SIGOSSEE Project News

Here at KnowNet, we've been avid users of del.icio.us for some time - of the delicious APIs as well as the service itself. We've written a number of python utilities for co-ordinating and managing accounts, and have also invested considerable effort in the creation of solutions for harnessing the power of delicious within your own content.

I've just added a powerful new feature to our JSON-powered cloud viewer - it now supportsbundles of tags, for more convenience and clarity when scanning a user's tags. I have deployed this viewer for the standards and architectures resource base. Enjoy! And let me know if you want to make use of this interface in your ow ncontent. We will be wrapping it up as a service of some kind soon, but it is already productised as a Plone product with w content types that any user can add - a cloud viewer for browsing a whole account, and a tagviewer for embedding a viewer for items with one particular tag.

Click here for the standards and architectures resources interface. We will shortly be adding links and embeds for other useful sources. Among them, check out del.icio.us/alharris, or explore the many other resource-collectors listed in my del.icio.us network ( and check out this fabulous del.icio.us visual network browser (type in 'mike_malloch', for instance, to see it in action).

Al Harris is presenting a talk to the Conference on Open Source for Education in Europe bout the work of the Standards and Architectures Working Group. A major part of the Working Group's activities is the preparation of a report. The preparation of the report involves a great deal of research and resource collection. Alan's talk introduces the resource base which we have developed for that purpose. The resource base is available in the Working Group's area in the SIGOSSEE site:

A large part of the work entailed by the Working Group's report is the comprehensive collection and categorising of web reseources related to standards, architectures and open-source in education. Mike has been seriously collecting, tagging and annotating resources for the WG since July, and we now have a very substantial and growing resource-base.

Most of the resource-base is back-ended by Mike Malloch's del.icio.us account, with others in Connotea. See Mike's main weblog, elearning2.0, for other materials and writings which explain why we are using external services to host the WG's resource-base, and about the theory and practice of architecting for education with open source and open standards. Please send me any links you think belong in the resource-base: if you are a del.icio.us user, add the tag for:Mike_Malloch- otherwise email mike AT theknownet DOT com. Because the resource-base is backended by well-known, open services, we can collaboratively build on it, and anyone is free to aggregate from it using del.icio.us and Connotea's rich and flexible APIs and RSS. You can also subscribe to my del.icio.us stream's RSS - all tags and queries are also avilable via RSS.

Below is a "tag cloud" showing the relevant categories in Mike's del.icio.us account. Click a tag to see the resources tagged with it along with a list of related tags.

A printable pdf version of the talk is available as an attachment to this post. An online version is available as a Flickr slideshow of the presentation.

A pdf version of the full preliminary program is attached to this post. See the conference website for more information.

The SIGOSSEE seminar in Sweden last week was brilliant.

Entitled Content for education in Europe: processes, platforms and standards, the seminar was organised by Peter Becker form the Interactive Institute and held at the impressive water side headquarters of the Sveriges Kommuner och Landsting (Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions who sponsored the event.

The aim of the meeting was to discuss open content, platforms and standards for Education in order to formulate a set of focus points for a continued national and European development work.

Technorati Tags: Open content, Open source

I've decided it is time to start practicing what I preach. In the Report on Standards and Architectures I strongly advocated loosely-coupled architectures based on 'small / loose' standards. In the months since I wrote the first report Draft, the web had come a long way towards making it possible for all users to participate in 'small-loose' services. (There is even a new word gaining currency to describe this movement: "Web2.0").

Two vivid and immediate examples of the 'service-oriented', Web2.0, 'small-loose' way are photo-sharing via the Flickr service and shared bookmarking via services like del.icio.us (there are plenty of particular links into these below).

I don't have time to go into the benefits here, but I'll try to do some posting about it in the site soon. In the meantime, you can find some relevant materials collected in my own del.icio.us shared bookmarks, especially the tags 'resources/introductory' and 'web2.0/publicity'. For examples, see the 'Web2.0 tag' ...Though almost all my bookmarks are on this topic so you may want to open the bundles of tags there and explore ( especially by looking at the other users' bookmarks revealed through the 'and NNN others' links shown beside bookmarks collected by more than one user).

Step 1 for our own ossite was to make a Flickr account to handle the photos for meetings, etc. I made an account this morning, and have also made a new flickr group for pooling together sigossee-re;ated images from multiple members (that way you can post to sigossee's photos through your own flickr account if you have one). I've put up all the photos from our own meetings and organised them a bit by 'set' and tag.

Some links:

• Our photos on Flickr
• Arhus meeting photos as a slideshow
• Athens meeting photos as a slideshow

I'll be posting soon about plans to bring service-oriented shared bookmark collection into the site ( complementing or replacing our current 'blogit' resource-collection ).

Apologies to all if I hadn't flagged these wondferful photos of the Arhus meeting earlier...

...maybe you stumbled already onto the pictures of the last meeting we had in Arhus on the OSsite? Or you missed them being published altogether? Either way, you can find them here:

You can also view the photos in single-photo view. A screenshot of the thumbnail view is shown below.

By the way, the project really ought to get a Flickr account - or agree a set of SIGOSSEE-PROJECT tags for our own flickr uplaods - it would make this sort of thing easier :o) If someone nags me enough, I'll write up an explanation which puts the case for doing it the Flickr way and distribute that to everyone.

