I must have blinked when this was announced, but OpenAcademic.org sounds like a perfect scenario. Development efforts to integrate some of the biggest open source tools used in online education. It sounds like the goal is to come up with a way for Drupal, Elgg, Mediawiki and Moodle to all play nicely together, in such a way as to be easily deployable and maintainable by even the smallest school. Rather than attempting to build The One True LMS, they’re taking the approach of playing to the strengths of the available tools, and putting the effort into integration.
The really cool thing is a documented commitment by the OpenAcademic.org team to not fork projects, and to contribute any code to the relevant communities. So, they’ll be hacking on each of these applications directly, with all improvements freely available to everyone.
Personally, I think this is one of the biggest and coolest developments in online education for the year. I’m ashamed that I missed the announcement almost a month ago.
I’ve been spending almost all of my time lately in Drupal, with some time in Moodle. It’s pretty obvious that each has its own strengths (and weaknesses), and that spending effort to duplicate each package’s feature set would be wasteful and counterproductive. Having an effective way to integrate these various tools would be amazingly powerful, especially as more applications, platforms and tools are brought into the mix.
Imagine an elearning ecosystem that ties in Drupal, Mediawiki, Elgg, Moodle, Blackboard, WebCT, Flickr, del.icio.us, Facebook, YouTube, etc… in a flexible system that can adapt to any pedagogical needs. Sweet.
I had been making a case to attend OSCON2006 this year, the logic being that it's a better fit for what I'm doing now than WWDC is. OSCON is a gathering of open source projects and programmers/developers, with tracks on various cool open source technologies, methodologies, etc… WWDC is a corporate developers conference, aimed specificially at core Apple technologies (with some obvious trickle-over into open source as well).
The sub-thought was that I could save some coin in our budget by going to an open source conference, rather than a high-end corporate one.
Then, I checked out just how much O'Reilly charges for people to attend OSCON. Holy crap. For what you get (number of days, tutorials, etc…) WWDC turns out to be cheaper!
|
|
|
| # of days |
3 (+ 2 days of extra tutorials) |
5 |
| Workshops/tutorials |
extra fee
$395 per tutorial, with discounts for multiples
|
free |
| # of sessions |
210 (15-45 minutes each) |
175+ (1 hour each) |
| Keynote |
Tim O'Reilly |
Steve Jobs |
| Location |
Portland |
San Francisco |
| Cost |
$1,245US + Tutorials + Executive Briefing
(25% academic discount)
|
$1,595US
all events included
|
I know O'Reilly needs to pay their bills, but it just strikes me as odd that a conference aimed at the Open Source Community would cost so much. They could have followed the model of NorthernVoice et. al., by having partners contribute space/resources, and charge a nominal fee to make sure everyone can attend. Have the event hosted at a university campus, and I'm sure it would cost less to put on – and might offer facilities as good or better than a conference hotel.
There are certainly more expensive conferences (JavaOne2006 would have cost over 2 grand US for the full meal deal, and Microsoft's PDC is around 2 grand as well – TED is over $4KUS). I suppose that once you add on the cost of travel, accomadations, and any non-provided food, the conference really isn't that expensive in comparison, but something just seems wrong about charging over a grand (US) to listen to 45-minute sessions by open source luminaries.
I've been to a fair number of different conferences (but never to OSCON), and WWDC has always been consistently in a league all its own. Other conferences wish they could be run as smoothly, deliver the same tasteful showmanship, be planned as completely, and generate the excitement and buzz in the presenters and attendees. I'm not sure how much of that is a result of the bells and whistles they're able to throw in by charging $1,600 per head, and how much is a direct result of the energy in the community.
As it turns out, I don't think I'll be travelling this summer anyway (don't want to be away from home too much) so the point is basically moot for me, but I'd bet there are a lot of folks that would like to go to OSCON who simply can't afford the entrance fee.
Teemu Leinonen posted a link on the IIEP-OER list, referencing the LeMill project he's working on. I just checked it out, and it's pretty cool. This one is based on the Plone content management system / framework, so it's great to see what can be done on top of these maturing platforms.
It's still being developed, but it looks like LeMill is another great option as a CAREO replacement. It's got some things in it that CAREO lacks (collections – an evolution of "subscribed objects", tagging), but doesn't have comments/discussion for each item (yet?). It's multilingual, easy to install, and runs just about anywhere.
Repository really isn't the right term any more. LeMill is (intended to be) more of a community than a repository. That's a much better model – one that seems to be working well on other projects like SocialLearning.ca (and many others – perhaps Merlot is the granddaddy of them all?)
I like the distinction between "pieces" (assets – images, video, etc…) and "materials" (compound products – websites, learning objects, courses…). The resource addition (upload or reference) process was pretty simple – maybe too simple, since there doesn't appear to be a license selector or copyright description available. I had an image uploaded and tagged in about a minute, though.
update: found a page on the LeMill wiki describing mandatory IEEE LOM metadata fields, so perhaps that widget just isn’t exposed for Pieces…
Where LeMill stands apart is the concept of Activities and Tools – perhaps these are just variations on a theme, and might be analogous to the different content types they've got in SocialLearning.ca. The implementation of the different content types lets you do some interesting things to group/sort/categorize/display various items, so that's a handy step in the right direction.
I'm going to have to make some time to play more with LeMill, and to finally get around to mocking up a Drupal port of CAREO.
Flock hit beta 1 (or 0.7, depending on how you count) yesterday, and it seems like a really solid release. My favorite feature isn’t even part of the core Flock code – it’s got more Extensions enabled, including Mouse Gestures!
I’m hoping they nailed down the nasty memory leaks that plagued previous builds, and cleaned up the window opening code, which could take several seconds to spawn a new browser window. But it’s definitely on the right track.
