Author Archive
VIA - Edufilter
I have been following the famous James Farmer blog for a couple of years now as well as the progress of his highly successful Edublogs. I thought this would be the perfect highlight session to get back into the swing of things here on Edufilter.
From the Edublogs site:
“Free blogs for teachers, trainers, lecturers, librarians, and other edu professionals”
I caught up with James to ask him a few questions:
What prompted you to set up Edublogs and subsequently the rest of the blogs in the incsub.org suite?
Um, playing 
No, more seriously, pretty much the first idea I had after getting a blog was “So how do I sort these out for students”. Actually I lie, that was a thought I had even before I started blogging - I recall a pretty horrific attempt to set up Manila in 2002. Edublogs just seemed like a natural progression - I grabbed the domain sometime in early 05 I think, pretty surprised to see it was available… played around with a few possible uses of it - Drupal etc. and then, over a few glasses of wine, had as close to a eureka moment as I can ever claim to have had…. that this new multi user blogging thing that I was playing with at incsub could be a source for edublogs… not much of a revelation I know but it’s kinda shaped where I am now more than I could have imagined at the time!
The uptake rates seem pretty impressive - has it been meeting your expectations?
Exceeding them at the moment, it’s scary. To be honest I really want to bring all the sites together to one page, brand the themes a bit (a cutesy little button a la ‘I power blogger’) and doing some serious promotion… but until I can get some serious enterprise architecture / scalability and work on it I’m kinda scared to do that. It’ll be fun when I can though. I think I estimated (thinking it’d be wildely optomistic something like 9k blogs in a year - and there were more than double that on edulogs.org alone.)
Across the various services, have you notice any trends occurring; frequency of posting, feature requests - that sort of thing?
I wish I had the time to get more into it, I really do. Overall people are pretty happy with the services but I’m itching to introduce all sorts of cool new stuff.
Do you have any plans to expand the range of services you offer and what can users of Edublogs expect to see in the future?
Yes, absolutely. First up I want to make it a much richer, stronger and more featureful system. Secondly integration with fantastic tools like wikispaces and yacapaca are just great. Thirdly… well, if I get to pull that off it’ll be a nice surprise, so I won’t tell you just yet
What effect do you see DOPA, if it goes through, having on services like Edublogs?
Very little, if at all, I hope.
How do you fund Edublogs?
Chalkface have provided some great support but fundamentally it’s outta my own pocket. The hardware technical costs at the moment are about $10k a year - which hurts - but I’m hopeful that it’ll be worth it down the line - I guess in many ways it has already. I’d rather not think about the cost in terms of my own time and stress levels, it hurts too much 
Edublogs is powered by WordPress, are there any other technologies behind the service?
Yep, bbPress runs the forums and is integrated with the user database (I can’t tell you how hard that was!) Wikispaces is, well, wikispaces and Yacapaca is a great assessment tool run by Chalkface. WordPress is about the closest I’ve ever come to software nirvana though, I couldn’t recommend it more.
September 26th, 2006
Via Edufilter and reproduced with permission.
Here is an interview with Brad Wheeler; a co-founder of Sakai and current serving Vice Chair of the Sakai Foundation Board.
What was the driving force behind setting up the Sakai project?
Rational economics and strategy for the future. In 2002, IU assessed continuing to advance our very popular home grown “Oncourse” system or to buy from the commercial marketplace. The public report is available - A Course Management System Strategy for Indiana University. Neither was a great option. Our economics were very favorable with great control of destiny in our homegrown system, but as an island, I knew we would struggle to keep pace with the very best innovation for teaching and learning. Michigan had reached all the same conclusions. We agreed to share code in 2002 and that ultimately led to what became the Sakai Project concept (with others) in late 2003.
What has the uptake rate been like? Is it meeting your expectations?
For the eight campuses of Indiana University, Sakai is already our default Course Management System. We’ve had over 90,000 unique logins and auto-load it with over 26,000 courses each semester. Some faculty moved last year and others are moving this year as we prepare to retire our old system.
Beyond IU, the uptake has been at the right pace. I’m delighted with the breadth of engagement from five continents. The project is only now 2.5 years old and has put out five releases. I think the 2.2 release really puts Sakai into full consideration for those that were waiting for a little more maturity in the software. Changing a CMS is a three year venture for most institutions, so many are now in the pilot evaluation year.
What is different about Sakai when compared to other OSS CMS systems such as Moodle or Drupal? Why do you think people should choose Sakai?
