Archive for July, 2006
A new open source service has just launched, OpenAcademic. The aims of this project are to build out customised solutions based on the open source tools; Moodle, Drupal, Elgg and MediaWiki.
The resultant solution will be released open source for those interested to download.
July 31st, 2006
For those interested in Moodle, here are some resources worth checking out.
You can watch the keynote and track 2 sessions from the recent MoodleMoot 2006:
http://moodlemoot.org/mod/resource/view.php?id=99
There are plenty of notes on the MoodleMoot site.
Miles Berry has been blogging his thoughts on the conference.
July 28th, 2006
Second of two posts on new open content initiatives.
“Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in the database and write high quality descriptions of the resources. The database contains 113495 records.”
Many years ago I was involved in the REM project, run by Bangor University. REM was supposed to be a Resource Locator. It sort of got built - but would only run in Netscape 4 - on a good day - when the servers were feeling friendly. REM was years ahead of its time - so of course the funding was withdrawn. Now 8 years later Intute comes along showing what REM should have been.
Its been a long wait - but its worth it.
Technorati Tags: open content
July 26th, 2006
Inside Higher Ed :: New Model for Scholarly Publishing:
It might be summer but the Open Content movement continues to gather strength.
Here is the first of two post on recent announcements / releases.
“Rice University Press, which was killed in 1996, will be revived. But unlike every other university press, it will publish all of its books online only. People will be able to read the books for no charge and to download them for a modest fee. Editors will solicit manuscripts and peer review panels will vet submissions — all in ways that are similar to the systems in traditional publishing.”
Much to be welcomed especially given Rice’s association with the Connexions project. Interesting - why would I publish through Rice, rather than just put the PDF on my own web site. Guess the answer has to be that they see publishing through the Rice site as conveying some kind of additional prestige. I am not so sure this will work in the long term.
Technorati Tags: Open content
July 26th, 2006
This week we are going to highlight a couple of excellent resources, one is an individual who is doing some pioneering work with open source in UK schools and the second is an interactive resource.
Miles Berry
Miles Berry is a strong advocate for the use of Moodle and Elgg in schools within the UK. He is a rare breed in that he talks about it but also eats his own dog food. If you are currently looking at the various technology options for your school, I would recommend his blog as a good starting place.
About Miles
Miles blog - the most recent entries have been a round up of the Flossie conference.
Here is an excellent presentation to get started: Moodle, Elgg and the e-strategy (pdf)
WorldBridges
This weeks star resource is WorldBridges and in particular their flagship service, edtechtalk.
Edtechtalk is packed full of interesting interviews, discussions, arguments and reviews. It will take you some time to wade through all the broadcasts but it is well worth it. Many of the most influential thinkers in the space of education and technology have presented on the show.
There is a good review of Worldbridges on the WebheadsinAction.org site: What is Worldbridges?
July 24th, 2006
Open specifications for interoperable learning technology should be very useful, because they enable the users to rely on their own systems, without the resources, or the implementation of teaching or learning being dependent on specific proprietary systems. As an example of the usefulness of open specifications, let us recall that the web is based on the HTML language, and this has allowed us to be highly independent of proprietary systems.
IMS is one of the main organisations which develops open specifications for eLearning. Several IMS specifications have become worldwide standards for delivering learning products and services, and the move is going on. However, these specifications are difficult to use by people with rather simplistic technological background such as teachers, small learning institutions, and others.
In order to facilitate the dissemination of these standards, the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona has been working on a set of experimental tools that provide user friendly interfaces for some IMS specifications such as Question & Test Interoperability, and Learning Design. The technical development work is based on libraries which were developed in Java to implement functionalities associated with the specifications such as saving and instance of a schema, verifying the instance’s compatibility with the specifications, and implementing the fields, data structures, and relations defined in the specifications. These libraries mirror in their structure a direct mapping of the specification hierarchy into a set of Java classes.
The QAed tool developed at Pompeu Fabra University is a complete open source implementation that facilitates the creation and management of assessment repositories, based on a user centered strategy. It implements a subset of the IMS Question & Test Interoperability specification known as QTI-Lite. IMS specifications promote coordination between distributed learning environments and content from multiple authors and this is also supported by QAed. The tool relies on a set of QTI-Lite Libraries which could be reused in the context of any e-learning framework and are part of the set of libraries mentioned in the previous paragraph. The QAed tool is a standalone application based on teachers’ needs, and implements some practical functionalities which go beyond the specification.
IMS QTI specification is evolving. The current version is QTI 2.0, and there is a quite developed draft of version 2.1. Current Pompeu Fabra University efforts related to QTI involve the upgrade of the libraries to cover a large part of the 2.0 and the 2.1 draft specifications which have been mentioned. The work is building on that of the JISC funded project APIS, but major additions and restructuring have already taken place. The resulting libraries will be released in the immediate future. In the framework of the European TenCompetence project, QAed, which is a stand-alone application, is also being transformed into an open-source plug-in for service oriented architectures (such as those supported by JISC and DEST eFramework). Current Pompeu Fabra University work also includes an easy to use editor based on templates for the Learning Design specification. Let us mention the related work Collage and the RELOAD Learning Design editor.
