SIGOSSEE Project News

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.

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.

The following is from the new presentations/downloads area of the site:

SIGOSSEE has had a huge number of requests for speakers for meetings and events. Sadly we cannot fullfill all these requests. Therefore we decided to set up an area with resources for speakers. All the presentations and notes on this page are convered by the Creative Commons License - all we would ask is that if you do use them you provide some feedback - and if you 'repurpose' the work, please provide us with a new copy on this page.

Knowledge Creation in the Open Content Community [ Download ] (finlandfin.pdf - 2.30 Mb )

This is a pdf version of a presentation by Graham attwell at the TEKES FENIX conference in Finland in April 2005

Researching technology for tomorrows learning [ Download ] (pedagogyFIN.pdf - 2.91 Mb ) Preview

This is a pdf version of the presnetation by Graham attwell at the pre-conference workshop on Open Source Software organised by Mediameiteri around the Interaktiivinen Tekniikka Koultutuksessa Konferensi - Interactive Technology in Education Conference in Finland in April 2005

Opening Frontiers in Learning [ Download ] (fin3.pdf - 533.87 Kb ) Preview

This is a pdf version of the presentation by Graham attwell at the ITK International sympoium on Open Source Software and Open Content in Education at the Interaktiivinen Tekniikka Koultutuksessa Konferensi - Interactive Technology in Education Conference in Finland in April 20

The SIGOSSEE project is holding a public seminar at the Crecotel Athens Imperial Hotel on the 22nd of February. A warm welcome is extended to all those interested in the use of Open Source Software in education. The meeting will be held in conjunction with the JOIN project. Working languages will be English and Greek and there is translation service.

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.

There are a wide range of news feeds available to help you track the content and discussions in the SIGOSSEE / JOIN site. Some of these are listed at the bottom of this page. A more extensive explanation of news feeds is available as a help topic in our weblogs.

There is a link to this list of RSS feeds in the footer of all ossite pages.

Phew!

First of all, let me thank all the members of this site for being patient over the past few months when the site was manifestly not up to the job we wanted it to do for us!

If it's any consolation, the reason that Mike and Steve from KnowNet have not intervened earlier to fix minor problems with the site was that we have been hammering effort into a new open-source product of our own: knotes, which is the platform powering the new weblogs and discussions. Our experience had taught us that none of the available open-source (or commercial!) project-platform or content-management systems was really good enough at combining the ability to enable both easy, powerful, collaborative posting of ad-hoc bits of content and the creation and management of 'proper' site content. We have spent many thousands of hours over the past year working to produce new open-source software to address this problem. Our new collaborative weblogging and discussion product for Plone, knotes, is the first of these efforts to near completion. It has been built from the ground up to be an open platform to allow developers to create and embed innovative collaboration activities. With a bit of luck, we'll be releasing to the wider developer community within weeks. Read the product page for more information about what makes knotes interesting.

Members of the site now have access to a range of shared weblogs, which you can find in the OSSITE Community Activities area. These replace the old motifs whereby members created links and news items in their own home folders, and sitewide 'aggregation' actions like 'resources' and 'reviews' listed these in one place. Instead, members can now create new shared bookmarks or news items as weblog posts directly in the appropriate weblog. We'll be posting more details nd proposals on how we can all, as members, make good use of the new shared weblogs.

We've also upgraded the content-management framweork and content of the front page, SIG partners pages and the SIG Working Groups pages, and will very shortly do the same with all the other areas of old content, for instance the JOIN area.

Please use the OSSITE Requests weblog to report any problems or give any feedback about these changes and the new system. And please remember that this is open-source software; we will uncover more bugs, and there are still hundreds of small and large feature improvements planned for the near future.

Warm regards, and thanks for waiting!, Mike

We recently moved the site to a new server ( on a much faster internet connection ). Unfortunately, a few glitches have come to light since then. Please bear with us while we iron these out.

All of the glitches appear to have been repaired as of 17:50 GMT.