Since I’ve not taught with Moodle or Drupal, I can’t speak to relative strengths. I can say that Sakai was conceived as a Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for enterprise-scale use. It is being used for eScience, scholarly portals, university committees, and all forms of collaboration in addition to supporting residential and distributed education. We saw this as a way to move to a Faculty Workbench concept where many of the tools they need for their teaching, research, and service roles are all there together. Likewise, students can use it for their teams and committees beyond courses too. One of our faculty recently told others on a call with a National Science Foundation project that “we do everything in Sakai for our collaboration.” A slight exaggeration, but its use beyond courses is accelerating quickly.
The broad community is also very important. The Sakai Conferences are now really about everything it takes to succeed – training, support, system administration, etc. The explosion of sharing among the Sakai community at the institutional level has been a remarkable development during the project’s second year.
Sakai is open source - can anyone contribute to the code base or become a member of the project?
Absolutely. Sakai has a very active Developer community and many improvements have come from individuals as well as developers who work in universities. There are a set of committers and review processes just like many other open source projects. The technical community works on a meritocracy.
Can you give us a scoop on some new features/initiatives Sakai users can look forward to in the near future?
I’m very excited about the Sakaibrary work to further integrate licensed library content into Sakai. See Integrating Licensed Library Resources with Sakai. There are some very cool synchronous tools for audio/video/whiteboard being developed in the UK. The GradTools work from Michigan is also a good one to help grad students through their degree programs. Sakai is laboring hard with IMS on the Tool Interoperability and Common Cartridge work. The 2.2. release also has full integration with the Open Source Portfolio. This helps mainstream courses, portfolios, collaboration, and more into a common, open platform. Faculty and students can then readily invoke the tools that serve their needs. I knew we were on the right path when an academic department called me recently seeking for us to deploy a Sakai tool built at another university that they had seen at their professional conference.
How do you see the recent Blackboard patent award effecting Sakai development?
It is difficult to see how these attempts to assert patent rights are in the interest of students, faculty, and tax payers. IU’s deployment of these enterprise-class concepts for educational software date to 1997 and 1998 as documented in the WikiPedia entry, thus we’ve made no changes in our plans nor am I aware of changes from others who are working together through open source sharing. The Sakai Foundation has retained the Software Freedom Law Center and Eben Moglen to advise us on these matters as assess the veracity of the patent claim and other efforts to limit the free sharing of educational software that has long been a value of higher ed institutions. Our announcement.
With the emergence of companies such as RSmart it seems to me the often heralded argument that OSS does not have the same support as commercial tools is no longer valid. What do you think about the whole OSS vs Commercial CMS argument?
Is someone really still talking about that? With 13 Sakai Commercial Affiliates and competitive bidding on support and implementation services around open intellectual property, I’d say “argued, answered…dismissed.” Our commercial affiliates have no IP claims on the work of the Sakai Project, and yet they are choosing to be great contributors in many ways. In a field of sixteen candidates with .edu’s having about 85 votes and .com’s having about 11 last year, Members of the Sakai Foundation elected Chris Coppola of rSmart to the board. Why? Because rSmart had been working in the discussion groups and helping the community. Markets work. Other affiliates are doing likewise too.
What are the technologies behind Sakai?
Enterprise Java is the core, but we’ve got connectors for tools in other programming languages as well. We are database agnostic. We use web services, Spring, and Hibernate.
And let me add one more…..
Sakai has shown colleges and universities how to invest together and develop software using open source practices. We are repeating that with the Kuali Financial System that will have its first release in early October, and a Research Administration System announcement is forthcoming. These projects, more than anything, represent a new Coordination Model for higher ed to pool and leverage its resources. It is working because it is held together by incentives rather than contract. Everyone has walk away rights to the code at any time. The value of the community entices them to participate.
August 31st, 2006
This week is quite an easy one - the Internet has been rife with discussion around the Blackboard patent. As crazy as this patent seems, are we that surprised and can you really blame Blackboard? Like most commercial ventures they want to put any competition out of business - that is the way business works - the fact the patent was awarded is the crazy part!
You can find comprehensive discussions here:
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=35267
http://davecormier.com/edblog/?p=67
http://www.technorati.com/search/blackboard
http://www.knownet.com/knownet/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell/entries/6193224930
August 3rd, 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
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
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
The OpenCourseWare consortium released their new portal a couple of weeks ago. This is a handy place to go if you are interested in following developments on the OpenCourseWare initiative.
With the OU also entering the Open Content arena, I think some interesting developments will surface over the next few months - watch this space.
July 5th, 2006
Previous Posts
