Open-Source in Education News

see Moodle and LAMS announce integration plan :: moodle.org for more Martin Dougiamas' original moodle.org post. This seems to me an example of an open source for education standards issue bearing fruit :o)

Moodle, the world's leading open source Course Management System, and LAMS, the world's leading Learning Design system, today announced plans for integration. This means thousands of existing Moodle sites will be able to easily incorporate the revolutionary "digital lesson planning" approach provided by LAMS. The integration will be freely available by the end of July.

... and more from the ScotFEICT article:

"This is excellent news for Moodle and LAMS users alike," said Martin Dougiamas, leader of Moodle. "Moodle and LAMS make a great complementary package. Moodle users will be drawn towards the fun and powerful design tools that LAMS provides, and LAMS users will be able to take advantage of Moodle's popular capabilities for managing communities of learners within a dynamic web site."

"We're delighted to announce this integration between Moodle and LAMS," said Professor James Dalziel, leader of LAMS. "It demonstrates the powerful benefits of combining a Course Management System like Moodle with a Learning Design system like LAMS to create a new generation of e-learning technology. The combination of flexible course pages (Moodle) with structured activity sequences (LAMS) can significantly enhance student learning," he said.

The New Zealand Ministry of Education is sponsoring the integration. "We've had strong interest in both Moodle and LAMS in New Zealand, and particularly in bringing the two systems together," said Elizabeth Eppel, Deputy Secretary. "We see great benefits to New Zealand education arising from an integrated Moodle/LAMS approach, so we were keen to support this development," she said.

The Moodle/LAMS integration will achieve "Single-Sign-On" between the systems, meaning only one name and password is needed for each user across the two systems. Teachers will also benefit from easy ways to add LAMS activity sequences to Moodle course pages. In addition, a new "course format" will be developed for Moodle centred on LAMS activities. Looking beyond the current project, Moodle and LAMS plan to explore advanced tool integration. For details, see lamsfoundation.org/integration/moodle

"While LAMS can integrate with a range of popular e-learning systems, we've been very pleased with the enthusiasm and pro-active approach of Martin Dougiamas on behalf of Moodle," said Dalziel.

"This integration will benefit not only school teachers and university lecturers, but also the growing number of vocational and corporate trainers using Moodle and LAMS," Dougiamas said.

This means progress for people like ourselves (KnowNet) who may be considering some explorations using the Open Service definitions but who want light weight 'bindings' for web-applications.

As an aside... I tried to find a permalink for this article on the IMS site, but was utterly shocked to discover there is none - just the 'past news' URL en bloc. Now, in my opinion trackback, RSS and other permalink-based mini-standards have done much more for education than any number of big, specifically education standards (which are what the IMS site is about). And the REST-ful web has done more than anything to make the web a useful experience for learners (REST is an architectural theory about the web which boils down to a few simple principles such as always making sure that URLs make sense and that all content can be reached from a sensible URL). I am tempted to surmise that the IMS site's prominent ignorance of these small, loose but very powerful standards is quite telling :o)

The Open Knowledge Initiative Delivers XOSID Specification
(Cambridge, MA) - 2 June 2005, The Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.(tm)) announced today the release of its XOSID representations of the Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs). XOSIDs provide a language neutral XML representation of the OSIDs, which until now were only available as Java APIs.

See also OSID page at IMS.

NB - I have just discovered a permalink at the MIT OKI site for this news: Open Knowledge Initiative Delivers XOSID Specification - if only the IMS site had the same respect for simple web standards :o).

I've just noted in my own weblog, c-Learning, that Userland Frontier is now Open Source.

We've moved to Zope, Frontier has moved to open-source. Will we ever meet again? Will anybody care enough to really push at the core of Frontier to make it into a modern framework for object-oriented application/service development? I'll tell you one thing: I've subscribed to Scripting News again :o)

I am a fan of Dave Winer. I always have been, and I do not care who was in the right in the little skirmish that led to atom, I always will be. It was his imagination, practicality and devotion to simplicity that gave us RSS, web-logging, XML-RPC, remote-posting APIs, etc etc --- all the best service-oriented, distributed, content-free-ing aspects of the web we live in.

