SIGOSSEE Project News

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'

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.

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.

Welcome to newsletter #3

Welcome to the third 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.

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.

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.

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.