OpenLearn, the OU's version of OCW.

However, I have reservations about the hosting provision at such institutional level through third parties and, in any case, my view is that we are dealing essentially with another output, one that results from existing internal processes to which most resources have already been devoted. Rather, institutional ownership can be expressed naturally through their own LMS, which can provide many organisational benefits, not least a single point of access to all study resources for students and for external examiners. However, If we are to support academics individually as originators of content, then the LMS system needs to support personalisation, a flexible environment in which to organise and publish. Indeed, I feel that the way Oxford is run in a devolved and self-organising way points to more organic and sustainable means that make sense particularly with the host of Web2.0 technologies are available. Hence, I now feel more confident that an LMS can provide valid linkage between personalisation and open courseware, as intimated in my poster at last year's conference in Dallas.

I think we should try to envision how it would work for an academic. I imagine a Professor accessing a LMS and going straight to their personal area, in which they have inter alia options to create, review and share content. For Oxford users it means using MyWebLearn, which makes available all the tools necessary to author a course. Sharing the material can be carried out literally in a few steps:

Log in.
Go to the resource you wish to make public
Click on the link 'View Access' at the bottom of the page.
In the following page go to the pull-down menu 'Allow..' and select 'Public' to 'look at' this page.
Click on the [Add] button to enact.

This simple mechanism has already been used to some extent in WebLearn, evident in Google with a few thousand resources (pages) indexed compared with fewer than a hundred pages from another institutional VLE with the same name! However, this process only enables the materials to be put in the open. From the academic's perspective, there needs to be added to this the means for specifying the licensing. Assuming a suitable policy and process were in place, then options could easily be added. Overall it needs to be very easy to use, ideally as easy as contributing to a blog.

On the other side of the coin, materials published this way as courses need to satisfy certain organisational and structural requirements - the content should be sourced from departmental areas, which need to be planned and designed into the system. Also, to be discoverable they need to be indexed with suitable metadata; and interfaces need to be provided that pull together all the relevant information in a meaningful way. We can achieve this by mapping to institutional structures, e.g. the LMS can automatically insert meta data about department, so that subsequently presenting the courses on offer as a whole, can be achieved by aggregation, say. Here I think we can learn from Warwick blogs, an institutional blog hosting service in which staff and students are able to write freely and connect with others. However, they have linked in with their institutional NDS LDAP directory, so that you can browse blogs based on department and even module of study. WebLearn already uses the institutional map in that it is hierarchical in structure, with the top two levels controlled centrally as far as departments and colleges. However, once at that level, areas are managed locally, i.e. content creation has been decrentralised, allowing natural growth.

The issue of quality control should already be handled in the processes of preparing the courses at the institution; what is being provided is largely a snapshot of the materials that were used in live courses. Whatever the processes, I think it is important that the decisions about releasing such content are devolved as much as possible and that the mechanisms for effecting it are as easy as the illustration above. I understand that for OCW(2) processes are being developed for Sakai to make publication a smoother process, so perhaps the production of Creative Commons licensed content may be an option in future, though I wonder how devolved it is and whether it revolves around MyWorkspace. Also, until Sakai has hierarchy, in comparison the technicalities of generating such materials appear far easier in Bodington (and I suspect developing pipeline processes to go with them might be easier also).

If another editorial layer is needed, then that can emerge from peer networks. A number of years ago I came across the Hippias search engine, a service (now merged with Noesis) that as I recall had an editorial board of experts in Philosophy whose members each maintained their own Web sites. These sites contained links to other sites and the Hippias search engine would index all the pages at the end of these links, thereby building a trusted indexed collection. I think it's a very apposite illustration of how you can combine devolved human quality control with automation.

This is obviously work in progress and much is still open to debate, but from the view I've described above, I think the focus should very much be with the academics, devolving much of the decision-making and supporting them as appropriate. Technically, this means Web2.0-like approaches should be incorporated and so I expect many elements of ccLearn could play a major role in facilitating institution-oriented OCW.

I hope to talk more about personalisation and Web 2.0 in future posts...

Bodington gets their open source on

StuartYeates — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 06:39:36 -0500

Adam Marshall and Sean Mehan

Open source VLE Bodington has released their first full release under the Apache License V2.0.

They package a quickstart war file, which you should be able to just drop into a tomcat container to take it for a test drive.