The beginning of a new era?

OK, "new era" may be a bit over the top, but Frontier contains an incredible combination of features, thanks in part to a vibrant community of active contributors for over a decade. UserLand will carry on with their "website and weblog publishing tools". Will a new community form around Frontier's general-purpose scripting environment? (It's starting.) Will the old fogey's come back? (Some have!) Will a new generation discover the power of an integrated, customizable development and runtime environment with persistent storage and ubiquitous outlining? Kudos to Dave Winer and UserLand for the decision.

The sixth edition of the Libre Software Meeting (LSM) will take place from July, 5th to July, 9th in Dijon, in the East of France. This year, the university of Bourgogne is hosting the event in the Miranda building of its
science faculty.
LSM is the largest meeting totally dedicated to free software in the world. Over 1000 people from more than 50 countries on 5 continentscame to Metz and Bordeaux for the previous editions, in 2003 and 2004.
The LSM combines two complementary events :

• a meeting of software developers and designers coming to discuss of their projects in a friendly environment ;

• a meeting for a broader audience that aims at addressing some questions surrounding free software.

The organisation of technical conferences is an opportunity for developers to exchange information about their projects, while the organisation of conferences for a broader audience is an opportunity for end-users to meet
the software developers.

For more information see http://2005.rencontresmondiales.org/sections

Sakai 2.0.0 Release Announcement (via EdTechPost)

A lot of folks have been waiting for this, and here it is - the Sakai project have release version 2.0, which amongst other things includes a Gradebook feature in addition to updates to the Samigo assessment tool. I am undertaking a review of Sakai 2.0 for Edutools right now that we will hopefully have up in a few weeks, and so should have a much better idea by then of what is actually all there. - SWL

...From the announcement at Sakai site, Wednesday, 15 June 2005:

The Sakai 2.0.0 release is now available. This release includes a Gradebook in addition to an updated version of the Tests and Quizzes tool (Samigo). The existing Sakai tools have been internationalized, allowing translation of Sakai 2.0 into multiple languages. Most of the existing tools now conform to Sakai Style Guide. Sakai 2.0 includes support for web-services to allow the development of tools on languages other than Java.

There are many improvements in the configuration, installation, efficiency and performance in the 2.0 release. The Sakai Kernel has been rewritten for this release, improving configurability and ease of development for Sakai.

The release is provided in demo, source, and binary distributions. The release can be downloaded from the 2.0.0 Release pages.

See this entry in the standards and architectures working group resources weblog for news and links about a new organisation promoting "microformats".

I've been meaning to do some serious writing on the subject of why "small and loose" standards are the right path for many developments we would like to see in software for education (my recent draft report on standards and architectures began to develop this theme).

Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patters (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patters (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

This will have great impact on educational content and software development. Open Source is definitely mainstreaming :o).

Macromedia's choice of Eclipse speaks volumes about the impact of open source on commercial software development -- and about Macromedia's commitment to making Flash into an essential platform for next-generation internet applications.

MACROMEDIA JOINS ECLIPSE FOUNDATION

New tool for developing rich Internet applications on the Macromedia Flash Platform to be based on industry-leading Eclipse IDE

San Francisco, CA - June 6, 2005 - Macromedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: MACR) today announced plans to join the Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit industry organization committed to developing and promoting the open-source Eclipse universal development platform. Macromedia plans to deliver a next-generation rich Internet application (RIA) development tool based on Eclipse. RIAs combine the rich user interface of desktop software with the web's reach and ease of use. Code-named Zorn, the new product will enable development teams to easily build and deploy applications that deliver more effective, memorable, and usable experiences by leveraging the powerful capabilities of the Macromedia Flash Platform (announced today, see separate release). The Flash Platform provides the solutions that make great digital experiences possible.

Following the first Moodle Conference last year attended by representives from more than a dozen countries, MoodleMoot_05 are holding the second Annual UK Conference for Moodle Users, Administrators and Developers. The Conference will be taking place in Oxford on Monday 15 and Tuesday 16 August 2005.