Among the known problems are:

• REPAIRED (some recent content will have temporarily disappeared)
• REPAIRED (the display of member-profile information in member's home folders is not working at present)
• REPAIRED (the 'contents' tab for indexFolders produces an error)
• REPAIRED (the member-profile summaries - available to site managers - produce an error)

Apologies for the inconvenience

The KnowNet team - please email Mike

if you encounter any particular problems.

Go to the Activities area to see the first issue of the SIGOSSEE Newsletter.

Details of the upcoming meeting in Limerick, Ireland, June 2-3, are given in the newsletter.

Further details on accommodation, from Tim Hall

Near the university there is only the Kilmurry Lodge and the Castletroy

Park

Hotel (Expensive) http://www.castletroy-park.ie/. There's lots of B&B

accomodation, but a better option might be to stay in town - nearer a

better

selection of pubs and restaurants.

I would recommend the Sarsfield Bridge hotel, http://www.tsbh.ie/ (I

already

recommended this to George Bekiaridis).

Other convenient (and large) hotels are Royal George

http://limerick-ie.hotels-x.net/Royal-george-hotel.html or in the old dock

area The Clarion Hotel

http://limerick-ie.hotels-x.net/Clarion-hotel-limerick.html or Jurys Inn

(fixed room rate hotel)

http://limerick-ie.hotels-x.net/Jurys-inn-limerick.html. All these are

within easy walking distance of each other and are central.

The University is about three miles away with an OK bus service and taxis

are not too expensive.

For those staying the weekend I recommend visiting the Burren - limestone

upland area north west of Limerick in County Clare with amazing flora at

its

most spectacular in late May and early June, interesting villages with

good

pubs, spectacular coastline, good traditional music and lots of megalithic

and early Christian remains. Start from Ennistymon, Corofin, Kilfenora,

Liscannor, Doolin http://www.kingsway.ie/doolin/ (for music and the Aran

Islands) http://www.bamjam.net/Ireland/Burren.html

We've just spent some work on making the site's layout, look and design more usable and attractive. Please let us know what you think! (Mike apologises for not finding the time to do this a looong time ago :O)

The 'opened padlock' logo candidate is currently occupying the top left corner. We're open to suggestions if anyone feels strongly about other logo ideas.

I will be attending the first meeting of the ComDev group in Gut Gremmelin, north-eastern Germany, this week (Wednesday - Friday), representing Knownet and the eCompete project. This meeting seeks to bring together several different European projects with similar aims in the field of competence development through e-learning in SME's in Europe. I will be leading a workshop on Open Source Software as a model for e-learning and aim to present the SIGOSSEE project and website during the meeting - anyone wishing to contribute anything toward this event should either post a topic to this sites forum or e-mail me direct at kel@theknownet.com

Attendance at the Open Source International Conference, Malaga has been a

pretty even split between the hardcore OSS community (read Linux, in

particular the Debian community) and business - from entrepreneurs to

corporates alike. It is also very much a home affair, with the vast

majority of attendees coming from around Spain.

Discussion in the larger presentations and plenaries has been divided

between fundamental philosophical, political and legal debate about

notions of freedom, choice & openness and the adoption of OSS by both

corporates and governments.

Many speakers have referred to the München model and understandably much

has been made of the moves in Andalucia to ensure the general adoption in

the public sector of OSS. The possible knock-on effects on the proprietary

software industry (Ireland being cited as the world's No. 1 software

exporting economy) of widespread legislation to enforce adoption has been

noted.

Technical discussion in the main sessions is pretty much limited to either

OSS at the OS level or leveraging application software. Middleware was

given a passing mention in one contribution only so far.

Sun's approach is evangelical, taking the moral high ground over others

such as IBM, Novell and HP, also represented on this morning's plenary,

emphasising the broader view of the benefits of OSS for the developing

world - again the emphasis is either side of middleware - however they do

seem to be talking in the right direction - openness in standards,

interoperability, royalty-free patents and focussing on education as the

way forward. Again, the principle emphasis is on OSS in business use and

the economics of the transition from proprietary systems to OSS.

Unfortunately, translation hasn't been available in the side rooms where

some of the more detailed contributions have been held - including

unfortunately this morning's e-learning session, but I've managed to get

hold of the transcript disk this morning (these had run out before I

reached the registration desk yesterday...)