Bodington is a free open source Virtual Learning Environment/Learning Management System in use at Universities and Colleges worldwide. The Bodington project exists to provide an open source environment to support learning, teaching and research. It is particularly suitable for complex, multi-disciplinary and large organisations and for inter institutional collaboration. It delivers controlled access using open standards.

AOC Nilta, BECTA and Open Source

StuartYeates — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 07:07:15 -0500

AOC Nilta have produced an excellent response to the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) Learning Platform Functional Requirements and Learning Platform Technical Requirements. There are some really excellent features of the program overall, from both a teaching and pedagogical standpoint, but unfortunately the technical requirements are written is such a way that no open source projects are likely to meet them in the near future.

The central issue, of course, is that the BECTA model of spending IT money is centred on paying a commercial company for licences, hardware, training, support and installation, and because of previous bad experiences these commercial companies are required to be of a certain size and age. This doesn't sit well with open source projects, whose focus is on small groups, communities and informal consortia. From the report:

Another concern is whether the vendor-only Learning Platform Framework process endangers the delivery of the functional aims in terms of sustainability, learner collaboration and citizenship skills and education?

The consultation framework excluded Open Source Learning environments and products from consideration because the business processes and models used by the open source community, which radically differ from the practises of commercial companies in terms of development, support, and dissemination, were not recognised as legitimate or sustainable by the Becta framework. Single open-source products or combinations of open source products which deliver the Becta’s functional specification are not eligible for consideration.

AoC NILTA is concerned that while the specification seems to recognise and support the pragmatic and practical ‘small pieces loosely joined’ framework that many institutions work with and around, the criteria and bidding process seems to stymie openness, collaboration and sharing, by tying individual institutions, or at best, local consortiums of institutions, to vendor contracts. By discounting open source solutions from the evaluation process, Becta is ignoring current excellent practice which has worked precisely because of the absence of licensing restrictions.

cheers, stuart

Call for book chapters on Open Source

StuartYeates — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 04:49:47 -0500

Prof. Nassim Belbaly, Hind Benbya and Regis Meissonier of Montpellier Business School have issued a Call for book chapters on Open Source:

Today, it has become clear that OSS represents a significant portion of the software industry. Thus, the purpose of this book is to provide readers with an overall understanding of the OSS approach by explaining the features common to the products and processes of open source development projects. Decision makers at different levels and in a variety of fields need to understand the factors that contribute to the OSS adoption and use effectiveness; the circumstances required, the approaches, tools, social designs, reward structures and coordination methods. We invite contributions that address professional and organizational issues related to the development, management, adoption, and use of open source software. We strongly encourage contributions incorporating creative or new applications of theory (e.g. using existing theory from other domains to illuminate open source processes or products or using open source example to describe existing theory), methodologies (may include cases studies and experiments). Each chapter would present approximately between 3,500 and 5,000 words, focusing on a particular perspective of the recommended topics (see below). Such perspectives would be designed to help developers, managers, academics and users to understand better the OSS phenomenon and make more informed choices about OSS systems and products.

cheers stuart

Sun's DTrace wins award form the Wall Street Journal

StuartYeates — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 04:09:20 -0500

Sun's DTrace framework, part of the recently open sourced Open Solaris operating system, has won an award from the Wall Street Journal for technological breakthrough.

The DTrace system allows operators to examine what is happening within a processes as they run, a notoriously hard challenge. In the past I've used gdb the GNU debugger, and found it very frustrating.

Computer systems are notoriously finicky. They'll hum along just fine and then unaccountably slow down, freeze up or stop working altogether. Finding the cause of some unexplained problem is difficult and time-consuming, especially with complicated systems in real-life settings.

Bryan Cantrill and a team of engineers at Sun Microsystems Inc. have devised a way to diagnose misbehaving software quickly and while it's still doing its work. While traditional trouble-shooting programs can take several days of testing to locate a problem, the new technology, called DTrace, is able to track down problems quickly and relatively easily, even if the cause is buried deep in a complex computer system.

cheers, stuart

The difference between standards and programming languages

StuartYeates — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 06:55:45 -0500

I've seen some confusion recently about the differences between standards and programming languages.

Standards

A standard is a document which describes the structure, layout and meaning of something. Materials that follow the description are said to comply with the standard. The The Chicago Manual of Style is a standard for laying out certain kinds of print on the page. ASCII and Unicode are standards for representing strings of characters. SGML and HTML which is based on it, are standards, as are their successors XML and XHTML respectively.

