SIGOSSEE Project News

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

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

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

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 ).

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 ).

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 ).

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 ).

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 ).

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.

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.

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.

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

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