This is going to be my last entry for 2005 before I fly off to Wales tomorrow to join my family who have been over there for the last 10 days with our inlaws. Just wanted to send everyone sincere best wishes and hope for their joy and successes in the new year. I am totally stoked about 2006 and look forward to more cool projects, collaborations, meetings-up and general rabble rousing with you all in the coming year. - SWL
Monthly Archive for December, 2005
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/documentation.xml
Bravo to the OSS Watch guys for tackling this hoary issue straight on - the best way to fight ‘fear uncertainty and doubt’ is by talking about the issues and showing how one can address them. Not that I know of any open source project that have this problem, ahem, but this short piece contains the sensible advice to make mailing lists, chat logs, etc., accessible to search engines and bookmarking systems, as well as to encourage new users to contribute documentation as their first contribution to the project. - SWL
http://moodle.org/other/icalt2005.pdf
This paper looks at the ever expanding world of open source course management systems, but adds to the comparison the factors of “adaptability, personalization, extensibility and adaptivity” (this later meaning “automatic adaptation to the individual user�s needs”). The results; Moodle is judged to be the best in terms of its adaptation capabilities, though all of the projects are deemed to be light on end-user adaptivity. - SWL
http://www.sakaitestdrive.com/
If you haven’t already had the chance, Unicon has made it even easier to have a look at Sakai 2.1 (just released on December 1, 2005) through their new “Test Drive” sites. The sites, available for free for 90 days, give you access to a demo course and worksite and allow you to change roles so as to see the system from various user perspectives. The background here is that Unicon once developed a CMS on top of uPortal called Academus, but appear to now be piggybacking on offering Sakai support and other uPortal support based on their years’ of experience.
This will not change anyones’ mind who had already decided they were not down with the ‘course managed’ approach, but for those looking for an alternative to their current CMS, this provides one more method to kick the tires, and just in time for Christmas! - SWL
Bryan Alexander posted a link to The Freesound Project and it was interesting to me for a whole slew of reasons.
It was interesting first off because I have been using the site myself for the last few months; I am getting more into making music with digital audio tools (yes, yes, I will post something, someday, give me time to build up my courage) and so turned to Freesound to find new samples for a drum machine. And it works; not perfectly maybe, but you can definitely find new samples fairly easily, and it has a number of other social affordances (’users who downloaded this also…’ and folksonomies) that lead you to related stuff you might like.
I was interesting also on a personal level as it was built as part of the 2005 International Computer Music Conference. ICMC is dear to my heart because way back in 1995, I was responsible for building the first website to support a ICMC conference, when it was hosted in Banff (the only remnant of which I can now find is this reference, the ‘WayBack machine‘ not even going back that far, so safe to say Internet ancient history!)
And finally it’s also of interest as a ‘repository’ of shareable remixable content, and one that would have to be judged relatively successful at that, with around 10,000 ‘objects’ and almost a million downloads. So what makes it tick, why does it succeed when so many of our various ‘learning object repository’ projects are failing so miserably? Let’s consider (more)….
Continue reading ‘Why does ‘Freesound’ succeed when so many learning object repositories fail?’
I came across this blog via a post from Christopher Sessum (another worthwhile subscription, I’d add), who pointed to an essay titled ‘Why smart people defend bad ideas.’ It REALLY struck home (for better or worse I am more and more trying to be brutally honest in my personal assessments) and led me to subscribe and read some of Mr. Berkun’s other posts. And so far I haven’t come across a single post that hasn’t rocked my brain in some way or another. In fact there is almost too much good stuff (I kind of depend on some dreck in trying to track 180+ blogs, which is where my subscriptions are at these days.) Not ‘Ed Tech’ focused, but ‘Highly recommended’ anyways! - SWL
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/OE_text_chat.txt
Really apropos of not very much, I stumbled across the above transcript during a google search on a pretty unrelated topic (unrelated except for the fact that it is me still thinking about it now, and I show up in this transcript almost 3 years ago when I first started thinking about it). This group meeting on ‘open education’ issues, organized by George Siemens, never really jelled formally, but informally I like to think that many of these folks now make up part of my online community, and hopefully, I their’s. And I have had the immense pleasure over the last 3 years of meeting almost all of them face to face, and even closely befriending a few of them. Remember this anyone? I’d say it seems like yesterday except it doesn’t, it seems almost another lifetime ago. God I’m turning into an old foggie. - SWL
http://infodesign.no/artikler/
personal_%20publishing_media_literacy.pdf
Are the Norse known for being terse? The only reason I ask is that my one complaint about this paper from Jon Hoem and Ture Schwebs is that it is too short! (which to be honest, is usually not the problem with academic papers!)