Open standards are standards under the control of ``impartial'' groups and freely usable without patent infringement or licencing costs. Organisations such as the International Organization for Standardization/International Standardization Organization (ISO), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) define open standards. Open standards you may use regularly include: the design of electrical plugs, which allow different manufacturer's appliances to plug into each other; international telephone system, which allows you to dial telephones across the world irrespective of the manufacturers of telephone at the other end or the exchanges between you; and DES/AES encryption which allow banks to communicate securely, and enable wire rather than physical money transfers.

Closed standards are standards under the control of a company or partisan group and are commonly limited through the use of copyright, trade secrets, encryption, patents and licence fees.

The line between impartial and partisan is not clean-cut, and even impartial groups can be the subject of lobbying and politics.

Only very rarely does a standard (usually a closed standard) specify a licence under which instances (usually documents) may be distributed.

Software

The programming languages C, C++ and Scheme have standards specifying their structure layout and meaning. The programming language Perl is not a standard, because the implementation rather than a document defines the structure, layout and meaning of the language. All programming languages with a standard (that I'm aware of) use other standards by reference. The C language uses the ASCII standard. Java uses the more modern Unicode standard. The XSLT programming language goes one step further and uses the XML standard.

There is quite a body of theoretical and practical research on programming languages, one key result is the Church-Turing thesis, which illustrates that all possible programming languages belong to an equivalence class and thus give us a test to determine what is (or is not) a programming language.

Informally the Church-Turing thesis states that our notion of algorithm can be made precise and programming languages can encode those algorithms. Furthermore, an algorithm can be represented in any programming language; in other words, all ordinary programming languages are equivalent to each other in terms of theoretical computational power, and it is not possible to build a programming language that is more powerful than the simplest programming language. (Note that this formulation of power disregards practical factors such as speed or memory capacity; it considers all that is theoretically possible, given unlimited time and memory.) [Adapted from Church-Turing thesis on Wikipedia, on the basis that a programming language is a form of virtual machine.]

Software written in programming languages largely falls into two categories, programs which are end-user useful pieces of software and libraries which are collections of tools used by one or more program or library to get work done. Thunderbird, Word and AutoCAD are programs. NAG and libstdc++ are libraries.

Some programs and libraries are released under an open source licence, which allows others to use the software under various (but generally fairly liberal) conditions. Programs and libraries have subtly different licencing requirements, because a library is largely useless by itself but must be combined with other software. Licences which are not open source are side to be proprietary. Open source compilers and interpreters for open standard programming languages are common, and indeed this is the field from the open source and free software movement originate, but proprietary implementations of open standard programming languages are also possible.

Some of these distinctions get broken down on the Web, where users don't necessarily see the difference between JavaScript (a language) and CSS (not a language), until they release that the current palaver over AJAX arose precisely because JavaScript is a programming language and was embedded at the ``right place'' in the browser to be extended in ways never thought of by the original authors. This property of apparent infinite extensibility is common to all programming languages.

The following formats used on the Internet are programming languages: JavaScript, XSLT, Flash, Microsoft Word files (with macros), OpenOffice files (with macros), PostScript, Java and AJAX (actually a use of JavaScript).

The following formats used on the Internet are not programming languages: CSS, HTML, XHTML, XML (even though XSLT, which is written in XML is a programming language), DocBook., TEI, Microsoft Word files (without macros), OpenOffice files (without macros) and PDF (Portable Document Format).

cheers, stuart

Open source on the education agenda

StuartYeates — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 11:26:45 -0500

tectonic.co.za is running an interview with Richard Weideman, Ubuntu education programme manager.

Canonical has been pushing further and further into the education space, with Ubuntu variants such as Edubuntu and Kubuntu creating considerable buzz. Now, as a dedicated manager based in South Africa, Weideman wants to take the Ubuntu and open source message firmly into the learning arena.

"The wider community readily acknowledges that Ubuntu has succeeded in making it easy for the average non-technical end-user to install and use open source, and avoid vendor lock-in," he says. "We're targeting these same goals in the education space."

The idea is to free up teachers "to spend more time and energy on the task of teaching, and less time managing the IT environment" as well as freeing up IT capital expenditure and directing it towards training and support for teachers, he adds.