Welcome to the fifth edition of the Special Interest Group on Open Source Software for Education newsletter. The periodic newsletter is intended to provide information and a digest of the activities of the Special Interest Group and of the SIGOSSEE and JOIN projects.

Interest in the project remains high with speakers form the project attending many meetings and conferences throughout Europe. This newsletter provides details of some of the activities we are undertaking or are planning for the future. It also includes notice of the call for papers for our conference in November. Please go to the special conference web site now!

If you have an item you would like to include in the newsletter please send it to the editor, Graham Attwell - graham @ theknownet.com - or login and reply to this post.

Please note that you can read the complete newsletter as html here, by clicking one of the links for 'extended text' or 'permalink'

Over the past few days I have updated the content in the research/standards area of the site. More is still to come, but a basic structure is now there for supporting further postings.

Please note that all members of the site can post and reply to entries in the new shared weblogs in the standards area.

In particular, note that I have placed downloadable versions of yesterday's presentation there, as well as a summary of the question session from after the talk:

• Downloadable version of Mike's talk :: Printable and viewable versions of the talk Mike Malloch gave yesterday on Standards and Architectures are available here. [ Blog entry in "Working Ideas"]
• Summary of questions and discussion from Mike's presentation :: This is a quick and dirty attempt to summarise the questions & discussion from today's remote presentation on the standards and architectures working group. [ Blog entry in "Working Ideas"]

This area contains resources and activities for the Working Group on standards and architectures. Our remit is to thoroughly investigate the issue of how open-source development efforts can collaboratively create sound and innovative architectures, supporting and leveraging new and existing interoperability standards.

Written Report - Drafts & Versions
This area contains downloadable and online versions of the written report drafts. The latest draft is a preliminary document by Mike Malloch on June 3, 2005

History: open software in education
Open source, standards and architectures in education. Current question: would OpenDoc be available if it was open source?
5 entries; 1 authors; 6 external links; 2 comments/discussions;
Last Entry: 06-Jun-2005 08:19 by Mike Malloch; OpenDoc - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ;
Last Discussion: 06-Jun-2005 10:42 by Mike Malloch; What do you think? Would Open Source have saved OpenDoc?

Resources: standards and architectures
Links and resources on open source, standards and architecures
20 entries; 1 authors; 19 external links; 0 comments/discussions;
Last Entry: 06-Jun-2005 12:03 by Mike Malloch; XML-RPC Home Page ;
Last Discussion:

Working Ideas
Standards & Architectures Working Group - general discussions
2 entries; 1 authors; 0 external links; 0 comments/discussions;
Last Entry: 07-Jun-2005 09:13 by Mike Malloch; Downloadable version of Mike's talk ;
Last Discussion:

Mike Malloch has just written a preliminary draft for the report of the Standards and Architectures Working Group. It is available a a pdf document attached to this weblog entry:

The remit of the Standards & Architectures working group is to investigate, debate, clarify and report on the ways in which emerging issues in software architectures and interoperability standards can impact the development, uptake and success of open source software for education in europe. Our scope is a bit more complicated: since all three of these areas can have important interactions with any of the others, the Standards & Architectures Working Group will investigate and report on issues which involve or impact on these interactions among the areas.

We will attempt to make recommendations in our final report: ways to improve upon and/or leverage the relationships among these three communities and interests.

Status of the current draft

This is a very preliminary draft. Due to the recent prolonged illness of the author, progress on the tasks for the working group have been seriously delayed. We expect to make up for this delay over the summer of 2005.

This report has an up-to-the-minute representation on the web at www.ossite.org/research/standards . We plan to use the WG’s collaborative web space to conduct an extensive process of online writing, debate and resource aggregation involving interested experts. To follow the debate, investigation and writing as it progresses week by week, please go to the site or subscribe to the RSS news feeds available there.

The current written version is restricted in purpose to a rough scoping of the field, and a description of the issues which the final written report will try to address.

An HTML version of the draft report is available for reading online in the Working Group's area of the site.

Welcome to Newsletter 4

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Special Interest Group on Open Source Software for Education newsletter. The periodic newsletter is intended to provide information and a digest of the activities of the Special Interest Group and of the SIGOSSEE and JOIN projects.

Interest in the project remains high with speakers form the project attending many meetings and conferences throughout Europe. This newsletter provides details of some of the activities we are undertaking or are planning for the future. It also includes notice of the call for papers for our conference in November. Please go to the special conference web site now!

If you have an item you would like to include in the newsletter please send it to the editor, Graham Attwell, - graham @ theknownet.com or add an item on the news page of the web site – www.ossite.org.

Our web sites

Main site

www.ossite.org

Wiki

wiki.ossite.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Conference

www.openconference.net/index.php?cf=3

Next meeting of the Special Interest Group

The next meeting of the Special Interest Group will be in Aarhus, Denmark on 6 and 7 of June 2005. The meeting is open to all members of the SIG and a warm welcome is extended to all those interested in the use of Open Source Software in education.

To continue reading the rest of the newsletter online, please click the 'continue reading' link below. If you prefer to read a printed pdf document, please use the links at the top of this entry to download or preview the pdf version.