Even if you feel you’ve had your fill of papers on “why to use blogs and wikis in education” please do yourself a favour and read this one. In seven short, packed pages they lay out a number of strong rationales for using blogs and wikis in the classroom (in this case mostly the K-12 classroom), introduce for me the interesting concept of “personal publishing as ‘staging‘.� They also show off their own, in-house blogging tool called ELOGG (no, not that one), very recognizable as a blogging tool but which also contains some sensible additions like “assignments, projects, friends & favourites, selected works, and media archives” that make the tool even more affable to a school setting.
I expect this paper to become one of the regularly cited as we move into the ‘early majority’ and onwards adopting these technologies and practices into their classrooms. It is passionate without being dogmatic, and informed by more than the blogosphere’s intelligentsia. - SWL
http://www.karinvandenberg.nl/Thesis.pdf
This thesis by Karin van den Berg was part of her Master’s program at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. It does a nice job of boiling down many of the previous attempts at developing criteria for evaluating open source projects (see her references for the extensive list) and then uses as a case study the field of course management systems to try out the evaluative framework. Somewhat unsurprisingly to me, she hones in on Moodle and Atutor as being the top two contenders when these additional open source considerations are factored into the equation; it is nice though to have some substance to back up ones’ instincts.
This piece was quite close to my heart for a few reasons, and thanks to Stuart Yeates posting on the Educause community blogs for finding it. It’s meaningful to me first off because I’ve been looking at these CMS thingies for far too long now through the Edutools project. It was meaningful to me because she cites Edutools numerous times throughout the thesis, and it is nice to get some academic ‘props.’
And finally it is meaningful because for the last year I have been going around giving a presentation that I think basically says a lot of the same thing, though I frame it slightly differently. The jist of that presentation is that making good open source choices is all about picking projects that are a suitable fit with the capabilities and maturity of your own organization, and trying to educate people on what some of the qualities of OS projects are that they can base those judgements on. The presentation was actually a summary of a funding proposal for an “open source suitability decision making tool,” a proposal that didn’t get funded. And I am really glad it didn’t get funded. Not because such a tool wouldn’t be useful. But instead because, as one of the reviewers astutely pointed out, and as this thesis backs up, the judgement of an open source project’s “maturity” is too multivariate (and evolves too quickly) for it to be serviced well by both such a small one-time grant (we were really not asking for much) but also from such a centralized research model as we had proposed. Still, it is really vindicating for me to see basically the same set of criteria brought out in full in this thesis, as it makes me fill slightly less half-cocked (so, what, two-thirds cock’d?) - SWL
http://terrya.edublogs.org/2005/11/28/hello-world/
The only post so far in this new edublogs.org blog (oh the marvels of Technorati, like it or not here come your readers, Terry A. ;-). Not so much a response to my posting on the false dichotomy that is being set up between Moodle and ELGG, instead it just takes that as its starting point for an extended musing on what the relationship could and should be between institutional provided systems and the users social networks, which by definition can and do cross all sorts of boundries. Personally, I find this approach a lot more palatable and mature than a lot of the all-or-nothing-it-must-all-be-open diatribes I come across these days, but maybe that’s just me being a good Canadian, trying to mediate between poles, and be a reformer, not a revolutionary. - SWL
Recent Comments