Like many of Ubuntu's activity, this is based out of South Africa.

cheers, stuart

Google releases Tesseract OCR as open source

StuartYeates — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 11:15:56 -0500

Google have released Tesseract OCR as open source. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system is being used by google in their google books project, and presumably they want to see it picked up and improved by image processing researchers.

OCR, the conversion of scanned, written, documents into electronic textual documents, is hard, very hard, to do reliably. Part of the problem is that the process moves from a noisy, approximate format where quality issues are apparent, but normally don't impact the legibility into an exact format, where errors are typically considered completely unacceptable. The availability of a quality OCR system under an open source licence is undoubtedly excellent news. It the short to medium term, we're likely to see many open source content management systems add OCR capabilities to their existing features. It only says so in the tarball, but this is apache licensed.

A few things to know about Tesseract OCR: for now it only supports the English language, and does not include a page layout analysis module (yet), so it will perform poorly on multi-column material. It also doesn't do well on grayscale and color documents, and it's not nearly as accurate as some of the best commercial OCR packages out there. Yet, as far as we know, despite its shortcomings, Tesseract is far more accurate than any other Open Source OCR package out there. If you know of one that is more accurate, please do tell us!

cheers, stuart

GPL to be tested in court in Israel

StuartYeates — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 08:05:09 -0500

It looks like there's a GPL dispute heading to court in Israel. It's between Jin (the original authors) and IChessU (who redistribute it). The case appears to rest on notions of separation between programs, which has long been a grey area with respect to the GPL, because there are complex technical issues involved and the GPL appears to rely on common sense.

At this point I need to explain a bit about the IChessU client, to clarify what I mean by "partial source code". IChessU aim to develop a site which brings chess tutors and students together. An important feature is the ability to see and talk to your tutor and fellow students. This part is an external C++ library Alexander had obtained seperately (I believe another Russian team developed it for him), and is used as a library (via JNI) from the Java code. So, what IChessU have released was everything (which is 95% my code and 5% theirs) except this audio/video over IP library and the few Java classes used to interface with it.

I've then spent a week or so trying to explain Alexander that it does not matter that the A/V library is "a separate library" and that in order to comply with the GPL, he must publish the source code to that too.

Even if this is lost, it's not the end of the world for the GPL, since most likely loss would simply involve slightly withdrawn lines about reuse in proprietary systems.

Thanks to /.

cheers, stuart

The ongoing development of "History of virtual learning environments" on Wikipedia

StuartYeates — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 03:05:38 -0500

The Wikipedia article "History of virtual learning environments" is still accumulating research and references for a possible defence against attempted enforcement of patent claims against Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). Started on 29th July, the page has had over five hundred edits by dozens of contributors.

Much of the effort to develop the page has been led by parties with the open source movement, but the information being recorded is also likely to be useful to proprietary vendors who may be attacked.

I must confess that my own efforts have been modest and mainly editorial, improving some references and pointing out unreferenced claims.

cheers, stuart

Open Source isn't just software!

hes8 — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 16:11:37 -0500

"Open Source" almost always refers to software. Of course it doesn't have to be so restricted, and so it was interesting to come across an Open Source project devoted to hardware! The <a href="http://openprosthetics.org/">Open Prosthetics Project</a> "is producing useful innovations in the field of prosthetics and giving the designs away for free."

The logic is similar to that used to justify Open Source software.

I wish them well!

FSF to launch campaign targeting social activists

StuartYeates — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 02:00:40 -0500

Newsforge is carrying an article saying that Free Software Foundation (FSF) is about to launch a significant campaign targeting social activists, trying to sign them up to the free software movement. This would significantly advance the political aims of the FSF.

I'd see this as largely a response to the ongoing success of the open source movement which largely silent on the political issues of open source and free software, choosing to focus on technical and business motivations.

The message, Brown says, will be a simple one, calculated to appeal to these groups: "Free software is an issue of free speech when we're moving more of our lives on to computers." The goal is appeal to the strong ethical stance of activist groups, and to encourage them to adopt policies in favor of free software.

"All these groups share a body of issues that they all recognize and care about," Brown says. "One group may be working against child poverty, another for recycling, but the people in these organizations can almost be transferred from one to the next. And from my experience with networking within social groups, if we could have one success, then it could very quickly lead to lots of success, because this community really communicates well." In other words, the FSF hopes that the promotion of free software will rapidly become part of this standard body of issues in the activist community.