Now to see if they managed to squeeze in category sorting/filtering in the blog posting interface (which, other than that, has been the best blog posting wysiwyg interface I’ve ever used).
Nope. It doesn’t sort or filter categories. Meaning that although it only took me 2 minutes to write this simple post, it’ll take at least that long just to select the proper categories from the menu provided…
I hinted at this in a previous post, but it wasn't "official" yet so I didn't provide any details. It's now official. The University of Calgary just finished the official CMS selection process, including input from ~140 web folks on campus and 6 presentations on 6 different CMS options. I was asked to present on Drupal, drawing on what we've done on some projects, and how it might fit into a larger community and workflow on campus.
The technical committee recommended Drupal last week (followed by Joomla – the only 2 solutions recommended were open source!), and the CMS group (including our IT department) approved that recommendation this week. The Teaching & Learning Centre abstained from voting to avoid any appearance of pushing one solution over the others.
So, over the next few weeks, our IT department will be getting up to speed on hosting Drupal. I'll be working with them to transfer information about our experiences in the Teaching & Learning Centre, and they'll merge that with their enterprise plan.
The short term goal is to provide an easy and effective way for faculties and departments to manage their websites without needing geeks in-house. If they can view a web page and use MS Word, they have the skills to maintain a website with Drupal.
Since this is now an officially supported CMS on campus, our IT department will be setting up servers, providing tech support, and keeping the gears meshed. The TLC will likely be providing project-specific support, and perhaps more general pedagogical guidance (what to do with it, what not to do with it, how to use it to enhance blended learning, etc…)
The longer term goal is to take advantage of some of the more social/community-oriented features, and open it up to individuals on campus. No timeline on that part of the plan at the moment, though, but that has me more excited than migrating the quasi-static websites into a CMS.
There are even longer term (and much grander) plans being discussed, but I won't mention details except to say that this could be a very big thing, both on campus, and for Drupal.
We've also begun investigating how Drupal may play a part in the U of C's podcasting (and larger digital media sharing) strategies. Ideally, we'd have a combination of iTunesU, Blackboard and Drupal, each playing to their respective strengths.
I've ranted about the IT department before, but I have to give them full props now. They went the extra mile to support an open source solution, when commercial packages might have caused them less grief (but also provided less flexibility and control). Sometimes the good guys do come out ahead…
To prevent myself from backing away from this, I’ve gone ahead and requested a new project on Eduforge.org to host the mythical EduGlu application development.
I’ve got no idea what this thing might be – not even what language it will be written in – but I’m sticking a flag into the sand to say I’ll help build this sucker.
It’s going to have to be a spare time / after hours project for me, since I’m already way booked at work. If it turns into anything, I’ll try to address any issues that come up there. That’d be a good problem to have, though.
The project hosting hasn’t been activated yet – could take 72 hours – but it should show up https://eduforge.org/projects/eduglu/.
Anyone else want to play? I’m hoping to do the whole thing out in the open, with an Open Source license to make sure it’s available to anyone. Next step, to brainstorm what this thing should be capable of. There will be a project wiki space when it’s been activated by the folks at Eduforge.org…
One of the extracurricular activities after Northern Voice included a quick excursion led by Jon to The Railway Club (a couple of blocks from Robson Square). We wound up sampling the überbrü – the Open Source Beer.
Brian had written about überbrü a while back, and I was intrigued by the idea – an open recipe for a brew, for sale only in local micrew bars (or at home).
Yet another good conversation, lubricated by a surprisingly good beer.
this post was really just an excuse to post something to help the nice folks at Qumana debug some glitches in the latest beta
I’m trying out Unison File Synchronizer as a way to keep my two machines at work in sync. Unison inherits many concepts from source code management tools like CVS and SVN, and can manage bidirectional updates (even merges). I’ve done a test sync, firing the contents of my Powerbook over on top of my deskop’s home directory. It took only about 20 minutes or so to copy stuff over, but a long, tedious process of approving or reconciling conflicts made the process last many times longer than that.
It would be cool if Unison could have a flag that said “hey, if there’s a conflict, trust the Powerbook, and blow away the desktop” or vice versa. So I didn’t have to hit “.” for each of 20,000 files…
There are precompiled binaries for MacOSX, including both a GUI and command-line app. I had zero luck with the GUI version, but the command-line app was trivial to use.
If this works out, it will replace the last function that I rely on my now doomed .Mac account for…
Update: Between having multiple sync profiles, and being able to set the -auto and/or -batch flags, this could be a very usable solution! I’ve tried disabling .Mac sync for a while to see if I miss it.
Well, it’s officially in alpha anyway. I just created an account on OurMedia.org – a joint venture between Marc Canter’s folks and Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive group.
Marc was pimping the project back at Northern Voice – but it was undergoing last minute tweaks so wasn’t officially released then.
It offers free hosting for content (audio, video, images, etc…) for eternity, as part of the Internet Archive project. Very cool.
The OurMedia.org website is a Drupal site (put together by Bryght, it looks like) – it’s quite nice. I may have to will borrow some ideas from it for weblogs.ucalgary.ca.
My first upload to the archive should appear shortly – there is apparently a delay between uploading and hosting as part of the Internet Archive at archive.org.
Update: The image still hasn’t shown up online… A quick surf of the site shows a whole lot of “it will be available soon, please be patient” pages. Wonder if the link between ourmedia and archive.org is down? Perhaps it’s a piece of wetware that went home for the weekend?
Update: Interesting. Looks like the image file is in place, but the node for it still has the placeholder text…
Also, after looking at that image at full size – man, is my camera a piece of shit. I’ve got to get a decent camera soon…
Update: items that were uploaded today are starting to show up on archive.org. Not sure what the delay is, but I’ve added another image to test it out.
