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.

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 ).

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.

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.