Experimentations with these tools are helping to design a way to bring the IMS specifications a visage that can be utilized by novice learners or learning designers in producing, distributing, and consuming learning components in accordance with global specifications.
July 19th, 2006
Its time for the regular education blog - Sounds of the Bazaar - only just over two weeks from the last edition so we are beginning to get the schedule I am aiming at.
Here are the sleeve notes for this edition 
Graham’s rant - my regular slot
In this edition I talk about issues arising from the Leonardo da Vinci funded Workplace Learning partnership project. How do we resolve the tensions between wanting to try small scale experiments with Web 2.0 technologies towards developing the concept of the Personal Learning environment, whilst practitioners and education and training providers want solutions now - software which works and software which makes their lives easier.
The Bazaar Interview
I interview Lou McGill who leads the JISC e-Learning programme work on
e-assessment. Lou talks about moving away from a simple multiple choice question approach to e-assessment to more formative approaches to learning and assessment.
I interview Lou McGill who leads the JISC work on e-assessment. Lou talks about moving away from a simple multiple choice question approach to e-assessment to more formative approaches to learning and assessment.The JISC work on e-assessment can be found here.
There is also a Special Interest Group on e-assessment, run by CETIS
Web site of the Week
This edition has a bit of a CETIS theme. web site of the week is Scott Wilson’s work blog. Scott, who works for CETIS is for me a rare hard core techie who can make himself understood to those of us of less technical backgrounds. Right on Scott!
Wilfred Rubens and edu-bloggers
The theme continues although it is a few steps removed. Wilfred Rubens works
for the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Wilfred is involved in the SURF programme - which is a parters of - yes you’ve got it - CETIS. In this discussion recorded in a bar in Salzburg, Wilfred talks to me about the Dutch Edu-bloggers and the role of blogging in education and research.
Sounds of the Bazaar (4) [33:08m]:
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Graham Attwell on Web 2 and education [5:48m]: |
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Lou Mc Gill talks about e-assessment [12:36m]: |
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Wilfred Rubens and edu-blogging [8:37m]: |
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July 18th, 2006
This weekly segment looks to highlight useful open source resources; here are a couple for this week:
- iTrainOnline - Strategic use :: Open Source (this is packed with links to projects, papers, resources and software)
- Open source in education: winning hearts and minds (a decent article)
Site of the week:
“This is the Open Source Software in Education website, developed by the EC sponsored SIGOSSEE and JOIN projects. The projects aim to provide information, advice, guidance and research on the use of open source software in education for the education community, for policy makers and planners and for educational software developers.”
This site looks like it is jammed full of interesting discussion, articles and resources. There is a multi-user news blog for keeping up to date.
If you are interested in Open Source, check it out.
July 13th, 2006
Should educational institutions be using/relying on commercial, centrally hosted, solutions?
While it is true that the range of commercial offerings are very useful, attractive and slick - is there an argument for maintaining control over the system you use, especially given one, current, revenue model - selling user data and habits to advertising and marketing companies?
MySpace
“Myspace, News Corp says, could drive traffic to Fox Interactive Media. And most importantly, Myspace has detailed logs of its users’ preferences, online behaviour and personal information.
That could help the company tailor what it does to the ever-more-discerning market which Mr Murdoch believes he has identified.”
Source: What Myspace means to Murdoch - BBC
Further reading: MySpace is the most expensive data mining project in the world
Using MySpace: Virtual Presence
Facebook
At one UK Univerisity some students commented on a proposal to launch a student space:
“What about a ‘facebook’ community as in many other universities? this facebook system has been very successful in many other unis e.g. LSE, Imperial etc”
“I think facebook is a better options as it makes it easier for other people to find you. This option means people have to go out of their way to find your profile. Why not join part of a larger community? “There is no point in re-inventing the wheel!”"
Then we look at what one of the new investors in Facebook says:
“We think Facebook has a unique opportunity to reach a crucial demographic at a key point in their lives. And when a site has this much scale and brand recognition, advertisers will come.”
This clearly highlights the focus of these sites.
Source: Social Networking’s Gold Rush -Business Week
Delicious and Flickr
These two services are immensly popular with many courses and projects making use of them - what happens if Yahoo changes its business model, especially now that it has lost it ranking as the number one site in the US? Could we end up in a situation where learners need to pay, again, to access their data?
Who cares?
That said, how much do people really care about who has access to their data, usage habits etc.? Perhaps this is just a few and in reality convenience is more important?
We are becoming so used to filling in profile fields, providing sites with our details that perhaps it doesn’t matter and we should just stop going on about data issues and fully embrace these excellent, new services within our learning environments?
What are the alternatives? Government sponsored spaces? Large insitutions getting together and providing infrastructure and services instead?
July 13th, 2006
Via Josie Fraser
If you are new to the concept of open source software then this new resource from the OSS Watch group looks like a good starting point.
“Perhaps you have already heard about open source software and you can’t quite believe that it offers a way to use software for free. Perhaps you have heard that open source is a movement espoused by men (and some women!) sporting beards and sandals. Perhaps you have simply no idea what it is and you want to find out more. Whatever your motivations, it’s always a good time to start learning about free and open source software.”
Visit the site: OSS Watch - Open source for absolute beginners
July 13th, 2006
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