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
